The Age of Kali Page 8

  Yet for all this, to meet the Rajmata, and to sit listening to her over breakfast, you would never guess she could be capable of anything more sinister than winning an award for Most Loveable Granny at an English village fête.

  ‘Please, Mr William,’ she said, ‘you must have one more guava. This is the height of the season.’

  ‘I mustn’t. I’ve got to watch my weight.’

  ‘When I was a girl I always thought it better to have a little extra round the middle. In those days we thought it a sign of good health.’

  ‘No. Really. Thank you.’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll keep it for you for tea.’

  She clapped her hand, and the small green piece of fruit was carried away on an escutcheoned plate by a liveried bearer.

  The Rajmata was sitting at the top of the table in the grand dining room of the Jal Vilas Palace in Gwalior. As she nibbled at pieces of fruit from the huge crystal bowl in front of her, she chatted happily about the progress of her day. Although it was only eight o’clock in the morning, the old lady had already been up for two and a half hours performing her lengthy morning puja (religious devotions).

  ‘Everyone gets very angry,’ she said, ‘because before I do anything in the morning I must spend at least two hours bathing my little Krishna, putting on his clothes and decorating him with garlands. I do it just the particular way he likes it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘You have a … close relationship with Krishna?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t really describe what it’s like,’ said the Rajmata. ‘I mean, I really shouldn’t: it’s so personal. It’s … it’s like two lovers: you can’t say to them, “Describe how you behave when you are together.” ’

  Sitting silently beside me, still in his leather jacket, was Sardar Angre, the Blofeld-figure I had seen the day before at the airport. He kept out of the conversation about the Rajmata’s puja, and for its duration appeared absorbed in his omelette.

  When the Rajmata’s husband died in July 1961 and the Dowager Maharani became estranged from her son Mahadav Rao Scindia, the new Maharajah, Sardar Angre stepped in to the breach and began acting as her constant companion and adviser. A nobleman whose family has served the Gwalior Maharajahs since the eighteenth century, the Sardar holds the Rajmata in an awe and respect which has not dimmed with time. She in turn looks to him for advice and guidance. They make a good team: he is as dry, sober and practical as she is mystical and quixotic.

  As the conversation at the breakfast table turned, inevitably, to politics, the Rajmata commented that the recent dramatic rise in the popularity of the BJP seemed to be almost supernaturally guided.

  ‘Really,’ she said, ‘it is nothing short of a miracle.’

  ‘No, no, Highness,’ said Sardar Angre in his measured tone. ‘It is the will of the people.’

  ‘This is your view,’ said the Rajmata firmly. ‘But I see the hand of God. I believe it is the doing of Hanuman.’

  ‘You really think the BJP is somehow … divinely propelled?’ I asked.

  ‘I have a feeling so,’ said the Rajmata, turning to me with an excited conspiratorial whisper. ‘Miracles can happen even these days.’

  Seeing me scribble the Rajmata’s comments in to my pocket notebook, Sardar Angre sensed danger, and whispered sharply to the Rajmata in Hindi: The modern world does not believe in miracles.’

  ‘You are wrong, Sardar,’ said the Rajmata, holding her ground. ‘Only yesterday I was reading in the Reader’s Digest about a great miracle in America: some invalids being healed – I can’t remember the details. But if these people are believing …’

  Sardar Angre frowned.

  ‘If you are on the right path,’ persisted the Rajmata, ‘truth will always prevail. My Hanuman is always on the side of truth. I have taken His protection, and Hanuman will always sort out our problems. He will remove all obstacles from our path.’

  Seeing the Sardar’s expression, I said: ‘I don’t think Sardar Angre likes you to talk about religion.’

  ‘No, no – you are quite wrong,’ said the Rajmata. ‘He also is very religious. One day I was looking for him and he would not answer my calls. So I went to his room and there he was sitting cross-legged in front of his Krishna idol …’

  Sardar Angre was visibly blushing, but the Rajmata was in full flight.

