The Dancer and the Raja (33 page)

42

The early 1920s are for Anita the most intense years of her life, although not the happiest, if by happiness a lasting state of pleasure and peacefulness is to be understood. On the contrary, they are years when passion continues to consume her, and with it the cohort of feelings that accompany it, such as fear, shame, insecurity, and even despair. But she also knows fleeting moments of supreme happiness that in some way compensate for everything else. In spite of the fact that she cannot see a way out of the labyrinth she has gotten herself into, neither does she feel able to control the tide of her emotions. She knows she is swimming in dangerous waters, but she does not come to the shore to stop her journey. Perhaps she cannot; or maybe she does not want to.

She is afraid of giving herself away because every time she passes Kamal or when she meets him in the dining room for lunch, she feels disturbed, she thinks she goes red, her words falter, and a slight trembling takes over her hands.

“Are you all right?” the maharaja asks her one day.

“I'm a little tired, that's all … I was coming down to tell you that I won't be having lunch with you today.”

She prefers to hide in her room rather than think they might be reading the feelings that bloom on her face. Every word, every casual glance, and even the most banal of her gestures seem sown with traps ready to uncover her secret. She has just found out that the maharaja is organizing Kamal's wedding to the daughter of a Sikh prince. A disaster. Kamal is vehemently opposed to it and says he will get married in European style, to a girl of his choice, or, if not, that he prefers to remain single. Anita fears that the young man may end up losing the trial of strength with his father and that would mean his moving away forever.

Upstairs, in her room, in front of her altar full of gods, Anita attempts to calm down and recover the sanity she had before. How is it possible that she should depend so much on a man who does not even know what she feels for him? She realizes that her whole life revolves around Kamal. Anita calculates her movements methodically, her comings and goings, and all her moves, to coincide with his, even if it is just for a minute, the time to say hello in a corridor, or to attend some guests at teatime, or simply to see him go past. What meaning is there in living like that, thinking about him as she could never have imagined she could think about someone? She cannot find a breathing space because when she is with the maharaja, she recognizes Kamal in her husband's gestures. They have the same build, the same way of speaking, and the same dark eyes in which Anita can see her own perdition. Sometimes she dreams of running away, but she is not mistress of her own will.

Then she ends up rebelling against herself, wanting to declare war on that intruder she has no right to idolize, to get him out of her head and cure the secret wound in her heart. She realizes she is lovesick and does not know how to soothe the pain that is cutting her up inside. She rails against him, and she rails at herself, but she exhausts herself in vain. When Kamal is present, she flees; and when he is not present, she cannot get his face out of her head. She daydreams that she says “I love you,” but she hates herself for it. It is an unhealthy love, one that can only bring misfortune. What dishonor for her husband, and even worse for her son! At the worst moments of despair she even thinks about suicide as the only way of freeing herself from the tyranny of her feelings.
Is the misfortune of living no more really so great?
she asks herself when she is alone.
For unhappy people like me death holds no terror.
Then she reproaches herself for having fallen into the temptation of thinking in that way.
What a terrible legacy I'd leave for Ajit! For his whole life he'd carry the weight of his mother's sin. Nothing degrades a man so much as feeling deeply ashamed at the conduct of his parents.

The terrible thing is that she says it all to herself. Not being able to share the weight of her conscience with anyone becomes so unbearable that it overcomes her. She is like a dam that is full to overflowing and about to burst.
My God! I don't know where I'm heading, or who I am anymore!

And yet, in spite of herself, a glimmer of hope finally slips into her heart when she remembers how Kamal looked her directly in the eye, how he helped her off her horse, how he brushed her neck with his hand as he gave her a shawl, the warm way he wished her good night … Then she gains strength again, she forgets the turmoil in her mind, and she lets herself be carried along by her daydream, as though she had wings to escape from an impossible situation.

The opportunity to break the ice with Kamal presents itself during a family trip to Europe, for no other reason than to get away from the monsoon heat. The maharaja has bought a mansion, which he has called Pavillon de Kapurthala, at number 11, Route du Champ d'Entrainement, near the Bois de Boulogne, one of the most select districts in the French capital, and he invites his family to stay there for the first time. Ratanjit remains in India, as regent and highest authority in affairs of state. In this way he is beginning to prepare to succeed his father when the time comes. Gita, his wife, is pregnant for the third time. After two daughters, everyone is hoping that now she will have the long-awaited boy who will ensure the continuation of the dynasty in Kapurthala.

