Of Crumpets and Earl Grey…..
Ever since Michelle literally patted the Queen on her back, Sid, the Kolkata based anglophile royalist husband of my friend Gauri, has been having nightmares. In the last one, he tells me, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Second, has been mounted upon by a huge black man, her butler, no less, and she was enjoying it thoroughly in her throes of passion. Initially who the hell was Michelle and why on earth was she patting that old grande-dame, I had no idea. But of-course, then there was the picture of Michelle Obama on CNN, wife of the most powerful man in the universe, patting the remnant of an old hag ruling over a tiny island with a huge past. Faux Pax Extraordinaire no doubt…..
The e-mail was vivid with details.
Geez. Get a life man…..
I keep telling him and that gorgeous wife of his that he desperately needs therapy. His obsession with the English royal family has reached sickening proportions; in my blunt, and lately totally subtle-less conjectures, I have rebuked him over this absurdity. His ongoing mental affair with the long dead Diana, which has also reached a climax by now I am sure, drove me up the wall on his last visit to Dhaka. I literally left him gaping on the dinner table at the Prego and stormed out after some expletives after hearing some anatomical details of the body of the princess while he was about to consummate….geez, sick sick sick….I had gotten down at the lobby, called Gauri, and gave her an earful. Thank God she and I we go way back when we were taking art history courses together back in the States decades ago. She just sighed, then chuckled, and said, ‘Hulo, why do you think I don’t accompany him to his trips anymore? He needs his bloody space and frankly at this point, so do I…. screw him, what are you up to?” The nerve …and she sensed it. ‘Guess what… I teasingly told him about my fantasy with Willy, Diana’s boy and he gave me a mouthful. It totally silly, isn’t it? “
Oh, you have joined the ball game, have you?
Gauri and I, whom she had nicknamed Hulo, like the Bengali stray cat for my wild ways, we are connected somewhat. Soul-mates? I don’t think so…but I felt totally at ease around her and vice versa, even now. To think that there was no sexual chemistry at all would be wrong though. We had our fling, had a huge fight, and then realized we were absolutely necessary in each other’s lives. We moved in. The Indian and Bangladeshi families knew we were ‘cousins’, the yanks didn’t give a damn, Steven and Juan, her true soul-mates and a bona-fide flag bearing gay couple suspected, eluded and hinted that I should join their ‘cause’ since ‘Gory’ was the perfect fag-hag; Alan, Rishi, Rithik, and Eddy, her ‘beaus’ in that order suspected me as her boy-friend on the side, and Teresa, Leslie, Laura, Maria, and Tanya suspected her to be the same while I supposedly double-crossed the lot. She initially tried to cater my cravings for the occasional home-cooked meal by serving blackened chicken and burnt fish and rice more like the ‘moorie’ but harder, and eventually I would look up the recipe books and cook up connotations that never seemed to last in the fridge. Between her coursework and readings, she would swoop down to the kitchen and devour everything in sight. In short, eventually, it was a perfect arrangement. She did the laundry, we cleaned, I cooked, we studied, partied, and got high together, picked up each other from our dates, conveniently disappeared from our flat when someone had to stay over or during the end of our living together, just gave up all pretences and the three of us, in whatever permutations combinations would end up would have breakfast together.
By the time Gauri reached Kolkata after her prolonged Bachelors and Masters, her marriage was already arranged. Dates were fixed, the trousseau was arranged without any fanfare from her side and I was shocked. This girl could don a skimpy mini-skirt, do a table dance on a C&W bar, and kick someone’s ass for being nasty with those crocodile leather boots and she had agreed to wed this character called Shuridoy, Sid for short, after a brief phone conversation between NY and Kolkata, and that was it. I kept asking, ‘Are you sure about this? You know what you are doing?’
Her great grandfather was the last of the hereditary Rai Bahadurs of this principality close to Beltala up north. While the previous generations were righteous with foresight, this particular gentleman was cut from a different fabric altogether. Multiple marriages, tons of children, both legitimate and illegitimate, and this one particular passion for gambling, which included stakes of lands as pawn all over the estate. By the time partition had happened, the estate looked more like a piece of rotten Swiss cheese, with pockets of ownerships distributed between the cash rich and the landed gentry, going all the way up to the royals of Bhawal, Rangpur, Cooch Bihar and far away Tripura. When the Cripps commission looked at the situation, instead of the Chit mahals created up north, they decided to do away with the arrangement all together. Thus came five generations of English ass-licking to an end. Her father, claimant to that illusive and non-existent title, had made it his mission to reverse the situation, at least reputation-wise. Gauri’s only brother was Oxford returned, doing very well, married the daughter of former titled scion of an estate, and now it was her turn to do the same. “Sid’ had been to Harvard and Don Bosco, his great grand-father was Cambridge educated, titled ‘Sir’ for his contribution to the Raj, and doing very well in business.
