Travel Reference
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palace - scarcely seemed to bother him. 'So many problems,' he
kept repeating.
One of these, I was almost shocked to hear, was the fact that he
was having an affair with a Tamil film starlet. The problem, though,
was not fear of getting caught, as I had imagined. It was guilt. As I
knew, he was a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba. Now, out of pure shame,
he could not face seeing the family guru. It was eating him up.
He was full of surprises that night. He announced in nearly the
next breath that his wife and daughters wished to meet me, but I
should realise they were shy and not used to meeting strangers.
When I discovered that they had never met any strangers before,
probably because they had always been behind the walls of the
purdah
throughout their lives, I found this perfectly understandable.
Following him into the forbidden area, past the 'kitchen', where
ragged old crones were indeed then cooking more black stuff in
even blacker pots placed on wood fires burning randomly on the
bare flagstones, then past my cell, we ascended a short staircase into
a comparatively opulent zone. There I was seated on an exquisitely
carved ebony sofa inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. There was
nothing wrong with it that a gallon of furniture wax couldn't have
fixed.
His two daughters had the huge almond eyes and delicately
pointed features familiar in so many classical South Indian
miniature paintings. Fragile beauties, they were indeed somewhat
taxingly shy, constantly veiling their giggles in folds of sari. When
they spoke, their English was good, and they were charmingly
excited by my visit. The rajkumari, on the other hand, a huge, pasty,
and ungainly mass of silk swaddled flesh, held herself aloof and
uncommunicative to the point of what would be interpreted in the
West as outright hostility. I could see why her husband had taken
up with his starlet. The power of the
purdah
sat at some distance in
this unnerving, pungent silence, while her daughters answered my
questions and began, even more eagerly, to ask their own.
Yes, it was true that they'd never left the palace and probably
never would. No, this did not trouble them. One girl - neither
looked more than sixteen - hauled out an elaborately bound photo
album and, placing it chastely between us, showed me her wedding
