The prince was not the partying kind, the princess couldn’t bear to stay at home, so the two decided to go their own ways of an evening. He was given to silences, she couldn’t bear to have anyone interrupt her in full flow, so she cavilled all conversations. He was a homebody, she insisted on being introduced by her title, and was riled when the headmaster of her son’s school thought the princeling could do with some discipline, so she pulled him out mid-term and packed him off to Harrow where he could be brought up as odiously privileged as he chose.
She was in India to attend weddings of children of friends and family; refused her whisky without ice even though she complained of the cold; insisted that the subcontinent was intolerable in the summer months when, in any case, Europe was so much more charming, and was gracious enough to invite us to her palace where, she said to my wife and me, she would prove that as a “working princess”, her carbon footprint was only a little more than most others.
In a room full of many strangers, we had been cornered into a group that was decidedly older, perhaps even retired, but what it had in years, it also made up in fortunes. Tycoons abounded. They ran, or at any rate once ran, industries. Their children went to Cambridge, or Princeton, not some legacy-deprived universities in Singapore or Australia. They didn’t do holidays on cruises crowded with children and “people from Karol Bagh”, hiring their own yachts when the inclination took them to go out to the sea. They’d stopped vacationing at their villas in Italy now that even that countryside had been discovered by the hoi-polloi — and no, they didn’t think Bikaner, where we holiday each year, lived up to their expectations, though it was “probably all right” for us.
Privilege is a strange thing. For those who aren’t born into that club, it appears odd that the really rich can’t be bothered about so many things:
Carrying their visiting cards, remembering their email ids, or ever having money about their selves. They’re never really good with names either, and will address you by whatever name they think suits you best — unless, of course, all men they don’t really know are “Ashok” and all women “Anita”.
My wife isn’t very good with the posh stuff. She’s usually armed with and distributes her visiting cards like wedding confetti; is more than happy to write her email down on cloth napkins that probably belong to sets but which she has no problem in stuffing into strangers’ pockets or purses and carries enough currency to bribe the good constabulary of the city who might have the temerity to stop us for a breathanalyser test in the middle of the night, thinking my preventive mouthwash gargle inadequate to the task. (Given our level of preparedness, it’s almost offensive that we haven’t been stopped at a police barricade yet — what is it the young drink that we don’t drink more of?)
It’s only when you’re up and close that you understand the way the really rich live, and think. “Your country,” complained one baron to another recently, “does not do business with my company.” Driving home that night, my wife fulminated about the difficulty of keeping a toehold in the world of privilege. “They even pay their servants less than us,” she said, having discovered that because a dowager complained about the lower orders no longer willing to work for free for temporary squatting rights in the servants’ quarters. “But,” she offered, “I won’t crib about that till at least we’re back from our holiday in the princess’s palace.”
