The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

Gita nods, but does not answer. The inconsolable maharaja finds it hard to hide the contempt he feels for his daughter-in-law.

  “You have to have a boy.”

  “I want one, but it seems impossible.”

  The maharaja clears his throat, preparing his next words. Fresh in his elephant-like memory is his daughter-in-law’s disloyalty when he asked her to help to get Anita accepted within the family; he cannot forget that she slammed the door in his face. So he does not beat about the bush. Besides, the matter will brook no delay or pussyfooting. What can be more serious and transcendental than the survival of his line and the House of Kapurthala?

  “I have something to say to you, Gita. If you cannot give us an heir within a reasonable amount of time, it will be necessary for Ratanjit to take another wife.”

  Gita is thunderstruck. She closes her eyes for an instant. How can he humiliate me this way? she asks herself.

  “I would never accept anything like that,” she replies.

  “You have no choice,” the maharaja insists in an icy tone. “You are an Indian woman, and you know that here it is perfectly normal for my son to have another wife if he so wishes.”

  “He wouldn’t do that to me,” Gita replies, with tears in her eyes.

  But from the way her husband looks away, Gita understands that Ratanjit will always do what his father asks of him. She said later, “At that precise moment I lost any respect I felt for my husband. I felt pity for him at his weakness and his lack of bravery.” When she leaves the office, she holds tightly to the banister of the stairs because she has the impression that the world is faltering around her.

  Gita has no option but to accept the blow. These Indian kings, who have been accustomed to imposing their will for thousands of years, especially on women, are still medieval despots. All they have of European is a light veneer, she thinks. Now she realizes what a mistake it was to have confronted her father-in-law. He is too powerful and vengeful to have as an enemy.

  After a few days, when she has managed to calm down and organize her thoughts, Gita can see only one way out of her situation. She is going to make one last attempt to save her marriage, her family, and her position. She decides to go to France to have a series of operations that will allow her to conceive again. These are delicate operations, with a real risk to her own life. But she is desperate. In spite of that dim light on the horizon, deep within she feels that the damage to her marriage caused by her father-in-law’s interference is irreparable.

  Anita also notices that her marriage is on its last legs, but for other reasons. For some time now the maharaja has not made use of his conjugal rights. His distancing himself has been gradual, even before Kamal began to occupy a place in her heart. Anita lives in her rooms, separated from those of the maharaja by several halls. She never goes into her husband’s rooms without telling him first. She does so out of respect, but also out of fear that she might find him with another woman. And he no longer comes by surprise into her room, as he did in the early years, when he appeared in the night in the doorway before she fell asleep, as a prelude to a night of torrid lovemaking.

  Now Anita listens for other steps, other movements, other noises. In Paris, after her rendezvous with love, Kamal and she have had few occasions to see each other again alone, and when they have managed it, it has always been only for brief moments. Their relationship is based on the furtive looks they give each other, touches, words whispered in an ear, and stolen kisses. There have also been times when Kamal has avoided her, as though he suddenly remembered she is his father’s wife.

  But when they go back to the narrow world of Kapurthala, daily contact makes it impossible for them to flee the tyranny of desire. Such dangerous promiscuity ends up by linking them in a special way, like two criminals who share the secret of a sin that drags them down with it, a fall that Anita sees as a necessity caused by boredom, like a rare and extreme pleasure capable of arousing her lethargic feelings, her wounded heart, and her forgotten youth. She loves Kamal with all her soul, but she is also drowning in self-contempt because she knows that what they are doing is too dirty, too unworthy. Anita struggles between the disgust that she feels for herself and the nameless pleasure of a love that is like a crime to her.