During the crossing by ship there are moments of intimacy between Kamal and Anita, which cement their friendship. She gets to tell him her problems regarding her relationship with the maharaja: her feeling of being neglected, the loneliness, the boredom, the despair at feeling less loved, less desired … Kamal consoles her and gives her advice. During the long evenings on deck they feel a vague sense of melancholy, a need to tell each other things that are difficult to say. They experience the same emotion as children when they talk in whispers of forbidden things. The attraction of sin between a young man and a young woman, even if only by word, leads them to matters that are a little risqué. Lying on the sun beds, they really enjoy the moment, like school friends who remember their first escapades. Anita tells him about her school in Málaga, about Anselmo Nieto, her first and only suitor, about how the maharaja fell in love with her, about that first night of love after the dinner at Maxim's … Kamal tells her about the concubines that came to the palace to initiate him in the art of sex, about his later lack of interest in Indian women, and he confesses that he had a love affair with an Englishwoman while he was studying in London.

“I really only like European women,” he tells her.

“Like father, like son,” she replies, laughing.

Their confidences and their conversations as good friends delight Kamal, who watches her even more closely, as though he could guess at the truth behind Anita's feelings that show in her face. She lets herself be looked at with a smile, not moving her head, with her eyes faraway and her voice subdued.

And in Paris, on the first occasion they find themselves alone, the inevitable happens. Just like every night, the maharaja has gone out to dinner, this time at the home of his friend, the princess of Chimay. Anita did not want to accompany him, saying she had a bad migraine. She needs to be alone, because she feels a little dazed with so much social life. Kamal has spent two days away from Paris, invited to a hunt in Fontainebleau.

It is nighttime, the servants have retired, only the passing of the occasional carriage can be heard, the howling of a dog in the distance and the sound of the wind in the foliage of the trees in the park. Lying on the sofa, covered with a blanket, Anita is almost hypnotized by the fire in the fireplace. It is cold, in spite of it being June, as though autumn had suddenly slipped in at the beginning of summer. The flickers of the fire light up the enormous sitting room that she herself has decorated with great care. She is delighted as she contemplates her handiwork: the gold-leaf medallions shine on the walls like shields, as do the rosettes on the ceiling surrounded by garlands that are also gilded; the purple flowers on the Aubusson carpet that covers the parquet give the whole a touch of comfort and voluptuousness. The chest of drawers covered in red Damask silk that matches the curtains, the enormous clock on the wall, the Chinese vases placed on pedestals, the feet of the two tables decorated with mosaics from Florence, and even the flower boxes placed on the windowsills evoke the opulence and taste of the period. From the ceiling hang three crystal lamps that shed blue and pink reflections from the fire in the fireplace to the four corners of the room. Anita is half asleep before that spectacle of luxury and magic, which is all her own work.

Suddenly she hears a noise; at first she thinks it is her husband coming back, although she is surprised as it is so early. Then, when she hears some footsteps, she is afraid and sits up; her hair is in a mess and her eyes betray her fear. The silhouette of Kamal stands out against the darkness of the room, lit by the reflection of the flames and the whitish light of the moon coming in through the windows.

“I decided to come back a day early … what dreadful weather!”

“I was falling asleep.”

“Sorry if I scared you.”

There are no more words. When Anita goes past Kamal to go to the stairs and up to her room, he gently and firmly takes her by the hand. She pulls lightly in an attempt to get free. They both look at each other as if they did not know each other; on their faces a forced, rather shamefaced smile appears. Then Kamal grabs her round the waist and holds her. Anita makes as if to resist, but suddenly stops moving and lets herself go.

“Let me go …” she says in a whisper.

It is the only sound that comes out of her lips. In the great silence of the mansion, she can feel the floor shaking as an omnibus pulled by horses goes by down Foch Avenue, as her mouth meets Kamal's in the first real kiss full of love in her life.

