Travel Reference
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if one day all this ended, their small and ancient world collapsed,
forcing them to survive in shark-infested waters with the rest of us?
They knew nothing of the changing society around them, of the
'Emergency' Indira Gandhi had proclaimed nearly a year before,
and which, still in place, was beginning to undermine her popularity.
Opposition leaders had been arrested, strict censorship imposed on
the press; Indian democracy itself was suspended and in grave danger
of being permanently replaced by a dynastic totalitarianism. Yet the
little princesses of Venkatagiri were hardly aware of it. I wondered,
the following January, if they had heard that the country had elected
a new prime minister, Morarji Desai, a man who drank his own urine
for its curative properties and advised others to do the same. The
influence of Marx is always just below the surface in Indian politics.
If it isn't Karl, it's Groucho.
What did interest these girls, however, was Bombay and
Hollywood - the two movie meccas seemed to be interchangeable
in their minds. I was a visitor from the Outside World, and for them,
I came to see, this Outside World was all one immense and exotic
place. National boundaries meant nothing to them. Beyond the
gilded, if now somewhat tarnished, cage of their confinement, they
pictured only various kinds of astonishing freedoms.
I did not have the heart to tell them what most people's lives were
really like out there. The wonderment and childlike enthusiasm in
their huge, bright eyes struck me as the most precious possession
this life offers anyone, and not something I had any desire, yet
alone right, to tamper with. When the rajkumari growled a few
words in Telegu that no doubt amounted to 'That's enough girls,' I
saw the disappointment in those eyes. They made me swear I'd ask
their father if I could come back - they had lots more they wanted to
show me, they promised, and lots more questions they wished to
ask.
To my utter amazement, quite early the next morning the
rajkumar appeared, informing me that he had arranged a complete
tour of the palace for me, with himself as guide.
As I traipsed after his loping, lanky form through endless musty
corridors, across bare upper courtyards in various states of ruin, and
into countless shabby rooms that resembled long-abandoned
garages, my heart sank. I felt deeply sorry for the man, living still on
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