  A sweet crime, which they began in Paris and go on committing in the palace in Kapurthala, in the gardens, in the greenhouses, in the abandoned forts and cenotaphs in the fields of the Punjab. The first lovers’ tryst takes place in Kamal’s room, after a reception at which they drink and dance until the last guest has left. “Come to me, I’ll be waiting for you,” he whispers in her ear. And Anita runs to meet him, as though she loved the wrongdoing, the sin that no one commits, the evil that is going to fill her empty existence and that is going to push her nearer to that hell she has always feared. And she does it with a complete lack of shame, hardly bothering to hide and forgetting the most elementary precautions of those who commit adultery. The first time it is Kamal who undresses her. He knows what he is doing: his agile fingers run round her waist with innate, ancient wisdom. He frees her hair, takes off her jewels, tears the silk of her bodice, and undoes her petticoats, one after another. When he sees her naked, he picks her up in his arms and places her on his bed, and he does it as though he were carrying a work of art, she so white, so ardent, so his, and so forbidden …

  The lovers finally find a safer place in the ruins of a Hindu temple dedicated to Kali, the goddess of destruction. It is a temple abandoned by men and taken over by vegetation, in the middle of the country, a few kilometers from Kapurthala. Like enormous snakes, the roots of gigantic trees imprison the ruined walls of carved stone. Hidden inside it, immersed in the strange world of the plants that surround them, it seems to them that the lianas embrace holds them with tenderness, that the branches of the bushes are the interminable arms of lovers who seek each other and tie themselves together in spasms of pleasure. It is as though all that world they share is sexually aroused. Anita and Kamal, swollen with voluptuousness, feel they are part of the powerful marriage of the earth. At nightfall the leaves take on confusing, misleading shapes, the hedges murmur, the lilies sigh in ecstasy and the apsaras—the celestial nymphs sculpted in the stones of the temple—smile at them from eternity. Suddenly they love each other with the tenderness of wild animals as they feel themselves sliding into sin, toward a forbiden love. Among the age-old stones of the forgotten sanctuary, they taste love again and again, like the criminal fruit of an overheated land, and with a dull fear of the consequences of their terrible acts.

  In spite of the constant tension, Anita looks younger, at the height of her beauty. That forbidden relationship lights a flame in her that shines in the depths of her eyes and warms her laughter. The maharaja notices the renewed spark in the face of his Spanish rani.

  “You’re prettier than ever,” he tells her one day, giving her a kiss on the neck.

  She jumps aside, with a little cry, trembling and trying to laugh, but unable to stop thinking about the kisses of his son, at their tryst the day before, among apsaras with ambiguous smiles.

  How long can the deceit last? The one most upset by the situation is Dalima, the faithful servant, the witness of all the tricks her mistress plays to meet up with her lover in secret. Hoping that such a dangerous game will soon be over, she never misses a chance to frighten Anita.

  “Madam, I’ve heard you’ve been seen out riding with Prince Kamal near the temple of Kali.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The grooms. But they’re also talking about it in the kitchens. Madam, be very careful.”

  “Thank you, Dalima.”

  Anita’s heart thumps wildly when she feels cornered. When she regains her lucidity for a moment, she tells herself that the game has to stop, that it is a senseless folly that can have no positive outcome. She manages to infect Kamal with the same terror, and they stop seeing each other for a few days. Then a deep sen
se of melancholy overcomes her heart, and she has the impression that her life is ebbing away from her body and leaving her. Through the palace windows, through the half-lowered blinds that shed their striped shade over the walls and furniture, her eyes seem to drift like a ship on the ocean, empty and languid. How hard it is to fight love! she says to herself. Incapable of setting limits to the voracity of the feelings that flood through her, she realizes that all she can do is let herself be pulled along by the current, let life decide for itself, let the course of events show her the way to go on, like a god emerging from the storms in the sky.

  At that difficult time, she secretly comes to hope that Kamal will break things off, that he may become the god that can cure all the ills of her soul. Because if she is guilty, what can be said about him? His betrayal is as unworthy or worse than Anita’s. What kind of man is Kamal, living off his father and yet criticizing him, enjoying a privileged position at the same time as he despises it, having the blood of a prince and yet denying it? Who is that man caught between two worlds? An Englishman with the dark skin of an Indian? An Indian with the mentality of an Englishman, who can only fall in love with European women? The victim of his own contradictions, Kamal leaps from one world to the other. He does the same as everyone; he wants the best of both worlds but ends up entangled in a no-man’s-land, in a place with no law or order, where betrayal holds court.

