ANOOP JUDGE

A Family Affair

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Princess Brinda Devi’s heart was like the black hole of a coal mine—it was so dense that there was no room for light, and so deep she was afraid it would suck her in. She told herself she pitied Stella, but heard laughter answering her—how difficult it was to deceive yourself when you had known yourself a full thirty-nine years.

She had a servant summon Stella to her sitting room in the afternoon when the Prince was away. When Stella came before her, Princess Brinda did not speak, but rose from the divan and removed Stella’s sari palav from her shoulder, as if in welcome, so she could study the girl.

In the afternoon sun filtering through the stained-glass windows of the palace at Kapurthala, she examined Stella’s red hair, cupid lips, and long, slim legs. A man could lose himself in the strands of that hair—so like burnished copper—softened by amla and scented with jasmine. Unlike Brinda’s, it had no need yet for henna. A man could kiss those red lips for hours and they would look fuller and more luscious for the bruising. Brinda’s hands dropped to Stella’s neck and encircled it lightly, for she was not trying to frighten her.

And she saw Prince Param had given her a Kundan necklace, one of Brinda’s own. She knew the gold of this one well because she had ordered it from the goldsmith herself, she knew every link of it and the sheen of its red enamel. She had worn it last at a party full of Europeans. Its brilliance and its weight had comforted her, compensation for her tongue-tied state; the European ladies ignored her once they found out she spoke no English.

And Stella was wearing it.

Brinda wanted to tear it from the hollow in Stella’s neck.  She wanted to press her thumbnail in that hollow until Stella’s red blood spurted and dripped over them both.

She wanted this. But, she moved her hands away.

“Come, lie with me in the afternoons,“ she said instead. “You are alone on your side of the palace, I am alone on my side.” Stella stood mute, an uncomprehending look on her face.

Stella may have been born in the UK but she was no longer a stranger to the shenanigans of a princely harem under the British Raj.

It was two years ago when Brinda’s world tilted much further along its axis, every breath feeling like a battle, her heart sour and rough as a guava fruit as her body betrayed her every moon month with its bleeding. It was the day when Stella, a slim, young, smooth-faced girl got a job in a chorus at London’s Little Theater, with the company going to Paris where the promoters of ‘Folies Bergere’ were so impressed by her looks and extrovert nature they thought she would be better suited to a nightclub cabaret. Stella herself had told her this some afternoons back, in her silly, high-pitched voice as Brinda sat, motionless, just listening. 

The rest she had witnessed herself: Prince Param Singh of Kapurthala attending the show with his wife Brinda Devi and falling for the eighteen-year-old dancer; after the show, the Prince going backstage and presenting her with a gorgeous bouquet of lilies and orchids. He was besotted, and then he followed her wherever she went, attending all her shows.

“Come,” Brinda said again. “It is useless for me to fight the prince’s will; he is my husband, he has brought you here. Somehow, I must accept that—and you.” 

Stella’s face lighted up like a diya at Diwali.

“Oh, Bhainji.” Sister.

Brinda Devi did not feel sisterly at all.

“Oh, Bhainji,” Stella said in her stilted accent. “I’m so glad. I told the Prince, I will be no trouble. I will just be like a younger sister.”

And her silly tears fell on Brinda’s hand as she led the girl to the porch swing in the courtyard. On the gallery that ran past their rooms, a punkhawalla spat a red stream of paan, then squatted, his back to the wall. With a rope over one shoulder, he leaned into the pulling rhythm. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Why was Stella so trusting? How could she be so confident that she would produce a child? How could Stella not look at her, Brinda, and think: This is what I might become?

Barren and childless.

Had Brinda ever been like this once? Had she ever been so gullible and yet so charming?

Ammiji had come to visit two summers ago, to reason with her. She said women had been heard of who could have children even till the age of sixty.

“I don’t have time to wait till then,” said Brinda stiffly. 