When they part, they remain silent for a few moments, in a feeling of mutual uneasiness, as though trying to measure the enormity of the madness they have just entered.

“What we are doing is monstrous …” says Anita in a barely audible, serious voice; her face looks as if it has aged.

“Sooner or later it had to happen,” Kamal replies.

Then he too has lived through his own tortured love story, Anita discovers. He too has had to struggle against that fatal attraction, only to let himself be carried along again, always a little further, until the final betrayal. He too must have found himself in the middle of a volcano that finally swallowed him up! The love they feel is like a poison that has slowly spread. From that night, Anita knows there is no turning back, and that destiny, which is pursuing her with determination, will continue to push her along a path from which she will never again be able to get away. Has she not sought this? Did she not want this? Has she not desired this more than anything else in the world? Now the step is taken and it is irreversible. Love triumphs at the expense of human weakness. Anita feels that it is only a matter of time until everything blows up like a gigantic firework. Or like a bomb.

43

In India, Kamal continues to live in the palace at Kapurthala just to be closer to Anita. Otherwise he would get far away, very far away. He keeps up his confrontation with his father and refuses to marry, something which is considered as an unacceptable affront from a son in an Indian family. “You cannot educate us in England as Westerners and then subject us to the archaic customs of our race,” Kamal shouts at him in one of their arguments. For the maharaja, the force of tradition carries more weight than the reasoning of a Westerner. Perhaps it is because of his age, but the fact is that Jagatjit Singh is falling back more and more on his culture. He never misses the daily reading of the Granth Sahib together with his officers and ministers, and he has declared publicly that he is sorry he shaved off his beard a few years ago. Or perhaps it is because of the uncertain future that the growing activity of Gandhi and the Congress Party seem to forecast. Gandhi does not tire of denouncing the poverty of the people and has launched a slogan that could well mark the end of an epoch: “Noncooperation.” His calls to boycott everything British—schools, courts, honors—find a wider and wider response among the population. The danger is that he is calling for an end to the order imposed by the British, including the maharajas. But neither the rise of the nationalists nor marrying Kamal form part of Jagatjit's more immediate concerns. He knows that time ends up by eroding the most rebellious of spirits and that his son will finally do the right thing. What worries him most is that the Kapurthala dynasty is still without an heir. In India, women do not inherit thrones, except in the Moslem sultanate of Bhopal. The maharaja fervently hopes that this time Gita will give him a grandson, but again a girl is born, the third. The new gynecologist from Goa, Miss Pereira, comes to tell him, with tears in her eyes. What should be a happy event becomes a nightmare. When the midwife gives her the new baby, even Gita screams, “Get her away from me!” Then she spends the whole day crying. For her the drama is even greater because Miss Pereira has told her that the aftereffects of the difficult birth will prevent her from having any more children. Ratanjit, always melancholic, sinks even deeper into depression. When the maharaja finds out the state astrologer has pocketed the amounts he has given him for prayers asking for a male heir, he orders him to be imprisoned without trial and for a minimum of three years.

“Gita,” the maharaja says to her one day after having called her to his office with her husband, “no doubt you realize how disappointed my son and I are at your inability to provide us with an heir.”

Gita nods, but does not answer. The inconsolable maharaja finds it hard to hide the contempt he feels for his daughter-in-law.

“You have to have a boy.”

“I want one, but it seems impossible.”

The maharaja clears his throat, preparing his next words. Fresh in his elephant-like memory is his daughter-in-law's disloyalty when he asked her to help to get Anita accepted within the family; he cannot forget that she slammed the door in his face. So he does not beat about the bush. Besides, the matter will brook no delay or pussyfooting. What can be more serious and transcendental than the survival of his line and the House of Kapurthala?

“I have something to say to you, Gita. If you cannot give us an heir within a reasonable amount of time, it will be necessary for Ratanjit to take another wife.”

Gita is thunderstruck. She closes her eyes for an instant.
How can he humiliate me this way?
she asks herself.

“I would never accept anything like that,” she replies.

“You have no choice,” the maharaja insists in an icy tone. “You are an Indian woman, and you know that here it is perfectly normal for my son to have another wife if he so wishes.”

“He wouldn't do that to me,” Gita replies, with tears in her eyes.