  ‘… and tears were running down his face. I would not have thought – such a practical man …’

  Sardar Angre was spared more embarrassment by one of the bearers bringing in a great pile of the morning’s papers. He and the Rajmata began scanning the headlines.

  ‘Riots, riots, riots,’ said the Rajmata. ‘Every day it is the same.’

  Sardar Angre was however engrossed in a report in a Hindi newspaper concerning the latest episode of his own long-standing feud with the Rajmata’s son. The dispute, which had been going on for some fifteen years – and which had, since its outset, been closely followed by the whole country – was currently enjoying one of its periodic flare-ups. Sardar Angre read the report out to the Rajmata.

  ‘This is all my fault,’ said the Rajmata, shaking her head. ‘A mother’s weakness.’

  I must have looked a little confused by all this, for I was immediately treated to a résumé of the whole celebrated affair. In 1975, when Mrs Gandhi locked up the opposition, suspended the Constitution and declared the Emergency, the Rajmata found herself transferred from the splendours of Gwalior to the less familiar surroundings of the infamous Tihar jail near Delhi. Her son, however, did a deal with the Congress and escaped to Nepal, leaving the Rajmata to fester in prison. She has never forgiven him. Moreover, as a minister in the current Congress government, the Maharajah remains a political as well as a personal adversary, the battle within the divided family mirroring the political divide of the nation at large.

  ‘He did not fight the people who imprisoned his own mother,’ growled Sardar Angre. ‘He should have gone underground and joined the resistance against Mrs Gandhi. Instead he totally surrendered. Nobody in this great family has ever done that. He betrayed his own ancestors.’

  ‘When he was in power Sardar Angre’s house was attacked [by the police, apparently acting on Mahadav Rao’s orders]. Half his possessions were taken, photographs were smashed …’

  ‘My two Rottweillers were shot dead …’

  ‘But worst of all,’ continued the Rajmata, ‘in the Emergency he left me inside that jail with the criminals and prostitutes. Imagine it: one of the inmates had twenty-four cases against her, including four murders. These were the companions he thought suitable for his mother.’

  ‘How did you cope in jail?’ I asked.

  ‘I had faith in my Hanumanji,’ replied the Rajmata. ‘He sent help.’

  ‘Hanuman came to you in person?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ replied the Rajmata, sighing and shaking her head sadly. ‘But He spoke within me and showed me that all human beings – even the most hardened criminals – will respond if you show them affection.’

  The Rajmata raised her eyes to heaven:

  ‘And He was quite right, you know: they did. One murderer became my cook – I don’t think I’ve ever had such a faithful servant. I wept when I finally left the prison – I was leaving so many close friends.’

  From the front hall a bearer appeared and whispered in the Rajmata’s ear. She nodded, dabbed her mouth with a napkin and got up.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘There are some ladies here to see me.’

  She added: ‘Sardar Angre would, I’m sure, be pleased to show you around.’

  Sardar Angre duly took me around the palace.

  I followed him through room after room, hall after hall – great prairies of marble reflected back and forth by tall Victorian pier-glass mirrors.

  Upstairs, all was rotting chintz and peeling plaster: a faint but unmistakable scent of decay hung in the air. Several of the rooms were unlit and seemed to be unused. They were visited o
nly by the sparrows nesting in the wooden hammerbeams of the roof; a heavy lint of old cobweb formed fan-vaults in the corner-angles. When the shutters were opened the intruding beams of light illuminated thick snowstorms of swirling dust-motes.

  Only the Rajmata’s bedroom really seemed loved and cared for. In a corner was a little silver shrine, full of idols. In front, a line of incense sticks were still smouldering. Every surface in the room was heavily loaded with other pieces of devotional clutter: photographs of Hindu saints and sadhus; a pair of Shiva lingams and a black mirrorwork image of the boy Krishna playing his flute.

  By the bed, somewhat surprisingly, stood a photograph of the Rajmata’s son taken on his wedding day. Despite all the hurt of their disagreements and public wrangling, the Rajmata’s maternal ties still remained strong.

  ‘Come,’ said Sardar Angre, seeing where my eyes were resting.

