The Court Dress by Anjana Basu
The court dress is displayed on its own stand beside the
long east window. If you were to see it when the room was
dark, it would give you a start because it looks exactly as
though someone is standing quietly and patiently by the
window. The costume is made of brocade, generously stuffed
and padded, and is bound by a velvet cummerbund encrusted
with gold and hung with long gold tassels. The crown is a
brilliant yellow silk turban. It had been the court dress of
H.R.H. Maharajadhiraja Sir Vikramaditya Pratap Narayan Sinha
Roy O.B.E. of Rangpur. The brocade, brought from Lyons as a
favour by the Maharaja of Kapurthala, is so rare that the
tailors finger the material regretfully, demanding
exorbitant rates whenever they are asked to fill in the moth
holes. Nandu used to check it every day for moth, dutifully
arranging camphor in little packets all around it.
Unlike the ballroom, the court dress had to be maintained.
To neglect it meant that scores of female relatives would
descend on the house uttering little shrieks of distress and
wringing their hands while the Maharaja's dark eyes glared
down from his portrait in the drawing room.
In the beginning, Nikki had been so unnerved by the portrait
that he had once suggested donating it to the Calcutta Club,
where his late father-in-law had frequently played whist.
His wife Queenie would not hear of it. One reason was that
her cousin George, the son of the Maharaja's sister, visited
them once a month and insisted on sitting beneath the
Maharaja's portrait. George so impressed the maids with his
resemblance to the great man that they would come scurrying
to announce, "Rajputtur esheychey, the Prince has arrived."
Nandu, on the other hand, who had been with the family for
generations, ignored George.
"If the painting weren't there," Nikki pointed out, "George
wouldn't be able to sit under it and call himself the
prince."
"But," said Queenie, "how would you like it if he sat under
the portrait in the Long Bar of the Six Hundred Club with
everyone there calling him Prince?"
This had not occurred to him, and so he agreed to suffer
both his father-in-law's painted glare and George's haughty
grin in silence.
But the court dress was a different matter. Backed by the
Maharaja's brother who occasionally strayed down from his
rural fastnesses, scores of Rangpur aunts, and everyone else
who had an interest in the family, Queenie insisted the
costume be maintained. Every winter, when the Kashmiri shawl
sellers came down from the hills, Nikki would return home
to find one sitting intently on the verandah, plying his
needle in and out of the padded folds of the Maharaja's
jacket.
"How much do we spend on that wretched get-up every year?"
he demanded.
"About three hundred or so," Queenie replied placidly.
"If you put off mending it for two years, we could buy a new
dinner set on the savings. I'm tired of eating off
mismatched plates."
"Well, dear, there's always the silver. But you know how
Nandu hates polishing it. And the maids always dent the
thalas."
Queenie's father had never been a particularly rich or
powerful Maharaja. All he'd left behind, apart from the
court dress, were two large houses, an odd assortment of
silverware, several unwieldy silver document cases, three
gold-hilted swords, and a Bentley that guzzled petrol.
Everything else had been taken away by the government. They
sold the Bentley to a collector as soon as they reasonably
could. They had talked of selling one of the houses to a
multinational company as a holiday home for its executives,
and handing the Calcutta house over to a promoter who would
convert it into a more manageable block of flats. But for
now it was just talk, and the Calcutta house quickly
swallowed the money from the sale of the car.
In Nikki's mind their living arrangements were far from
ideal. They ate off an odd conglomerate of bone china and
steel thalis. None of the drinking glasses, got free with
the bottles of whisky and rum Nikki bought, matched.
Everyone knew about the set of lead crystal wine glasses and
old brandy snifters locked away in their blue velvet cases
at the back of the Godrej, but they were as unusable as the
ballroom and the silver.
Nikki and Queenie had one daughter who went to a fashionable
convent school and it was quite obvious that, the way things
were going, she would never be able to run the houses.
Nikki's job hardly brought enough in to paint the town house
once every five years. At least that was what Nikki said and
Queenie never argued with him. Occasionally, because they
were her houses draining the coffers, she unbent enough to
allow him to sell a significant piece of furniture such as
the great, black, stone-topped table at which Netaji had
apparently written letters to the INS. But when it came to
the matter of the court dress, he found himself against a
wall.
"Why can't you at least give it to the Victoria Memorial?"
he asked. "They'd take care of it and you wouldn't have to
worry about moths."
"But Papa's not important enough for his court dress to be
displayed at the VM. Besides which, I don't think I'd like
Papa's clothes to be put on display like that."