The marriage took place in November of ’93. She was gracious enough to push the marriage by a few weeks to make sure that I could also come, since I was also returning for good. The marriage was fantastic, colourful, full of pageantry and yet totally appalling. Sid came with his retinue riding this fantastic Arabian horse to the gates of the Grand Hotel. What dismounted from the horse was a creature from another planet. While Gauri did yoga, went to the gym, and maintained herself, this fellah was bald, short, pugnacious, and …and …I was totally lost for words. With two rosy cheeks that looked more like Baldrick after a shower, I was stunned, and for a few brief seconds was overcome with the idea of ‘rescuing’ her and run off to Dhaka.
After all the feasting and rituals, it was time for the portraits. Gauri kept insisting that I was in as many of them as possible, with her in-laws, cousins, but I kept avoiding looking at her. She knew what I was thinking and kept slowly patting my hand which she kept making me keep on her shoulder, not sure whether she was reassuring me or herself.
She had her fun and now ‘duty’ beckoned.
My wife Anjali has been more accepting of Gauri as my friend, specially after she met Sid on the very first trip. We had gone to Kolkata for a few days. The deal was we were to stay at the Tallygunj Golf Club for the first two days and then move to their house after their other guests were gone. It was obviously not Gauri who was in charge of the situation of the household. It was Sid. He ran the place like a five star hotel, immaculate, the guest room had three sets of towels, for each part of the day and were changed everyday. It was Eggs Benedict for breakfast, and porridge, followed by Earl Grey, which apparently also traveled with him , but not in tea bags, mind you, loose tea with a strainer. Gauri apparently had plenty of excuses to eat lunch outside, since the ‘smell’ of home cooking at the home kitchen made her husband very squeamish. Dinner was a western sanitized affair. In a sprawling household how the aroma of curry permeated to his royal olfactory was a total mystery to me. The first day Anjali was ‘why cant you be a little bit more like him? The house is immaculate.’ I just told her I just wasn’t ready for an upgrade and that was that, but by the second day, her sympathies were more with Gauri. She took her to her ‘den’ on the top floor on the roof with a beautifully laid out tropical garden. The room was more ‘Ikea’ than ‘Ethan Allen’, …the Gauri I knew. She had forbidden Sid from that room. There was a wall full of pictures attached with simple blue tack, but all composed and in straight lines. There was some of us, including one of me, kissing her on the forehead, and which also required some explanations later.
To come back to the Royal Obsession, there was a bust of Queen Victoria in his mahogany lined library, which was impressive no doubt, but it was the titles that intrigued me. Lives of the Mountbattens, Marlboroughs, Hastings, Curzons, Dalhousie, Earls, Dukes, Royalty of entire Europe, and hundreds of leather-bound copies of the lives and genealogies of the Indian Royals. There was a small framed picture of Lady Diana in that famous turtle neck of hers, and there was a oil portrait of Gayetri Devi, immaculate, beautiful, and regal. When asked about it, Gauri gave a mischievous smile and told me, ‘Why don’t you ask him about it? He would loooove to tell you all about it’.
That mixture of eagerness mixed with sarcasm put me off.
‘Why is that bloke looking down over our plates? ‘ I pointed at the bearded gentleman above the fake mantle piece of the chandeliered dining room.
‘That’, Sid boomed,’ Is Edward the VII th.’ .
‘I know’, I scowled back, trying at my utmost to sound and look as black as possible.
‘But why is he here?’
‘Because,’ he boomed, ‘it was during His Excellency’s tenure that my Great-Grandfather was ‘knighted’ for his contribution to the science of botany’.
I was about to say that King-Emperor did not give out titles those days like the Queen does these days, to the likes of Elton John, and Cliff Richard. There was a Viceroy for that, and if any titles were given, it probably was given thorough a ‘royal firman’, with contacts between the two races kept to a minimum., I knew my history somewhat, but in this case a little knowledge was a fatal thing and the glare Anjali gave me was enough to keep my trap shut. Gauri was having the time of her life, gleefully sipping her watery porridge with sets of utensils cascading out from each side of her bowl. Eerily it reminded me of one of those mornings almost two decades ago when we both had our significant others staying over for breakfast.
Gauri was wearing a simple diamond droplet, significant yet simple. It complimented her long slender neck beautifully. In fact Anjali had drawn my attention to it earlier.
‘That diamond droplet is really pretty…is it from here?’ I asked Gauri to divert the simmering ‘toofan’ based on the Royal of Royals.