Brinda closed her eyes, shrinking within herself. How do you talk to a mother about the things that happen between a husband and a wife when the lights are out? How could she speak to her of the tenderness of the Prince’s touch, the way he brushed Brinda’s heavy lashes with his lips, when she couldn’t repay his gentle lovemaking with children?

“A man is pleasured,” Ammiji said, “and you can see it in the way he sighs and becomes soft again. But,” she took a paan from the fluted silver tray at her elbow –not the plain kind, but the sweet one, with lots of coconut and candied betel nut and all the minty pastes and mixtures that the paanwalla had delivered fresh this morning—and gently tucked it between her red-stained teeth, “a woman is merely cracked open for seeding like the earth before the force of the plow. If she is fertile, good for the farmer, if not, bad for her.” 

When Prince Param stopped coming for pleasure, Brinda kept it a secret even from Ammiji. She wept incessantly, the leaves of the peepal tree outside her window rustling in her ears like a lullaby.

When she was forty years old, she could read her fate in their neighbor, Zara’s eyes, saw it in the way she and her husband Nawab Hussain Azad, ignored her when they came to visit, and no longer asked about her when Prince Param stopped to visit at their home. She went to the Pandits, the holy sages who sat at the ghats of the sacred city of Varanasi then, and asked them for curses. They said they were men of God, and she must be self-effacing, humble, grateful for her undiminished status, the generosity of her husband, her continued unharmed existence.

Hai Bhagwan, better, to die. For she could not bear any more remembering.

She knew his body so well, so many years of holding each other, in exhaustion, in times of hope, in times of loss, in times of debt. Yes, Stella could do git-mit talk with the European ladies and bat her eyelashes at the British officers as if she were churning malai to make butter, but could a young woman know him this way? How would a young woman know that he breathed deeply, with his mouth open when he slept soundly, or how he tapped his pinkie finger on his nose—a nervous tic—when the maharaja, his father sent for him?

But that was then. Now she rarely cried. Her grief had settled down, like particles in a colloidal mixture: it was tough to tell which one was grief, and which one was she, her true personality. 

The only refuge from this perpetual grief of hers now was daydreaming—day in, day out Brinda Devi daydreamt of soaring and flying off to the free skies over distant, eerie landscapes of lands, rivers, meadows, and ravines.

Stella stood quivering, her heart racing as she studied the enamel patterns around the imposing oak doorway leading to His Highness Maharaj Jagatjit Singh’s quarters.

A proper, tall, liveried attendant with razor-sharp high cheekbones, wearing a tie-die Laharia turban beckoned her inside and gestured for her to sit in a beautifully appointed waiting room. Though there was bright sunlight outside, all the lights were on and the crystals in the chandeliers twinkled like stars. A wall-to-wall Persian carpet covered the floor. The blue damask curtains were the same shade as the walls. The vaulted ceiling high above her depicted the courtship of Ram and Sita in paint and stucco relief. And, on the walls, Sikh history: portraits of former Maharajas wearing brocade chugas and leaning on jeweled swords. Or, in riding gear, ready for a hunt.

Facing her were three gold velveteen sofas, the middle one occupied by a short man of about sixty wearing a pearl necklace and a blue satin robe with feathers in his turban. He was stout, with many folds like rows of sausages on his neck, and had a lazy brown eye. He was playing Patience, the cards spread in front of him on a polished mahogany table. 

It was the first time Stella had stood in front of the ruler of the state and she felt a tickle in her throat. The maharaja had tolerated her for the past three years as one of the Prince’s concubines—an integral part of royal life—but now he had summoned her for an audience. To what purpose? What did he want from her? Stella could feel her insides drawn together like the lips of a wound.

With well-manicured and bejeweled hands, the maharaja motioned for his guest to take a seat on one of the many well-embroidered, and vibrant silk pillows that had been placed in a circle around him. They sat quietly, trying to read one another and tell their never-to-be-told secrets through eye contact and osmosis. The maharaja smiled then. Stella smiled back.