Other suggestions, such as renting out the ballroom for
parties, met with equal disfavour from Queenie, although she
did open the room for the annual office party Nikki threw
every winter. In the morning Nandu would grumble about the
scratches made by corporate heels on the floor.
Nikki's office crowd was suitably impressed by Queenie's
royal connections, and equally impressed by George, who
invited himself and his wife to every party Nikki and
Queenie threw. He always stationed himself next to the
Maharaja's coat and expanded on the life of the Maharaja's
father -- "my grandfather" -- with his two concubines.
Nikki complained about George's eternal presence.
"Well, if he walks in, I can't throw him out," Queenie
said. "He is my one and only cousin." Nevertheless, she
walked up to the group surrounding George and tactfully
extricated him from the clutches of his admirers.
What was even more absurd about George, Nikki thought, was
the way he dressed. He had come in tight white trousers with
a flowing white kurta and an ornate brocade jacket clasped
by a large spray of emerald leaves.
"How very royal he looks," gushed one of the secretaries.
"He's not really," said Nikki. "Granted, his mother was the
Maharaja's sister, and while she might have been a
Rajkumari, he's not a Rajkumar himself."
The secretary looked unconvinced.
In Nikki's eyes, George had but one small thing in his
favour: he kept offering to take the Maharaja's court dress
off Queenie's hands.
"I do have more servants than you, and I know how
difficult it is for Nandu to manage by himself. Bhebey
daakho na, Queenie Di. After all, he was my Mama's brother and I shall
certainly treat his court dress with all the reverence due."
Nandu, who was serving tea, sniffed audibly and whisked
himself out of the room in a clatter of milk jug and
strainer.
George made sure that no one else but Queenie and Nikki was
present when he made these requests. He knew well that the
scores of royal aunts and sisters-in-law who flocked to
Queenie's drawing room were not likely to support him. The
oldest and most imperious of his aunts had once explained
to him in great detail that the only pedigree worth
considering was one descended from the male line.
"Your mother must have brought you up very badly if she
didn't tell you that," she said, "and from what I know of my
cousin, I'm pretty certain that she wouldn't have been so
careless."
George distributed his oversized visiting card, which he'd
had embossed with the entire family tree and all his
mother's titles, liberally wherever he went. He had a box at
the races where he invited the whole world to come and cheer
his horse whenever it ran in a race. That it had never won
didn't lessen George's hospitality. Nikki found him
hobnobbing with cricketers, starlets and bank clerks with
indiscriminate good humour, the diamond buttons on his kurta
flashing in the afternoon sun.
George also had pretensions to being a painter and displayed
his watercolour landscapes at the Academy. Every
advertisement for those exhibitions flashed his pedigree in
three inches of bold type. Once Queenie made the mistake of
dropping into one of those exhibitions and the next day
found her photograph in the art section of one of the daily
newspapers captioned: Princess Ashalata of Rangpur
inspecting a painting by Prince Vikramjit at the Academy.
Nikki suffered everyone at the office pulling his leg about
being Princess Ashalata's husband. And what did that make
him? He came home fuming.
"Who on earth asked you to go to George's art exhibition?"
Queenie was entertaining two amused aunts to tea, and had to
interrupt Nikki's fuming to apologise to them on his behalf,
which upset him all over again.
"Quite understandable really," said one of the aunts.
"George is unbelievably vulgar."
"Yes," agreed the other. "Diamonds in the morning. Really!"
After the aunts had left, Queenie said, "I couldn't help it.
How was I to know that George was planning to send that
picture to the papers? I'm sorry you were made to feel
embarrassed."
The watercolours were actually not bad. They owned a framed
one that George had given them on their anniversary and it
hung in the guest bedroom. It was a view from the east wing
of the Rangpur Palace, with blue fleecy clouds, Gothic
arches and an obligatory kite wheeling high above the
distant mountain peaks, all very correct eighteenth century
Raj stuff that George had mastered at Slade. One of George's
larger paintings, a view of a ruined fortress in the hills
near the Bhutan border, which the office had paid several
thousands to acquire, hung in Nikki's office boardroom.
Despite the art critics sniffing and saying things about
historic pastiches, the watercolours sold well.
George with all his pretensions managed to be better off
financially than Queenie with her ruined house and palace.
There was no point being told over and over again that the
Maharajah's sister had married money and that George didn't
have the two houses to maintain. Which was why it irritated
Nikki even more when he came home in winter to find yet
another Kashmiri shawl repairer sitting on the verandah
labouring over the Maharaja's clothes.