  One day Anita tells him of the visit she made to the village of Kalyan with Bibi, and she tells him about the emotion she felt when she heard the story of Princess Gobind Kaur and Captain Waryam Singh, and she confesses that the peaceful picture of that couple will always be the symbol of true love for her.

  “Could you do the same thing, kidnap me and take me far away from here forevermore?”

  “My father would look everywhere for us and he wouldn’t leave us alone until he caught us. He has the means to do that.”

  “So … There is no hope for us, is there?” Anita asks him sadly.

  “Yes, there is. But it cannot be in India: here we will always be condemned. It has to be in Europe. Give me a little time …”

  But the knot is tightening. Just before leaving again for London, the maharaja speaks to Anita.

  “Inder Singh has told me you’ve been seen out riding with someone near the temple of Kali …”

  Anita feels a shiver run down her spine. For a moment she thinks, This is it, he knows it all, and that her husband is setting a trap for her in order to find out the truth. But she keeps her cool.

  “Sometimes I meet Kamal on his way back from inspecting the fields and we have fun racing the horses … It can’t be anyone else.”

  She manages to lie as she tells the truth. From the maharaja’s expression she knows she has given the right answer. This time there is no trap.

  “I don’t like you being out there alone so much. I want you to ride with an escort. You could have an accident, fall off your horse … And then who would pick you up?”

  “You’re right, mon chéri.”

  44

  The gay twenties. London is gayer, the Savoy is livelier, and the streets are fuller than ever. Women with their hair cut garçon-style can be seen, others smoking in public, and all of them with shorter skirts. There is a contagious air of freedom and ease. London has finally forgotten the war.

  The first thing Anita does when she reaches England is to visit her son. She prefers to do it alone, in order to enjoy such a long-awaited moment.

  “Ajit, darling, I was longing to see you …”

  “You’re very pale, Mother …” he says. “You aren’t ill, are you?”

  “No, dear, I’m fine …”

  The idea that the inner turmoil she has been suffering is reflected in her face and that her son may guess at it fills her with worry. What will happen to Ajit if the scandal breaks? Will he reject his mother? Will he hate her? Will a boy of seventeen be able to understand what is going on? She wants to push these questions out of her head because they augur ill and make her feel ill at ease with herself. Once again she is overcome by a feeling of disgust at herself, the same feeling that has become so familiar to her in recent times.

  “Uncle Kamal has been to see me,” Ajit continues, “and he’s told me that he’s going to stay to live in England.”

  Anita’s eyes shine. Then it’s true, he hasn’t made me an empty promise, he’s trying to find a way to stay in England, she tells herself, with her heart swollen with mad hope. Kamal’s message, which has come to her through Ajit, raises her spirits. Now she can see herself living in London, very close to her son. And with Kamal.

  Am I going mad? she asks herself later, when she goes back to the maharaja to accompany him on the usual string of social activities: the races at Ascot, the tennis championship at Wimbledon, strolls in Kew Gardens, tea at the mansions of aristocratic friends … Except for royal receptions, to which Anita is not invited, she goes everywhere with him. The maharaja goes to Buckingham Palace with one of his sons to see the wedding presents for King George VI and his bride, Elizabeth. The Duke of Kent shows them to him with such enthusiasm that it is as if he is the one getting married. As is usual when he is in Europe, the maharaja is radiant. The hectic social life is a reflection of the renewed esteem in which the English hold him. Nothing can make him happier in these agitated times. Today more than ever, the maharajas need the protection of the British.

  Kamal is part of the maharaja’s entourage, which is made up of some thirty people, as usual. They occupy the tenth floor at the Savoy. Anita and the maharaja sleep in rooms separated by a little sitting room and a corridor in what is known as the Royal Suite. Kamal has his own room, at the end of the passage. It is as if the customs of Kapurthala had been transferred to London.

  But the nightlife is different. All over the city music clubs have sprung up where jazz, tango, Latin rhythms can be heard … There has never been such a variety as now. Anita asks the maharaja to let her go out with Kamal and his English friends to listen to music, almost as if she were a teenager asking her father for permission. The maharaja always gives her that pleasure, while he opts to stay in the hotel and go to bed early.

