Dreaming in Hindi (31 page)

It's 10
P.M.
, and the niece of the maharana is saying she will not bring children into this marriage. Not with the way things are, she says, as a back-and-forth whoosh of cold water on marble contradicts her.
Wiiill, beeee,
it votes, slurry, mournful, muffling the faint rumble that's been tickling my feet. I give the room a fast scan. Everything's stationary.

Over in one corner, the maharana is bending heads with his bull-necked adviser, Shakti Singh. Earlier, Sri-ji had posted himself by the door, but he'd wandered off after an hour of sporadic arrivals. It's four days before New Year's and what should be the height of tourist season, but you'd need just two seconds to count the Americans in the room. Four, plus one constitutionally confused. Four point five; I'm the half.

The niece, seated beside me, is picking at her sari. At the buffet behind us, men in white stand motionless. The spread's the same one they served two nights back at another rent-a-royal party, in the other palace in the lake, one floating mirage over. Glistening roast pig, exquisitely perfumed puddings, desserts both massive and frothy, but the niece will have none of it. She's twenty-six, raised in London, and now deposited in a frustrating arranged marriage here. The concentrated sight of Western faces must be hurtling her back, must be creating deep feelings of affinity, for remarkably, given the fact that no Indian normally would, she's decided she wants to spill.

"My mother-in-law expects me to wear the five compulsory proofs of marriage," she tells the Americans, who've each plunked down the equivalent of one month's local rent to say they attended a party at a palace. Oh, she tried—donned the ankle chains, the nose ornament, the bangles, the special necklace; streaked the part in her hair vermilion to show she was wed—but she'd been in London too long. She reverted in less than a month.

Wiiiiiill, be,
the water shushes.

"Huhhhh," says a thin woman, from Los Angeles and in her thirties, whose air of self-satisfaction does not appear to have been curbed by two weeks on the road in India. She assumes an expression of intense concern, nods from time to time like a shrink.

"Reeaally?" breathes a middle-aged woman from Long Island, who's momentarily confused by the marital compulsions part of the talk but knows a confessional moment when she sees one.

"My in-laws don't approve of me." The niece attacks a wrinkle. "I don't want children till I see if I can bring them into this," she says, and soon the Americans are bringing the weight of decades of collective national therapization to bear on the situation.

"Have you tried journaling?" the California woman says. "You need to work out your feelings about your own identity. I ask because I started keeping a journal, and it changed my life."

"I do like to write," the niece allows softly.

"You know who you have to read? Naipaul. He had conflicts about
his
identity, and he's worked them out through writing. You should think about writing like him."

We're in a country where rapid personal makeovers are inconceivable; where everyone likes to wear the same thing, go into the same business as their parents, touch their elders' feet; where disgruntled husbands, in many areas, have the cultural power to torch a wife and say she fell into the stove. Why don't you try a little Nobel-level upgrade now that you're not wasting all that time putting red gunk in your hair? the LA woman seems to be suggesting. I look to see if the niece is insulted. She's drinking it all in.

"You know," Long Island says, "there has to be trust in a marriage. It doesn't sound to me like you feel a lot of trust toward your husband. This is my second husband," she says, glancing at the hefty man on her left, who's been eyeing women all evening. "In my first marriage, I couldn't feel comfortable, but now we're very, very happy." And the niece is signed, sealed, and delivered for life, a fact that doesn't seem to have registered with LI, who proceeds to deliver a long story about a daughter who got off on a wrong first marriage but spun around and remarried, her gardener. With help from her, he now has the largest landscaping business in the county.

The niece is pumping it, basking in the attention—"But could I...?" "Do you think?"—when LA, who'd assumed a glazed expression, jumps back in.

"You have to be able to express your feelings," LA says. "You have to be your own person. I'm serious, you have to think about writing," she goes on, till Long Island stops her cold by asking my opinion about a local sight. "Oh, you don't want to go there," LA says sharply, and the niece and I are left to converse on our own. But it can be so hard here, we agree. No, really it is, we say. But you can't know till you've lived here, and the sentence establishes our true affinity. She, I, we understand, and so I'm persuaded to lower my voice and tell her about something that happened three days ago, when I went to the villages with Renee's friend Pauline.

