It was 1980 when I first met Francis Wacziarg, though, of course, you never met only Francis but Aman [Nath] and Francis, their names always spoken in hyphenation. Which seemed strange because though the two were close friends and had common interests, they also had their own businesses, lived in separate homes, and sometimes even had different friends. But it was when they came together that a special kind of Indian magic happened.
Almost the first fruit of that collaboration was a book they researched and wrote together, The Painted Walls of Shekhavati, which was an eye-opener for a greenhorn travel writer like me. Having lived all over the country but come home to holiday intermittently in the Shekhawati region (yes, we differed on the spelling), I had thought the frescos quaint but provincial. That they could be the subject of a book would be the first of their examples that opened up India in unique ways for people like me. Other alliances followed, such as their love for used objects and furniture with which they furnished their homes, leading the way to what would become an "ethnic" statement among the cognoscenti. When they bought a ruined heap on the Jaipur highway called Neemrana - actually, Francis could lay claim to it only later when he became an Indian citizen - many mocked them, but the two together showed how a sensitively restored building had the potential to become representative of the country's heritage.
Neemrana became a brand. Before that Aman still dabbled in advertising while Francis built up his export business. Being a French citizen, he was drawn to events in the French embassy, which helped him make friends with visitors such as Dominique Lapierre whose Freedom at Midnight was then a celebrated tome on India, and who brought groups of French tourists to the country looking for a suitably nostalgic experience. I can visualise one such group in the early '80s being escorted around Mandawa by Aman and Francis, each guest carrying a cotton-topped broom twig dipped in ittar to keep the stink of dirty drains in abeyance.
Aman went on to do more books, Francis's interest in Indian handicrafts resulted in a growing business, but together they created an empire around heritage. Aman, the more precocious and the wittier of the two often took centre stage, but it was always Francis who was more rooted, supervising the dining table in his Sunder Nagar home where the food was as often a spicy Chettinad or Kerala-inspired thali as it was French but with a desi twist. His Francisi Mahal, the French-themed suite in Neemrana as well as in some other of their properties, was not so much the accommodation of a French potentate as it was a firangi experience of India that allowed visitors, in William Dalrymple's words, to live like White Mughals.
There was Francis's more public persona as France's informal ambassador in India - though, in reality, he was India's ambassador for France, where he also had a family. He introduced a simple version of the opera in the country even as, over the last few years, he battled blood cancer. When doctors in France said there was no more recourse in allopathic medicine, he sought alternative treatment in India and for some years he seemed to have overcome it too - so well did he seem recovered that friends had stopped asking after his health. It certainly gave him a longer lease and quality of life, he remained his usual affable self, so if he seemed to be working harder than usual, it was because he alone seemed to sense that time was running out.
This week, when the end came - abruptly - he took away some of that ephemeral magic of India with him.