But from the way her husband looks away, Gita understands that Ratanjit will always do what his father asks of him. She said later, “At that precise moment I lost any respect I felt for my husband. I felt pity for him at his weakness and his lack of bravery.” When she leaves the office, she holds tightly to the banister of the stairs because she has the impression that the world is faltering around her.

Gita has no option but to accept the blow.
These Indian kings, who have been accustomed to imposing their will for thousands of years, especially on women, are still medieval despots. All they have of European is a light veneer,
she thinks. Now she realizes what a mistake it was to have confronted her father-in-law. He is too powerful and vengeful to have as an enemy.

After a few days, when she has managed to calm down and organize her thoughts, Gita can see only one way out of her situation. She is going to make one last attempt to save her marriage, her family, and her position. She decides to go to France to have a series of operations that will allow her to conceive again. These are delicate operations, with a real risk to her own life. But she is desperate. In spite of that dim light on the horizon, deep within she feels that the damage to her marriage caused by her father-in-law's interference is irreparable.

Anita also notices that her marriage is on its last legs, but for other reasons. For some time now the maharaja has not made use of his conjugal rights. His distancing himself has been gradual, even before Kamal began to occupy a place in her heart. Anita lives in her rooms, separated from those of the maharaja by several halls. She never goes into her husband's rooms without telling him first. She does so out of respect, but also out of fear that she might find him with another woman. And he no longer comes by surprise into her room, as he did in the early years, when he appeared in the night in the doorway before she fell asleep, as a prelude to a night of torrid lovemaking.

Now Anita listens for other steps, other movements, other noises. In Paris, after her rendezvous with love, Kamal and she have had few occasions to see each other again alone, and when they have managed it, it has always been only for brief moments. Their relationship is based on the furtive looks they give each other, touches, words whispered in an ear, and stolen kisses. There have also been times when Kamal has avoided her, as though he suddenly remembered she is his father's wife.

But when they go back to the narrow world of Kapurthala, daily contact makes it impossible for them to flee the tyranny of desire. Such dangerous promiscuity ends up by linking them in a special way, like two criminals who share the secret of a sin that drags them down with it, a fall that Anita sees as a necessity caused by boredom, like a rare and extreme pleasure capable of arousing her lethargic feelings, her wounded heart, and her forgotten youth. She loves Kamal with all her soul, but she is also drowning in self-contempt because she knows that what they are doing is too dirty, too unworthy. Anita struggles between the disgust that she feels for herself and the nameless pleasure of a love that is like a crime to her.

A sweet crime, which they began in Paris and go on committing in the palace in Kapurthala, in the gardens, in the greenhouses, in the abandoned forts and cenotaphs in the fields of the Punjab. The first lovers' tryst takes place in Kamal's room, after a reception at which they drink and dance until the last guest has left. “Come to me, I'll be waiting for you,” he whispers in her ear. And Anita runs to meet him, as though she loved the wrongdoing, the sin that no one commits, the evil that is going to fill her empty existence and that is going to push her nearer to that hell she has always feared. And she does it with a complete lack of shame, hardly bothering to hide and forgetting the most elementary precautions of those who commit adultery. The first time it is Kamal who undresses her. He knows what he is doing: his agile fingers run round her waist with innate, ancient wisdom. He frees her hair, takes off her jewels, tears the silk of her bodice, and undoes her petticoats, one after another. When he sees her naked, he picks her up in his arms and places her on his bed, and he does it as though he were carrying a work of art, she so white, so ardent, so his, and so forbidden …

The lovers finally find a safer place in the ruins of a Hindu temple dedicated to Kali, the goddess of destruction. It is a temple abandoned by men and taken over by vegetation, in the middle of the country, a few kilometers from Kapurthala. Like enormous snakes, the roots of gigantic trees imprison the ruined walls of carved stone. Hidden inside it, immersed in the strange world of the plants that surround them, it seems to them that the lianas embrace holds them with tenderness, that the branches of the bushes are the interminable arms of lovers who seek each other and tie themselves together in spasms of pleasure. It is as though all that world they share is sexually aroused. Anita and Kamal, swollen with voluptuousness, feel they are part of the powerful marriage of the earth. At nightfall the leaves take on confusing, misleading shapes, the hedges murmur, the lilies sigh in ecstasy and the
apsaras
—the celestial nymphs sculpted in the stones of the temple—smile at them from eternity. Suddenly they love each other with the tenderness of wild animals as they feel themselves sliding into sin, toward a forbiden love. Among the age-old stones of the forgotten sanctuary, they taste love again and again, like the criminal fruit of an overheated land, and with a dull fear of the consequences of their terrible acts.

