Durbar (5 page)

Delhi’s drawing rooms in those socialist times had about them a shabby sameness. Terrazzo floors that had seen better days were usually covered with Persian carpets now a little worn at the edges, the sofas looked as if they had been made by a carpenter working in the garden and the upholstery and curtains were perpetually dusty and frayed. The people who gathered in these drawing rooms were a motley lot. Princes, recently de-recognized by Indira Gandhi, scions of high officials, the
occasional business tycoon from Bombay (not Mumbai then), young married couples of little distinction and single young women looking to get married. Almost nobody in these drawing rooms had a serious job or a serious interest in getting one. All they had in common was that nearly all the men had been to the Doon School and all the women to Welham Girls’ High School or some convent in Simla or Mussoorie. We who had been to Welham viewed girls who had studied in convent schools like Tara Hall and Waverly with disdain for reasons that had to do with us considering ourselves more Indian than them. I remember going to Tara Hall in Simla for a sporting event with other Welham girls and laughing openly at the way the girls sang the national anthem with a British accent.

On the way to Mapu’s house that evening, Naveen told me that Arun and Nina were Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi’s best friends and that it might be embarrassing for him to run into them since Rajiv’s mother had just put his father in jail. I think I said something to the effect that it might add some excitement to what could otherwise be a dull evening. I remember that on the short drive from Prithviraj Road to Sundar Nagar both of us noticed that there were more policemen on the streets than we had ever seen before. This was Delhi before it had witnessed terrorism and political violence of any kind, so policemen were a rare sight. To see them standing in the shadows of nearly every gulmohar tree we drove past was both exciting and a little scary.

Mapu lived in an old-fashioned, stolid, double-storeyed house that looked on to the high walls of the zoo. All you could see from his tiny front garden was the wall and the tops of the tall trees on the other side of it, and sometimes distant sounds of animals roaring or cackling could be heard. The drawing room windows had been left open and a hot, dusty wind blew in, tossing the white muslin curtains about and drawing them on to the veranda. At that time only rich businessmen could afford more than one air-conditioner and this was most often reserved for the bedroom. Mapu’s drawing room was not air-conditioned so most of his guests had settled down in an alcove close to the windows where there was a hint of a breeze that brought in the summer scents of jasmine and raat-ki-rani.

While Naveen got himself and me a drink I spent a few moments looking around Mapu’s large, high-ceilinged drawing room and noticed that the only people I knew there were Romi Chopra, whom I met at
parties and who I knew was a friend of Rajiv Gandhi from Cambridge, and Vicky Bharat Ram, who belonged to a famous Delhi business family. Mapu introduced me to his brother, Arun Singh, and Arun’s wife, Nina, while Naveen was still getting our drinks. My first impression of Arun was that he had a dour, intimidating reserve about him and Nina I noticed was elegant, friendly and full of laughter. She wore a brightly coloured chiffon sari, expensive French perfume and magnificent Cartier rings on her fingers.

Mapu was passionately interested at the time in reviving Indian textiles and in pursuit of this passion had made a whole new group of friends. Most of the other people in the room were from this group. They were a distinct type. The women all wore handwoven cotton saris and cheap Kolhapuri slippers on feet that looked like they were in need of a pedicure. Their hair was uniformly left long and loose and their only concession to make-up was a large bindi. The men wore kurta–pyjamas and had an unwashed quality about them. The feature they had in common with the women was their ridiculous effort at being ‘Indian’. They were so affected in their ethnicity that their conversation was pointless and dull. They talked about Indian culture and music with fake intimacy. Conversations were usually about the latest Ravi Shankar concert or the latest performance by Yamini Krishnamurthy or Sonal Mansingh that, of course, they had attended, all of this discussed in English heavily interspersed with the Sanskrit names of ragas and dance forms. Most of them had studied in the best private schools in India and many had gone on to Oxford or Cambridge, but somehow this turned them into ‘professional Indians’, as a British friend once described them. That evening Naveen made his disdain for ‘the ethnarks’ more than apparent, so after we had said hello to Arun and Nina we wandered off to a quiet corner of the drawing room with our drinks.

