As my wife’s occasional and unacknowledged secretary, I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re getting a lot of spam mail,” I told her, “with people addressing you as ‘Your Royal Highness’.” “You fool,” said my wife, “We’ve been expecting those emails, I hope you haven’t deleted them from Our folder.” “There’s no reason to get into a royal lather, Your Highness,” I joked, “but isn’t this whole nostalgia thing just a little bit pretentious?” “We don’t wish to speak to you,” she said grandly, “but you must let us know the moment there are more such mails so We can take action,” effectively putting me in my subordinate place.
Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have stopped the flood of mails from pouring in, making demands on the “Princess” I discovered was the same person to whom I was married. The mystery, though, soon resolved itself — someone, it turned out, had organised a bazaar in which only members of India’s tattered past, her former royals, could participate. And they were free to bring anything they wanted to hawk — their princely baubles and bits, their crowns and jewels, even the riding boots they’d hung up when their stables and stable boys had disappeared under the shameful ignominy of democracy.
But the royal ladies turned out to be intrepid, designing apparel and furnishings and accessories, finishing each piece not so much with passion as with an eye for the perfection they insisted was genetically coded in their genomes. “Dahling!” they said to each other, “that’s lovely,” before dividing up all the stuff between themselves because, who else beside them had a right to such exquisite taste?
But the bazaar was later. First there was the confusion of how they were to be addressed as they paraded their long histories to the podium. As maharanis or maharaj kumaris, rajkumaris or baisas? Did they owe their fealties to their natal homes or their recognition to their married ones? When the tongue was not tripping over their resurrected titles, it had to grapple with other issues — was one house senior to another? Should they be lined up in order of their gun salutes, the pecking order of status, or — oh horror! — alphabetically? “We really shouldn’t be bothered with these issues,” my wife said imperiously, when someone asked her for her views, “surely there’s a comptroller who understands Our rank and order,” forgetting that any such office had been consigned to the dustbin of history long before she was born.
“It’s all your fault,” she shouted at me when the organisers wanted to know what insignia to use beside her name for, alas, it turned out now, she’d married below her lineage and that dark blight was coming home to roost. To use any reference to the emblem of the minor thikana to which she owed her bloodline would have been to acknowledge the diminished standing of her married home which, in a long-ago family feud, had lost its privileges of crest and rank, if in fact it had any. “You’ll have to think up a motif,” she ordered, “something that reflects your humble ancestry.”
I studied the other symbols — the soaring eagles and roaring tigers, the badges of goddesses and heralds, and could think of nothing as impressive. A bucolic camel was a poor replacement for a lion’s head, crossed pens did little justice to the majesty of clashing swords. Perhaps the other royals were feeling as vanquished too, for just as suddenly the event managers did away with the demand for family crests. “Besides,” continued my wife in the first-person plural, “in these times We oughtn’t to draw attention to Our class”, conveniently overlooking it as the only reason she had for participating in the royal family bazaar.