  Anita spends unforgettable nights that remind her of her early youth, when she went out with friends her own age. At a club called the Fallen Angel, where five colored musicians play as if possessed by a strange kind of magic, Anita hears the best jazz in her life. This is a kind of music that moves her more than the tango now. The sad, languid Camellia has a blues soul, perhaps out of some strange premonition.

  Neither she nor Kamal suspect that they are under the watchful eye of a faithful assistant of the maharaja’s, a Sikh called Khushal Singh, who spends his nights spying on the movements in the corridor on the tenth floor of the Savoy. The last night, after they are back from the Fallen Angel, the assistant wakes the maharaja at half past one in the morning.

  “Your Highness, it is time,” he says.

  The maharaja gets up, desperate to find out and at the same time alarmed at what he is on the point of discovering. He wraps himself in a crimson silk dressing gown, puts on some suede slippers, and follows his assistant down the weakly lit corridor, walking without making any noise on the thick carpet. At the door to Anita’s room, Khushal Singh makes a sign with his head, as though asking permission to go in. The maharaja nods. Inside, everything looks normal. The blinds are half down, as usual, because Anita has never liked to sleep in total darkness. She has always said it frightened her. At first sight it looks as though someone is sleeping peacefully in the rumpled bed, at least until Khushal Singh, with a decisive gesture, suddenly pulls back the sheets. The maharaja opens his eyes wide, as though trying to understand. There is no one in the bed, just a pillow placed in such a way to make it look as if there is a person sleeping there. So it’s true, the maharaja says to himself; everyone’s suspicions are about to be confirmed. Now he understands the distant, cold behavi
or of his wife, her lukewarm response when he dared to give her a kiss or take her hand, her faraway look … But there is worse to come.

  Jagatjit feels his heart beating so strongly that he is afraid it will betray his presence as, now with hesitant step, he goes down the corridor, where his sons’ rooms are. Khushal Singh points to Kamal’s room. The maharaja puts his ear to the door and must be able to hear something on the other side, because he immediately makes a sign to his assistant, who knocks discreetly. After a moment that seems eternal, Kamal opens it a little and finds himself face-to-face with his father, too furious to speak, too wounded to react. Without a word, the maharaja pushes the door wide open. The bed is unmade. Anita is sitting on a chair in front of the dressing table, dressed as she was when he last saw her, a few hours ago, when she went to ask his permission to go to the Fallen Angel.

  There is a terrible silence. Anita does not lower her head or look away, but remains looking at her husband with wide-open eyes, as rigid as a statue, in silent defiance. On the other hand, Kamal, with his head down and his shoulders drooping, seems flattened by the weight of his own infamy. The maharaja, thunderstruck by the blow that wounds him as a father and as a husband, does not take another step and stands there, livid. His gaze is burning, as if he wanted to set them ablaze with the fire in his eyes.

  After an interminable silence, the maharaja turns to his son, without raising his voice. “Get out. I don’t want to see you again. I don’t know how I could have fathered such a treacherous son.”

  “We were only talking for a while,” Kamal stammers. “We’d just got back … Don’t think …”

  “Get out of here. Do it before I have you thrown out.”

  Anita closes her eyes, as though waiting for her turn. But she hears nothing: neither insults, nor any sound of a struggle. She can only hear Kamal’s steps going away down the corridor, as though they were the beating of her heart leaving her. When she opens her eyes again, she is alone. The three men have left. They have not taken out a knife, as they would have done in Andalusia, she thinks. There have been no insults, no shouting, no violence, except for the contained fury of the maharaja. In the darkness, she can only hear the distant siren of a barge on the Thames, mixed with a trace of music coming up from the hotel bar, or perhaps from the street. Is the drama over? Is her crime, the furtive kisses, the nights in the temple of Kali, the cursed love that has consumed her for months going to end in such a feeble, ignoble, shameful way? Her husband has not even addressed her, in the height of contempt. And the silence that reigns all around her, a silence of ship’s sirens and false peace, scares her more than the crime itself.