27/10/2015
REMNANTS OF A ROYALTY: PRINCESS SAKINA THE AWADH's UNTOLD STORY
Their mother, whom they called Her Highness, killed herself with the ''drink of silence,'' a toxic mix of powders that included crushed remnants of the family diamonds and pearls.
Bereft, the Prince and Princess say, they slept with the co**se on a stone slab, he on one side, she on the other. Then they did the embalming themselves, careful to keep Her Highness's head on a brocade pillow.
The macabre has befallen the House of Oudh, creating an eerie tale of people chasing the ghost of an old grievance and squandering their lifetimes in the pursuit.
Oudh (pronounced ah-wud) was a wealthy swath of northern India in the time of the maharajas. Its sovereigns traced their bloodlines to ancient Persian kings. Their power seeped away under the rule of the British, who finally seized the realm in 1856. Some of the royal family never gave up their claim on the palaces. Nor did their descendants.
Best known among the bitter Oudh progeny has been the Begum Wilayat Mahal. In 1975, trying to shame the Government into returning the family's estates, Her Highness moved into a busy New Delhi railroad station along with a retinue of 13 ferocious dogs, 7 Nepalese servants and 2 of her children. They stayed 10 futile years.
What finally coaxed them out was the offer of a substitute home, a 14th-century hunting lodge built by a Delhi sultan and known as Malcha Mahal.
The stone monument -- without electricity or water, infested by bats and pigeons -- sits on a concealed hill in a woody preserve in the middle of the city. It is accessible by a brambly footpath, but with the dogs snarling and signs warning that trespassers will be shot, it was well suited to become a hermitage, and Her Highness wished this so. She had decided that her family's public protest would be replaced by lives of secluded misery.
Her Highness died five years ago, and since then, her mournful daughter, Princess Sakina, who is about 40, has neither left the grounds nor combed her frayed hair.
''I have divined that this world is nothing,'' she said, flipping her hand as if to discard all earthly creation. ''Cruel nature takes malicious delight in our ruin, so I desire nothing, want nothing. We are now the dynasty of the living dead.''
It was late in the afternoon, and the Princess and her brother, Prince Cyrus Riza, had granted a rare audience. This was arranged through an exchange of notes, carried up and back the footpath by the family's lone remaining servant, a young man dressed in a formal black coat and white turban.
The Dobermans and Labradors -- now numbering only seven -- were chained, though there was no holding back the pigeons. They streaked through the open archways of the dreary lodge, further befouling the tattered oriental carpets on the stone floors.
The Princess, gaunt and dark-eyed, was wearing a soiled black cape. ''Her Highness remained very restrained with us always,'' she said, describing what was a decidedly unusual relationship. ''We never took meals with her. We would never call her Mother. Here, I will show you the bowl she drank from, taking her drink of silence.''
The bowl is centered on a table, set up as a shrine along with Her Highness's gloves and shawl. As the Princess talked, the Prince stood behind her. He, too, has sunken cheeks and he spoke of the bizarre with the same air of poised nobility. Unlike his sister, he ventures into the city from time to time and has even been to Europe. He has secreted away some of the family's final possessions, he said. These are sold off to pay for food.
''We are people of nature -- no plastics, no politics, no business,'' he said. ''There are those who would like to befriend us, and we would accept this, but they would have to be people of status and character. We do not open our hearts to just anyone.''
Princess Sakina agreed with this, bemoaning what has become of the world, lamenting the loss of palaces she never lived in, nostalgic for a time a century before her birth.
''We have accepted ruination, but we will not accept the demonic democracy of any country that has deprived royalty of their proper position,'' she said.
These words were an echo of her mother's. Her Highness had claimed to be the great-granddaughter of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Oudh, thought by some to be a poet and esthete, and by others to be a lecherous degenerate.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, apparently took some pity on her. According to various accounts, he gave her the use of a house in Srinagar, in Kashmir. When fire destroyed it in 1971, Her Highness was offered a bungalow but felt such accommodations beneath her. Her remonstrance led her to the railway station.
For 32 months, the obstinate woman lived on a train platform, later moving to an open portico built as a carriage drive for the wealthy. Her beloved dogs discouraged anyone who might try to evict her.
In 1984, the Indian Home Ministry finally interceded, suggesting that ''after repairs'' the derelict Malcha Mahal might be a fitting home for the aristocratic squatters. Her Highness moved in. The repairs were never done.
Malcha Mahal proved as difficult a home as the train station. In summers, bats flapped overhead and scorpions and snakes crawled inside for the cool shade. During monsoons, rains poured through the roof and collected in puddles on the uneven floor.
Seclusion did not necessarily come with safety. One night, intruders poisoned seven of the watchdogs and made off with antique bowls and silver goblets kept on an ornately set table.
''The death of our animals made it hard for Her Highness to bear the unbearableness,'' the Princess said. ''So much is unbearable.''
Her Highness took her own life at age 62. The Prince and Princess, heirs to their mother's obsession, found her limp body on Oct. 12, 1993. By their telling, they felt an obligation to embalm Her Highness themselves. As the co**se dehydrated, they slept beside her, something they had never done while she was alive.
The method of embalming was one handed down from the time of the Pharaohs, Prince Cyrus said. But these esoteric techniques, however trusted, would later be deemed a disappointment. After a year, the co**se was removed from its crypt and inspected. Eternal preservation had not been achieved.
A funeral pyre was prepared. ''Do not use the word cremation,'' the Princess pleaded. ''This is too common a term. What we did was confer Her Highness to the pious flame.''
The ashes, at least those that did not blow away, were released into rivers that flow through the land once known as Oudh.
Courtesy (Barry Bearak/The New York Times); The Princess of Oudh, the matriarch, in the rail station in 1983. (UPI/Corbis-Bettmann)