  He opened the double doors and stepped out on to the balcony. Together we looked out over the long lawns of the garden leading up, past groves of palm trees, to a delicate Moghul pavilion at the end.

  Then I noticed that to one side of the palace, a few hundred yards away, lay another, even larger, edifice. Suddenly I realised that the vast building I had just toured was only a small, detached wing – a kind of garden cottage – tucked off to the side of the main bulk of the Jai Vilas Palace. This far larger palace was the home of the Sardar’s enemy, the Maharajah. Like the building we were standing in, it was a late-nineteenth-century construction built in an Italian baroque style: a kind of massive Milanese wedding cake air-dropped in to the jungles of central India.

  It was here, in the larger palace, that lay the two most celebrated follies of India’s nineteenth-century Maharajahs. Upstairs glittered the great chandelier, said to be rivalled only by that in the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg. So heavy was it that before it was hoisted in to place, a ramp a mile long was built, allowing twelve elephants to climb up on to the roof. Only after it was confirmed that the vaults could indeed bear the weight of all twelve of these massive beasts did the architect feel confident enough to order the chandelier to be raised in to place.

  Meanwhile, downstairs in the dining room, the palace’s other great eccentricity was being constructed: a solid silver model railway that took the port around to the Maharajah’s male dinner guests. When a guest lifted the decanter from its carriage, the train would stop until it was replaced. Then it would hoot and shunt its way around the table to the next guest.

  Both of these follies, and indeed the entire palace complex, were built for the ill-fated visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Gwalior in 1875. Realising that his present palace was ill-suited for entertaining European royalty, the Scindia of the day had given orders that work should begin on the grandest and most modern palace in Asia. A fortune was spent on the new building. In its nine-hundred-odd rooms gold leaf covered every dado, while solid marble flagged every floor. Everything was to be of the best: a warehouseful of Bruges tapestries, Chippendale chairs and huge Louis XIV mirrors was imported from Europe. Only one thing was lacking: it never occurred to the Maharajah to take the trouble to find a proper architect.

  Instead, he turned to a jobbing amateur, and instructed a local Indian Army Colonel to knock something up. Colonel Michael Filose had no formal architectural training – in fact, prior to starting work on Jai Vilas he had worked on only one building: the Gwalior jail. But the Maharajah saw this as no obstacle: he packed Filose off to Paris to see Versailles, instructing him to come back quickly and build something similar in Gwalior before the Prince of Wales arrived.

  It is not clear exactly what went wrong, but on the night the Prince of Wales came to stay, the silver train braked suddenly and toppled the port decanter right in to his lap. Later that night there was another disaster. Before she went to bed, the future Queen Alexandra decided to have a bath. As the vast marble tub filled with water, it quivered imperceptibly, then slowly sunk out of sight through the floor.

  As we were leaving Jai Vilas, Sardar Angre and I bumped in to a couple of other elderly sardars, or noblemen, from the old Gwalior kingdom. Brigadier Pawar was in the lead, accompanied by his wife, Vanmala, and another old gentlemen who was addressed throughout merely as ‘the Major’. As Angre and Vanmala stood chatting, I asked the two old sardars what they missed most about the old days when the Maharajah and Rajmata ruled Gwalior.

  ‘Well actually,’ said Brigadier Pawar, ‘the old days we miss altogether. We miss them so much you can’t pinpoint any one thing: everything is missed.’

  ‘In the old days everybody had time,’ said the Major.

  ‘There was time for processions, for riding, for tiger-shooting …’

  ‘There was not much competition,’ continued the Major. ‘Things were just there. Now you have to struggle for each achievement.’

  ‘Before it was a very much sheltered life. Now it’s more competitive.’

  ‘Unless you pull someone down you can’t go up.’

  The two old men looked at each other sadly.

  ‘You cannot imagine the splendour and affluence of those days,’ said Vanmala, filling the moment’s silence. ‘If I started telling you, you would feel it is a story I am making up.’

  ‘In those days every sardar had fifteen horses and an elephant,’ said the Major. ‘But now we cannot afford even a donkey.’