It must have been a few minutes after Naveen and I had repaired antisocially to our distant corner that I saw Rajiv and Sonia walk in through the open French windows. Rajiv wore a white kurta–pyjama and Sonia a lacy white dress that just reached her ankles. The first thing I noticed about Rajiv was his skin. It was pink and shiny, as if he had been in a sauna. He was not very tall but was slim and, despite his thinning hair, very good-looking. She was small and slim, with a prominent, sulky mouth and thick brown hair that hung loose down to her waist.

Had they been royalty they could not have got a more reverent reception that evening. Romi and Vicky rushed forward, abandoning whoever they were talking to and everyone else in the room slowly followed. Rajiv and Sonia sat down, holding hands, in the alcove near the open windows and a circle formed around them. Naveen made a joke about us having been left out of the ‘magic circle’ but reiterated that it would be embarrassing for him to go up and talk to Rajiv. We were still dithering over what to do next, when Mapu’s sister-in-law, Nina, came sailing up to us and said with a gay laugh that Sonia had asked ‘if that wasn’t Naveen Patnaik standing in the corner’. After saying this, she sailed gaily back to the circle around Rajiv and Sonia without noticing the effect her words had had on Naveen.

‘My drink has turned to ash in my mouth,’ he said melodramatically. ‘What should we do now? They might think we are very rude not to join the magic circle.’

‘Yes. Maybe we should,’ I agreed.

When we got close enough for Sonia to say hello to Naveen and for me to be introduced to her, Naveen, in a feeble attempt at polite conversation, decided to compliment her on her white frock. ‘Is it a Valentino?’ he asked with a friendly smile, to which she said unsmilingly, ‘I had it made in Khan Market by my
darzi
.’ There was something in the way she said this that prevented further conversation.

Despite the Emergency having just been declared and the city seething with political tension, nobody talked about politics that evening. There was talk of Corbett Park and children’s schools and holidays abroad, and about handloom cloth and handicrafts, but nobody brought up even once the political situation in the country. I sensed that this unstated conspiracy of silence had to do with nobody wanting to embarrass Rajiv and did not bring up the subject either. Mapu told me later that his brother disapproved of the Emergency and was close enough to Rajiv to have been able to write Mrs Gandhi a letter giving her his views. Later, at another dinner party when I asked one of the people regularly invited to dinner parties for Rajiv and Sonia why nobody mentioned politics in front of them, he said it was because Rajiv was not at all interested in politics. He was very happy being an Indian Airlines pilot and a family man even if he was Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandson and Indira Gandhi’s son.

That first evening, though, I found it extraordinary that nobody mentioned the Emergency even after Rajiv and Sonia left. In the nearly
thirty years that India had been an independent country we had failed to deal with most of our problems but the one thing that we were rightly proud of was that we were a democracy. The average Indian may have remained poor, illiterate and living in the most primitive conditions but he had the right to vote and this we considered a huge achievement when we compared ourselves to the military dictatorships in most other developing countries. So, you would think that as educated, privileged Indians at least the suspension of fundamental rights and the imposition of press censorship would have come up in conversations that evening. They did not. I realized later that the political changes in the country were never mentioned only in the set in which Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi moved.

During the Emergency, my social life seemed to become an endless series of dinner parties. The city had not extended as much as it has today. If we travelled to the still unfinished colonies of Shanti Niketan and Vasant Vihar it was considered a long way. Vicky Bharat Ram lived in Shanti Niketan and I found myself invited to his house quite a lot. At his dinner parties there were nearly always the same people. One of them was Romi Chopra, who remains a devotee of the Gandhi family to this day. I remember him from those evenings as a shy, effeminate man. Someone who knew him from his Cambridge days once told me that he had wanted to become a ballet dancer but had ended up working for an advertising company in Delhi. When Rajiv and Sonia were not present he would talk to me about politics, but his political views were limited to the unashamed, unstinting, unquestioning worship of Mrs Gandhi. In his eyes she could do no wrong and the Nehru–Gandhi family had a divine right to rule India forever and ever.