"Oh, God, and then we found out, the girl had been only fifteen."

The niece nods, her face impassive. "It was meant to be," she says, poking daintily at her baked Alaska.

"It was?"

"Yes. Those things are meant to be," she says, as the whoosh builds to a shout, as the rumble becomes a roar. As Christmas comes barreling in three days late, sporting crimson horns, and in the collision with Adhikmas that occurs, time is sent reeling backward.

 

FOUR DAYS BEFORE THIS
, Christmas Eve, at a palace up the hill.

"Come by my flat around nine," Sri-ji had said when I phoned that morning, following the instructions he'd issued at his birthday party. I'd just come off a camel safari that had fanned a cold into a flu. In my feverish state, I'd taken the word "flat" literally, imagined all day that the maharana lived in an atelier, in the spirit of Marie Antoinette, perhaps. With potted palms, but no, at 9
P.M.
, his directions left me in front of a building the size of a small embassy. A maroon MG roadster was parked outside.

A barefoot servant in a formless gray suit answered when I knocked. He led me into an anteroom, where I signed my name in the guest book beneath someone who'd added "prince of Slovak" to his. In this town, any deposed royal was welcome to take back the title. The servant left. I sat on the edge of a thin gold love seat and looked around. Across the room, a cast-iron lion, a
singh,
was tearing apart a deer. On the walls, stark-faced rulers of Mewar appraised each other from their large gilt frames. In his portrait, Sri-ji was in a long white tunic and explosive red plumed headdress. One eyebrow was raised in a way that could look affronted or amused, depending on how you craned your neck.

In the chandeliered reception room, his attire was more relaxed, red-and-blue-striped T-shirt over pants. "Yes, yes, have a seat," he said when I was brought in, frowning as if to place me. The aides perched on chairs shot each other glances. He cleared his throat. He nodded gravely. He cleared it again. Then no one said anything.

"And what do you do for Christmas?" I ventured when the silence stretched on.

"We drink," he said.

He proceeded to tease a thin aide, a new girl from Delhi. "She's a Parsee. They're like elephants, an endangered species. There are only ninety-nine thousand in the world," he said, and everyone laughed helplessly, except for the aide, whose shoulders seized up. A radiant-looking young woman rustled in, Sri-ji's daughter, on break from college in the States. "I was just telling Bobi she's like an elephant," he said. "Endangered." At that word, Bobi inhaled sharply.

His daughter took a seat. "Show them what I found in the vault," he said. Eyes downcast, she lifted her arm to display the Yuletide trinket, an emerald the size of a kiwifruit set in a white-gold band.

Sri-ji held forth on the endless rounds of dinners and parties he had to attend in his two official roles: kingdom figurehead, CEO of several palaces that had been reoutfitted as hotels. "I can talk to someone all night and not know who they are," he said. "He can. I've seen him," his daughter said fondly. His stories began, rose, swelled, were delivered in a baritone as persuasive as any movie maharaja's. "Bin Laden has had plastic surgery to look like a woman," he announced, and no one questioned this, though maybe that wasn't entirely the voice.

He talked and people twittered, and periodically nervous-looking retainers would appear carrying trays laden with envelopes. He'd hold up one finger, then he'd tear them open, scan the contents, and toss them back on the tray. At the time, I was wide-eyed. Around town, common knowledge held that Sri-ji had godlike abilities to know what even the smallest citizens were doing at all times. Now I was seeing the source of these powers, I assumed—these were missives from his network of spies. Later, though, I got a better idea of the kind of intelligence the envelopes contained. Toward the end of the year, Sri-ji had me to dinner with the maharani, his wife. All through the meal, servants scurried in with cell phones on trays, and then, because my Hindi was firing, I could ascertain what variety of secret communiqués were being exchanged. "
Just add more ghee,
" he was saying into the phone. "
Yes, more ghee. It will make it much better.
"

A man appeared and said the cars would take us to dinner now. We all piled in and the cars slowly made their way down a drive wide enough for two passing elephants, past stone pachyderms trumpeting from high fortress walls. The procession inched along like this for about two hundred feet, till we reached a pavilion above the lake, then we all got out. "You are studying Hindi?" Sri-ji asked in the royal skiff over to the Lake Palace.

