The Midnight Rose (12 page)

That day, we left our house and began to walk along the road to the railway station to embark on the first part of our journey. Suddenly, a white owl flew right in front of us and my mother came to a sudden halt, her expression aghast.

“We cannot go,” she said to my father and me. “We must turn back.”

My father, used to my mother’s superstitions and wanting to visit his relatives for Holi, smiled and shook his head. “No, my
pyari
, it was simply a beautiful creature flying past us. It means nothing.”

But my mother had already turned tail and was walking back in the direction of our home. Despite my father’s remonstrations, she refused point-blank to change her mind. So, that weekend, we sat, the three of us, my father and I sulking as we thought of all our cousins, uncles and aunts having Holi fun together hundreds of miles away.

A day later, however, we heard that there had been floods in the region. And the very train which we were due to board had crossed a bridge which had collapsed under the weight of it. The train and its occupants had crashed into the swirling, muddy-red waters. One hundred souls from our city did not return home.

After that, even my father began to take my mother’s instincts more seriously. As I grew older, my mother began to teach me simple remedies for coughs, colds and broken hearts. I was instructed to watch and learn the lunar calendar—there were times every month when mixing the remedies would make them more potent than at others. She told me that the moon gave women our feminine power. And how nature, which the gods had created for humans, to provide all we needed, was the most powerful force on the planet.

“One day, Anni, you will hear the spirits singing to you,” she told me as she tucked me up in bed. “Then we will know for certain the gift has been passed down to you.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I nodded in agreement anyway. “Yes, Maaji,” I said as she kissed me good night.

I knew that it was thought in my maternal family that she had married beneath her. My mother was born into a high caste. She was a second cousin of the Maharani of Jaipur, although, in truth, it always seemed to me that everyone I knew in India was a cousin of ours or someone we knew. She had been betrothed from the age of two to a wealthy cousin in Bengal, who had inconveniently caught malaria at sixteen and subsequently died. While my mother’s parents searched
for another suitable match, she met my father at the Navratri festival, and they began a secret relationship composed entirely of smuggled letters.

When my grandparents announced to her that they had found a highborn but older husband of fifty who wished for my mother to become his third wife, she threatened to run away unless they allowed her to marry my young and handsome father. I’m not sure what lengths my parents went to in order to see each other—the stories had become a part of their own folklore by the time I was born—but eventually, my grandparents reluctantly agreed to the match.

“I told your grandparents that I could not give their daughter rubies, pearls and a palace to live in, but I could house her in love always,” my father had told me. “And, my
beti
, you too must remember that to love and be loved is worth all the treasure in a maharaja’s kingdom.”

My father, Kamalesh, was the polar opposite to my mother. A philosopher, poet and writer, who took his ideology from Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Brahmin poet and activist, he earned a pittance of a living, producing a monthly pamphlet on his radical thoughts, especially where the British occupation of India was concerned. He had taught himself excellent English and, ironically, given his political views, subsidized his writings by tutoring highborn Indians who wished to learn the language in order to converse with their British counterparts.

He also taught me, his daughter, not just English but a whole host of subjects, ranging from history to science. While other Indian girls were learning the art of embroidery and the necessary prayers to offer Shiva to find a good and kind husband, I was reading
On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin and studying mathematics. I could also ride bareback by the age of eight, charging across the flat desert plains outside the city, my father urging me to go faster and catch up with him. I adored my father, as all little girls do, and worked as hard as I could to please him.

So, between my father, the radical, who thought of all things logically, and my mother, who once saw a bat in the bedroom she shared with my father and had an
ojha
come to the house to clear it of evil spirits, I grew up with an uncommonly varied overview of the world. There was much of each of them inside me, but also something that was uniquely myself.

Once, as my father comforted me on his knee after I’d seen a group
of young boys beating a half-starved dog in the street, he tipped my chin up to look at him as he wiped my tears away.

“My sweet Anni, you have a bleeding heart that beats louder than one hundred Indian drums. Like your father, you abhor injustice and embrace fairness. But be careful, my Anni, for humans are complex, and their souls are often gray, not black and white. Where you believe you will find goodness, perhaps you may find evil too. And where you can only see evil, maybe there will also be some good.”

•  •  •

When I was nine, my father died suddenly during a typhoid outbreak that was plaguing our city during monsoon season. Even the potions in my mother’s considerable armory failed to save him.

“It was his time,
pyari
, and I knew it was,” my mother told me.

I struggled to understand her calm acceptance of my father’s death. As I yowled like a banshee over his lifeless body, she sat by him, tearless, peaceful and still.

“Anni, when it is your time and you are called on, you must go,” she comforted me. “There is nothing to be done.”

Her response didn’t suit me at all. I kicked and screamed and refused to leave my father as his body was lifted onto the funeral pyre. I remember being forcefully dragged away as the swami began to chant and they lit the straw pallet below him. As acrid smoke plumed into the air, I turned and hid in my mother’s skirts.

After my father died, we had little to support us. The Maharani of Jaipur, being a cousin of my mother, offered us a home with her. So we moved, the two of us, from our pretty little house in the city up to the Moon Palace, and into the zenana.

The zenana was where all the ladies of the palace lived together, separated from their male counterparts. Because, of course, back then, from the moment puberty struck, all the ladies adhered to the tradition of purdah. No man, apart from husbands or close male relatives, could gaze upon our faces. Even if one of us was sick, the doctor would have to diagnose our condition through a screen. And if we were out in public, our faces and bodies would be heavily shrouded and veiled. Now I struggle to believe that this was the way it was, but none of us had ever known anything different and it was simply part of our daily lives.