In spite of the constant tension, Anita looks younger, at the height of her beauty. That forbidden relationship lights a flame in her that shines in the depths of her eyes and warms her laughter. The maharaja notices the renewed spark in the face of his Spanish rani.

“You're prettier than ever,” he tells her one day, giving her a kiss on the neck.

She jumps aside, with a little cry, trembling and trying to laugh, but unable to stop thinking about the kisses of his son, at their tryst the day before, among
apsaras
with ambiguous smiles.

How long can the deceit last? The one most upset by the situation is Dalima, the faithful servant, the witness of all the tricks her mistress plays to meet up with her lover in secret. Hoping that such a dangerous game will soon be over, she never misses a chance to frighten Anita.

“Madam, I've heard you've been seen out riding with Prince Kamal near the temple of Kali.”

“Who told you that?”

“The grooms. But they're also talking about it in the kitchens. Madam, be very careful.”

“Thank you, Dalima.”

Anita's heart thumps wildly when she feels cornered. When she regains her lucidity for a moment, she tells herself that the game has to stop, that it is a senseless folly that can have no positive outcome. She manages to infect Kamal with the same terror, and they stop seeing each other for a few days. Then a deep sense of melancholy overcomes her heart, and she has the impression that her life is ebbing away from her body and leaving her. Through the palace windows, through the half-lowered blinds that shed their striped shade over the walls and furniture, her eyes seem to drift like a ship on the ocean, empty and languid.
How hard it is to fight love!
she says to herself. Incapable of setting limits to the voracity of the feelings that flood through her, she realizes that all she can do is let herself be pulled along by the current, let life decide for itself, let the course of events show her the way to go on, like a god emerging from the storms in the sky.

At that difficult time, she secretly comes to hope that Kamal will break things off, that he may become the god that can cure all the ills of her soul. Because if she is guilty, what can be said about him? His betrayal is as unworthy or worse than Anita's. What kind of man is Kamal, living off his father and yet criticizing him, enjoying a privileged position at the same time as he despises it, having the blood of a prince and yet denying it? Who is that man caught between two worlds? An Englishman with the dark skin of an Indian? An Indian with the mentality of an Englishman, who can only fall in love with European women? The victim of his own contradictions, Kamal leaps from one world to the other. He does the same as everyone; he wants the best of both worlds but ends up entangled in a no-man's-land, in a place with no law or order, where betrayal holds court.

One day Anita tells him of the visit she made to the village of Kalyan with Bibi, and she tells him about the emotion she felt when she heard the story of Princess Gobind Kaur and Captain Waryam Singh, and she confesses that the peaceful picture of that couple will always be the symbol of true love for her.

“Could you do the same thing, kidnap me and take me far away from here forevermore?”

“My father would look everywhere for us and he wouldn't leave us alone until he caught us. He has the means to do that.”

“So … There is no hope for us, is there?” Anita asks him sadly.

“Yes, there is. But it cannot be in India: here we will always be condemned. It has to be in Europe. Give me a little time …”

But the knot is tightening. Just before leaving again for London, the maharaja speaks to Anita.

“Inder Singh has told me you've been seen out riding with someone near the temple of Kali …”

Anita feels a shiver run down her spine. For a moment she thinks,
This is it, he knows it all,
and that her husband is setting a trap for her in order to find out the truth. But she keeps her cool.

“Sometimes I meet Kamal on his way back from inspecting the fields and we have fun racing the horses … It can't be anyone else.”

She manages to lie as she tells the truth. From the maharaja's expression she knows she has given the right answer. This time there is no trap.

“I don't like you being out there alone so much. I want you to ride with an escort. You could have an accident, fall off your horse … And then who would pick you up?”

“You're right,
mon chéri
.”