Finally, he spoke to her in an affectionate tone but with careful measure. “Oh, how I love the English and their teas! The fine china. The ostentation, the ritual.”

On padded feet, an attendant, a bold, dark Goliath of a man, in full uniform appeared at his elbow, and the maharaja eyed him expectantly. The attendant bowed deeply towards Stella, handed her a delicate egg-shell china cup and saucer with a white-gloved hand, and poured her a pale cup of tea, from a polished silver teapot.

Dutifully, Stella took a sip from her cup—the tea was hot and fragrant with strong floral, citrus, and spice flavor—as the maharaja began speaking, sharing with her in dulcet tones the favor he needed from her. Since Brinda couldn’t beget a son, the maharaja wanted to marry off Prince Param again. He had found for him a suitable Rajput girl from Kangra, Lilawati Devi. Now, he disclosed—to Stella’s horror—that the Prince had unwillingly been forced into this union.

“But, there is one tiny problem,” the maharaja said languidly, stroking the ends of his handlebar salt-and-pepper mustache. “Prince Param will not go near his bride. He said ‘she’s a junglee, unlike my worldly-wise Stella.’”

Maharaj Jagatjit extracted a card from a deck and contemplated where to put it, deciding finally to lay it face down on the table, then focused his laser-eye view on Stella.

“You see, Stella,” the maharaja said mournfully, “only you can persuade Paramjit to consummate his marriage to Lilavati.”

Stella bit her cheek until she tasted blood. The morning sickness she’d had for the last two months emboldened her to do what came next.

She would do as the maharaja instructed, she said, swallowing the lump in her throat, but she would need a million rupees for the job.

Incredibly, the maharaja agreed.

That night she forced the Prince to go to the bed of Lilavati, but no, Lord Param wouldn’t go. And Stella was so angry she began to accuse Param of slighting her when he had done nothing. They would fight so that Stella could throw him out of her boudoir and direct his faltering steps to the zenana and the waiting bride. Son and heir, Sukhjit Singh was conceived that night. Duty defined, duty done.

“I’m done,” Prince Param said the next day. “I am giving up this kingdom, these rules, these unending responsibilities. I just want to be with you, Stella.”  Stella had finally worked up the courage to tell him she was four months pregnant with his child.

That night they left the shores of India. 

The memories flashed for Stella like the shifting scenes of a cinematograph: how could she describe the night they spent, the way they spent it, the sensations she had never known, the moonlight silvering the courtyard outside their hotel room, her body pale and hairless, limbs supple and careless, how from between her legs there sprouted peach buds ready to open into flowers, and how Prince Param plucked those, one by one. Or that first wet week after which Prince Param took her to a Gurudwara in England, held her hand tightly, married her in the presence of the Santjii who renamed her Narinder Kaur; how he became her life, the air she breathed, the blood that flowed in her veins. 

“Ever since I saw you dance like you had diamonds at the meeting of your thighs, you’ve had my heart,” the Prince said as he pressed his face into the crook of her neck, breathing in the faint dry warmth of her scent—of lilacs and Pears soap.

She could hear her heart beating. She could hear his heart beating. At that moment, conviction took over. At that moment, Stella was happy.

* * *

Many years later, Stella would pull Indira to her lap, humming snatches of a melody by Tchaikovsky from her ballet days. She’d run a comb through Indira’s black hair, weaving it into a thick plait, and she would remember how Brinda reacted when her maid, Mamta said her husband forced her to abort the fetus when he found out it was a girl. Brinda clasped Mamta’s hands, her soft, pink palms enclosing Mamta’s rough and chapped fingers, her face lined with resignation and sorrow as she whispered urgently, “Om Namo Shiva. Om Namo Narayanaya.”

The prayer for the dead. 

The world felt so slick as though it had washed over and out of her: time, the organs weighted with grief, the memory of the shadow crossing Prince Param’s face as he glimpsed the writhing body of the baby girl in the midwife’s arms, the sickly-sweet odor of the opium-corn brandy that Stella detected on him as he turned away.

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