The noise and bustle of the zenana took much getting used to
when I first arrived. In our own home, we had had a maid and a boy to take care of the garden for us. But after they had left at the end of each day there had only been three of us, with a front door we could shut to keep out the world if we wished. Palace life was very different. We lived, ate and slept communally. Sometimes I yearned for the peace and privacy of my old home, where I could close my bedroom door and lose myself in a book without being disturbed.

However, communal living did have its advantages. I was certainly never short of a playmate, for there were many young girls of my age living in the zenana. There was always someone around to join me in a game of backgammon, or to play the veena, a stringed instrument, as I sang.

My playmates were all polite, well-mannered daughters of local nobility. But the one thing that I missed terribly was my lessons. It was only after entering the zenana that I realized just how progressive my father had been by starting to educate me.

It was he who had nicknamed me “Anni”; my proper name, Anahita, means “full of grace.” I always felt it didn’t suit me. I may have had a scholarly mind (and by the time I was eleven could outrace any of my contemporaries on a horse), but when it came to girlish “graces” I felt ill equipped. I would often watch in the zenana as the other women pampered themselves and preened in front of the mirror, spending hours choosing the right-colored bodice to wear with a skirt—traditional-style saris were not worn in the province of Rajasthan.

All of the princesses and many of their noble cousins were already betrothed to a male whom their parents thought suitable. I, however, came from a high-caste but poor family. My father had left little in the way of material possessions and I was aware my mother had no dowry to offer for me. I was not a “catch” for any eligible man, and my mother was still searching the family tree to find someone who would want me. I was not disappointed or worried by this; I simply remembered my father’s words to my mother’s parents when he had asked to marry her.

I wanted to find love.

When I was eleven, and had been in the zenana for over a year, my previous education and skills on horseback began to pay dividends. I was chosen by the Maharani to become companion to her eldest daughter, Princess Jameera.

Even though being the princess’s companion gave me a new set of privileges and an open door to all sorts of new and exciting activities, such as accompanying her on one of the many game shoots or being
allowed access to parts of the palace that up until now had been forbidden to me, I don’t remember it as a happy time.

Jameera was spoiled and difficult. If we played a game and she lost, she would run to her mother in floods of tears, complaining that I had cheated. When I spoke to her in English, as I had been asked to by her mother, she would put her hands over her ears and refuse to listen. And if I ever dared outrun her on our morning horseback ride, she would howl with rage and ignore me for the rest of the day.

We both knew what the problem was; even though she was the princess, I was blessed with certain natural talents and skills which she lacked. Even worse, despite the fact that I had no inclination for preening and pampering myself, everyone remarked on my slim figure and good bone structure. Whereas Jameera had been blessed with neither.

“Maaji,” I used to cry in my mother’s arms, as she wiped away my tears. “Jameera hates me!”

“Indeed, she is a difficult girl. Here,
pyari
, there is nothing we can do, is there? We can hardly tell her mother, the Maharani herself, that you dislike her eldest daughter! You must do the best you can,” my mother entreated me. “You are honored to have been chosen by her, and I’m sure you will reap the benefits one day.”

As usual, my mother was right. In 1911, there was great excitement in India among all the princely states. Edward VII, Emperor of India, had died the previous year. His son, George V, had become king and his formal coronation was to take place in England in June. After that, in December, there was to be a great coronation durbar held in Delhi, to which all the princes of India were invited. And as Princess Jameera’s companion, I was included in the vast entourage that the Maharaja of Jaipur—her father—would take with him.

My mother was in a flurry of excitement. “Anni,” she said as she took my face in her hands and looked down at me, “when you were born, as is the tradition, I consulted an astrologer to prepare your life chart. And do you know what it said?”

I shook my head. “No, Maaji, what did it say?”

“It said that when you were eleven, something extraordinary would happen to you. You would meet someone who would alter the course of your life.”

“That is indeed incredible,” I replied respectfully.

It is only now, as I write this, that I can look back and see how right the astrologer had been.

I
t would be simply impossible to describe in words the splendor and majesty of the coronation durbar. As we approached the plains on which Coronation Park—the tented city just outside Delhi—had been erected, it felt as though the whole of India was on its way to the same destination.

As Jameera, the younger princesses and I sat in our purdah howdah atop one of the great elephants in the Maharani’s train, we peered through the curtains to snatch a glimpse outside. The dusty highways were thronged with every conceivable form of transport: bicycles, carts loaded high with possessions and pulled by bullocks shining with sweat, automobiles and elephants all jostling for space on the road. Rich and poor alike were all headed to Coronation Park.

Each of the maharajas had his own tented camp, each one a village with water and electricity provided. When we arrived at our camp, I looked with awe at the exquisitely furnished women’s quarters.

“There’s even a bath,” I called to Jameera, wondering at the modern miracles that could produce everything we might need to live here forever if we wished.

Jameera was less impressed. It had been a long journey and she had not taken to traveling well.

“Where’s my
puja
box?” she barked at the maids who were unpacking the endless trunks they had brought with them from the palace for the royal women. “These sheets are rough,” she said sulkily as her fat little fingers felt the linen on her bed. “Change them for me!”

I was not to be cowed by Jameera’s ill temper. Once I had helped her maids unpack and Jameera was safely in the bathing room being tended to, I wandered off to explore. Outside, in the immaculate, beautiful gardens that surrounded our camp, the lights from the enormous park lit up the night sky. In the distance, I saw a sudden explosion of fireworks, whirling dervishes of color—the acrid smoke mingling with the scent of incense that hung heavy in the air. I heard elephants trumpeting in the distance and the sweet sound of sitars playing.

I felt a moment of pure, unadulterated joy. Every princely state in India was gathered within these few square miles. Among the many thousands of people inhabiting the park were the most revered, powerful and learned in the land. And I, Anahita Chavan, was part of it.