Queenie wasn't home the day George came with the request.
One of the banks was throwing a costume party, and he wanted
to borrow his uncle's court dress to wear to the party.
"It's falling to pieces," Nikki warned him.
"I'll take good care of it. I'll even get it mended if
required," George said.
By some coincidence George wasn't sitting under his uncle's
portrait, and Nikki found him more bearable than usual.
Besides which, the offer of getting the coat mended for
nothing was tempting. He summoned Nandu and ordered him to
transport the court dress with the greatest of care to
George sahib's car. "Deviji key boleley bhalo hoi," Nandu
said.
"There's no need to tell Deviji anything!" Nikki retorted.
"George sahib wants it only for a few days and he's promised
to take the greatest care of it, haven't you, George?"
Which was how, for a week, the stand came to look like a
scarecrow beside the long window in the ballroom. Nandu told
Queenie the whole story the moment she came home, and it was
all she could do to indicate subtly to Nikki, in a thousand
different ways, that he had failed to uphold the honour of
the family. By the time the week was over, Nikki was
squirming with embarrassment and wondering what he would do
if George didn't return the court dress. At the end of the
week George, as he had promised, sent the costume over in
the care of his driver.
"Well, Nandu," Nikki said, since he couldn't say anything
to Queenie, "see, George sahib didn't steal it!" Nandu gave
him a long, reproachful look and returned the dress to its
stand, arranging the folds of the coat suspiciously. Queenie
joined him, fingering the cummerbund.
"I didn't know that the velvet had got as thin as this,"
she observed. "Nandu, that shawl wala's been cheating us.
Remind me not to pay him his fifty rupees the next time he
comes."
That was the other thing about the royal family of Rangpur,
Nikki thought, it haggled over trifles. He spent the rest of
the week making Queenie feel guilty about making him feel
guilty.
A month later there was a "night" at the Club -- one of
the foreign liquor companies was offering free drinks on
the house. Nikki and Queenie went along, as she said, to
look at the tamasha. The back lawn of the Club was
transformed by festoons and fairy lights so that the
bejewelled women walked up and down in little glitters of
rainbow fire. At the head of the marble stairs leading down
to the lawn, receiving guests with all his historic charm
was H.R.H. Maharajadhiraja Sir Vikramaditya Pratap Narayan
Sinha Roy O.B.E. of Rangpur, in full court regalia, down to
the last diamond. For a moment, it looked exactly as though
the Maharaja had walked out of his frame in their drawing
room and transferred himself to the Club. Nikki could only
stop and gape at the spectacle.
Not Queenie, though. Not knowing what to expect, Nikki
watched her walk up to her cousin and say something in his
ear, hidden as it was beneath the yellow silk of his turban.
Immediately his triumphant smile froze and cracked, while
the Club photographer continued to flash picture after
picture of the occasion.
They never did get the original back. Queenie said it wasn't
worth the scandal. The aunts clucked and whirred and hissed
and said that George should be ostracized, and Queenie
agreed to ban him from her drawing room. He continued to
make his appearance as the Maharaja at as many Club nights
as he possibly could, and enough people shook his hand and
congratulated him on his regal appearance to compensate for
his banishment from the family circle. After all, who needed
to sit under the portrait of the Maharaja when he had become
that very portrait made flesh? Nikki gave up complaining
about the state of the houses and the ruinous costs of
maintenance. Whenever he looked at his wife now, across a
room or from the foot of a staircase as she descended, he
smiled secretly and tried to imagine the words she had said
to her cousin.
The court dress is still displayed on its stand in the
ballroom, but Nandu spends half the time dusting it that he
used to.
This used to be the ballroom. The family stores old
furniture in here now, there being no point stuffing the
other rooms with furniture when servants are so hard to
find. After Nandu is gone, heaven knows who they'll get. The
maids whine and faint in coils if you ask them to do more
than wipe the rooms and wash the clothes. Asking them to
polish the wooden floor of the ballroom is out of the
question. Instead, the family covers the floor with
newspaper to protect it from scratches, and hides the teak
and mahogany furniture under old sheets. Every so often
Nandu whisks a duster in the air and brings the cobwebs down
from the lustre hanging from its gilt chains. He is
trying hard, but his back isn't letting him dust with his
old spotlessness.
The court dress is displayed on its own stand beside the
long east window. If you were to see it when the room was dark, it would give you a
start because it looks exactly as though someone is standing quietly and patiently
by the window.
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The Blue Moon Review, All Rights Reserved.