  ‘But it’s not just the sardars who are nostalgic,’ said Vanmala. ‘The entire population is nostalgic. That’s why the Rajmata – and all Scindias – are still so popular. Whenever any of them stands for election they are voted in by the people.’

  ‘But why is that?’ I asked. ‘Don’t people prefer democracy?’

  ‘No,’ said the Pawars in unison.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said the Major.

  ‘You see, in those days there was no corruption,’ said the Brigadier. ‘The Maharajahs worked very hard on the administration. Everything was well run.’

  ‘The city was beautifully kept up,’ said the Major. ‘The Maharajah would himself go around the city, you know, at night, incognito, and see how things were being managed. He really did believe his subjects were his children. Now wherever you go there is corruption and extortion.’

  ‘Today,’ said Vanmala, ‘every babu in the civil service thinks he is a Maharajah, and tries to make difficulties for the common man. But in those days there was just one King. The people of Gwalior had confidence that if they told their story he would listen and try to redress them.’

  ‘The Maharajah and the Rajmata were like a father and mother to them,’ said the Major.

  ‘Now all of that is no more,’ said Brigadier Pawar.

  ‘That world has gone,’ said the Major.

  ‘Now only our memories are left,’ said Brigadier Pawar. ‘That’s all. That’s all we have.’

  When they died, the mortal remains of the Maharajahs were cremated at a sacred site not far from the Jai Vilas Palace. After saying goodbye to the Pawars and the Major, Sardar Angre took me over in his jeep to see the place.

  The memorials – a series of free-standing marble cenotaphs raised on the site of the original funeral pyres – were dotted around an enclosure dominated by a huge cathedral-like temple.

  ‘The complex has its own staff,’ said Sardar Angre as we drove in. ‘In each of the shrines is a small bust of one of the Maharajahs. The staff changes the clothes of the statues, prepares them food and plays them music, just as if they were still alive.’

  He jumped out of the jeep and led me towards one of the cenotaphs.

  ‘The same will happen to the Rajmata when she dies,’ he said. ‘You see, in Gwalior the people still believe the Maharajahs are gods – or at least semi-divine. They think the departed Maharajahs are still living in the form of the statues.’

  ‘You believe this?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Sardar Angre.

  I laughed, but soon realised I had missed the point: ‘No, actually I believe in reincarnation,’ sai
d Sardar Angre. ‘I think the Maharajahs are alive somewhere else in a different body, not in some statue.’

  Sardar Angre removed his shoes and led the way in to one of the shrines. In the portico stood a small marble Shiva lingam; ahead, in the main sanctuary – the part of the temple normally reserved for the image of the god – sat a statue of a large, rather jolly-looking lady in 1930s Indian dress.

  ‘This is the mother of Her Highness’s late husband,’ said Sardar Angre. ‘Look! She has a new pink sari.’

  She had, but that was not all. What looked like a diamond necklace had recently been hung around her marble neck; someone had also placed a sandalwood tikka mark on her forehead, between her eyes. A small cot with a mosquito-net canopy and a full complement of blankets and pillows had been left to one side of the statue; beside it, on the bedside table, stood a framed photograph of the old Maharani and her husband.

  Sardar Angre explained the statue’s daily routine. It woke up in the morning to the sound of musicians. Then the priest gave it a discreet ceremonial bath, after which its clothes were changed by a maidservant. Later, the statue had lunch, followed by an afternoon siesta. In the evening, after tea, it was treated to a small concert before being brought dinner: dal, rice, two vegetables, chapattis and some sticky Indian pudding. Then the bed was put out and made ready – the corners turned back – and the lights turned off. The statue was allowed to make its own way between the sheets.

  Grave goods – everything the Maharani would need for the afterlife – lay scattered all around. I felt rather as if I had stumbled in to a pyramid twenty years after the death of Ramses II.

  ‘Death is nothing to us,’ said the Rajmata later, as we went in to lunch. ‘For us it is only a change of circumstance.’

  ‘Like moving house?’