"
Haan-ji,
" I said, in the clipped tones of deference the jigri had taught me: "Yes, sir."

"Well that must be boring," he said.

In the open-air courtyard of the hotel, a holiday party was in full swing: glittering Indian couples from other states, boys in dry-ice clouds dancing to a live band, one badly dressed magnate from an Eastern bloc country and his wife. At our poolside table, Sri-ji pulled a chair up next to mine. We all hit the buffet, then he took my photograph, had me repeatedly look into the camera to see if I liked the preview. All I could see was that my cold had made a chapped butt of my face. He passed around a PalmPilot displaying a joke: "Women and hurricanes are similar in that they're wet and wild when they come, then take your car and house when they leave." He knocked back a few, made booming remarks, got up and touched my shoulder. "Come," he said. We switched tables. He had some further analysis to deliver about Helaena.

"She is mentally crazy," he said with a note of wonder, picking up where we'd left off. "She is cunning and too smart for her own good." The band went into an Elvis medley. "What?" I had to keep shouting.

"She does not like you," he said. "Why do you think she didn't want you to come to the palace?" I widened my eyes in the hope this would qualify as a response. "Over and over, I said, 'Bring her.'" His tone was sorry, shocked. He paused to let me reflect on the opportunities that had been lost to me. I considered that I had come up, about a hundred times, but since he had that many rooms at least, how would he have known? I wasn't going with this line.

He offered proof of Helaena's scheming ways. "My brother is looking for a guest, and you were looking for a place to stay? You went to see him? Yes, she told me that." All right, now I was going to kill her.

It was a well-known fact, as far away as the Great Thar, that Sri-ji had been on the outs with his brother ever since their father died. The brother, being older, had been in line for the throne. But in some tricky bit of business, upon the father's death, the brother had been ousted and sent to live on a dairy farm at the foot of the palace. Sri-ji had become the possessor of the head plumes. "Sri-ji is not the rightful maharana," people snickered behind his back, inaccurately, because ever since the royals lost their titles, no one technically was. Nonetheless, all of this amounted to cryogenic social ostracism for anyone who stepped one foot past the dairy farm gate.

I'd made it all the way up to the door after learning there was a room there for rent and having heard one too many 4
A.M.
rounds of the "Brazil" song, then considered what life would be like with an embittered exiled ruler for my host family and beat a fast retreat back to the hotel with the wedding field. Helaena, when I told her, had been sworn to secrecy. "You see, she wanted to keep you away," Sri-ji said. Okay, I was giving him that one. Clearly, there'd been some perfidy.

He cocked a finger for an adviser to join us, a woman whose job responsibilities evidently included gasping and looking disbelieving. "Do you know Helaena wanted to get married?" Sri-ji said, and the adviser clucked. "Do you know she wanted to marry my nephew?" The adviser appeared stricken. "Do you know she never said goodbye?" he said tightly, and without another word rose and rejoined the table.

At the end of the evening, we all reboarded the skiff. "There's snow in Kashmir," everyone kept saying. Dressed as we were in thin saris and light coats, the night air off the lake was cutting. We huddled down as the boat circled out toward the other floating palace, a hulking gray form now. The boat curved back, and as it did, it set off rippling splashes: flapping glinting balls, coruscating disturbances in the dark. Almost at the dock, I figured out what they were: sparks of light off the wings of spooked ducks.

 

EIGHT DAYS BEFORE
the evening with the niece, somewhere in the middle of the desert.

"
Tiger will eat you,
" the camel drover's son was saying, one dromedary over to my left, through the fog of a cold I'd contracted in a sleeper train north.

"
Not the tiger!
" I cried and sneezed.

"
Tiger eat you,
" he repeated. From one camel to the right, my traveling companion, a shock-jock radio producer, gave us a look. Her ride kept making gurgling noises and twisting to bite her, which was not boosting her appreciation for the tiger dialogues. The boy and I had hit on this rewarding colloquy by day two of the camel safari.