Vicky I remember as being full of bluster and social conversation. He was a lot richer than the rest of us so at his dinner parties he would serve French wine and fine Scotch whisky at a time when Mrs Gandhi’s socialist economic policies made these things almost impossible to acquire. He was married at the time to a beautiful Mexican woman who hardly ever came to Delhi. This did not deter Vicky from giving wonderful dinner parties in his house filled with antique Indian sculpture and exquisite paintings. His family was famous for their contribution to Delhi’s culture and some of the finest private concerts I have attended were in Vicky’s father’s house.

Another couple who were regular guests at these dinner parties were Satish Sharma and his foreigner wife, Sterre. She was blonde and spent
most of the evenings chatting to Sonia. Satish Sharma was a surly, silent man who did not seem to have much to say. He came from a middle-class background and had not been at either school or university with Rajiv and his other friends. Satish worked for Indian Airlines and it was through flying together that Rajiv and he had become friends. He gave no indication that he was even slightly interested in politics or current affairs. If someone had predicted that he would one day become an MP from Indira Gandhi’s constituency, Rae Bareli, and a cabinet minister it would have been taken as a joke.

The other close friends who were present at these gatherings when they were in town were Nina and Arun Singh, and Suman and Manju Dubey. Of them Nina was the most likeable because of her friendly, open nature. Arun, or Roon, as everyone called him, was impossible to talk to because of his forbidding reserve. I knew of Suman from journalistic circles, in which he was respected for having got himself a very well-paid job with a newspaper in Singapore or Hong Kong. Indian journalism in those days consisted of a handful of English newspapers, with a small circulation and big influence, and a handful of Hindi newspapers that had a larger circulation but little influence, and any journalist who could get a job in a foreign newspaper was hugely admired. Suman was fidgety and nervous and seemed permanently distracted, while his wife, Manju, was a legendary beauty but had about her a cold, supercilious air. Another couple I remember as being part of Rajiv and Sonia’s inner circle were Nimal and Thud. I never found out his real name because everyone called him Thud, short for his surname, Thadani. It was only after Rajiv became prime minister and Thud became well known as one of his close friends that I discovered that his first name was Mohan. His wife was a plump, blowsy former airline stewardess who looked as if she may once have been pretty.

Then there were the foreign friends with whom Sonia seemed most comfortable and relaxed. Ottavio and Maria Quattrocchi were the ones who were nearly always invited where Rajiv and Sonia went. Not much was known about them, except that Ottavio worked for an Italian company and lived in Friends Colony. Sonia’s parents stayed with them when they came to Delhi. The other foreign friends came and went. There were Teresa and Brewster, whose surname I no longer remember, who lived in Marbella and had been introduced to Rajiv and Sonia by Mohammed Yunus, one
of the Gandhi family’s closest friends. Yunus was a tall, talkative Pathan who, during the Emergency, became one of Mrs Gandhi’s most vociferous spokesmen. Teresa was very glamorous and always dressed in the latest clothes by Yves Saint Laurent or whoever was the designer of the season, and Brewster was a tall, bald ex-model. They disappeared soon after the Emergency ended, when it was discovered that they were involved in smuggling antiques out of India. There were other foreigners who came and went but were too itinerant to be important.

Drifting in and out of this inner circle of friends would be the occasional prince from Rajasthan or Punjab, a business tycoon or two from Bombay and other friends of Rajiv from the Doon School. It was a closed circle of people who lived an upper middle class Indian existence. Nobody spoke Hindi well but that did not matter. What mattered was if you spoke the sort of English you may have learned in a public school in Dehra Dun. If some newly rich businessman drifted by speaking English with difficulty, he was instantly treated as an object of fun.

Sonia did not speak English well but because she was a foreigner it did not matter. We were deeply impressed by all things foreign not just because we had been ruled by white men for so long but because secretly we believed that Western culture and civilization was superior to ours. It may sound like a funny thing to say, but Sonia’s foreignness made it easier for her to be accepted in Rajiv’s circle of friends. Had he married an Indian woman of her background, she would have been permanently held in contempt by the broken-down aristocrats and aspiring grandees who were Rajiv’s closest friends.