‘Pardon?’, she said absently. Gauri’s mind was probably more mired in practical things, like how to manage the car to pick up Rono, their son, from school and squeeze in shopping with us at the same time.
‘Hulo, let ME tell you….’, Sid boomed again. That tiny façade of a body surely packed an irritating voice.
I glared back, literally. He doesn’t have the right to THAT name, and glared at Gauri. She, in turn, snapped into attention and gave a pacifying smile.
‘Zamir, as I was saying…,’ Sid has picked up exactly where he had left off. ‘I had it modeled after the droplet in the centre-piece of the famous Patiala necklace. Surely you must have heard of it. I did send you a message when it was featured in the Discovery chanel. You did catch the show I hope’.
Well I did, unfortunately. The necklace was one huge piece of layered jewelry worn by the ruler of Patiala for some occasion or rather, maybe the Durbar in Delhi. It was one of those obscene pieces of ornament, carted back from Paris that could have fed a million or two, for a week or two. The king also could have had Sid executed for even drawing parallels to the two pieces. It’s like comparing the Himalayas to the ‘tillas’ of Srimangol.
‘Nice’. I said. ‘Can we check out the boutiques after breakfast?’ I am beginning to feel like the nouveau riche interloper in the boudoir of the Prince Regent. But hey, why am I feeling like this for? What is he then? I buttered the muffin and directed my attention towards Gauri and an obscure Rubens that is apparently stored in the Marble Palace and was the subject of agonizing research years ago and from which I plagiarized for another class. I got an A and Gauri made a B+, and she never forgave or forgot. Now totally animated, she started talking about the rest of the collection there while the rest of us ate in silence. ….. Peace.
On the way back, we decided to stop for some ice cream in front of New Market. I pointed out the Grand to Anjli and Gauri and reminisced about the wedding. Since it was just beyond lunch time, the kid has been duly deposited with the nanny back home, and there was no apparent rush for anything. It was a beautiful December morning, sunny and cold, and we started walking towards Park Street. The street has books of all sizes and shapes and price ranges, stalked in the glittery Oxford to the footpaths on both sides. I initially proposed a quick lunch at Ban Thai inside the Grand, but since we were closer to the Park Hotel, the Atrium Café it was instead.
After lunch, the ladies decided to go window shopping. I looked at the Hobby Centre across the street, now a forlorn outlet, but in the early 80s, a real destination for us teen-agers coming from the backwaters of Dhaka. It stocked radio controlled airplanes and exotic accessories for aquariums in those days. I looked up at the edifice of the buildings all around. More than a hundred years old, still standing, stripped of its grandeur and glamour. In one instance, some kind of royal insignia over the main door was painted over with the garish red and gold while the rest of the building looked like it was ready to fall apart but couldn’t out of obligation to history. Having been in London for a few years, I could see the semblance. Looking up, ignoring the throngs of us Bangals below, and it was easy to be transported back to the skyline of London in its Imperial heyday.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Anjali and Gauri was back and my wife was giving me one of those amused looks.
It was then I realized that I had my hands in my pockets, with the jeans jacket on me, looking up to a building across the street and literally laughing away.
‘Nothing’, I said, trying to control myself.
“I know that smile, spill it.’ It was more of a rebuke from Gauri, who looked at Anjali and gave each other one of those all knowing condescending smiles. Those two have bonded, it seems.
‘Oh, nothing, lets go.’, I put myself between the two and put my hands on each of their shoulders.
Looking at that building and its pretentious insignia, I understood Sid.
Sid was that building personified.
The e-mail was vivid with details.
Geez. Get a life man…..
I keep telling him and that gorgeous wife of his that he desperately needs therapy. His obsession with the English royal family has reached sickening proportions; in my blunt, and lately totally subtle-less conjectures, I have rebuked him over this absurdity. His ongoing mental affair with the long dead Diana, which has also reached a climax by now I am sure, drove me up the wall on his last visit to Dhaka. I literally left him gaping on the dinner table at the Prego and stormed out after some expletives after hearing some anatomical details of the body of the princess while he was about to consummate….geez, sick sick sick….I had gotten down at the lobby, called Gauri, and gave her an earful. Thank God she and I we go way back when we were taking art history courses together back in the States decades ago. She just sighed, then chuckled, and said, ‘Hulo, why do you think I don’t accompany him to his trips anymore? He needs his bloody space and frankly at this point, so do I…. screw him, what are you up to?” The nerve …and she sensed it. ‘Guess what… I teasingly told him about my fantasy with Willy, Diana’s boy and he gave me a mouthful. It totally silly, isn’t it? “
Oh, you have joined the ball game, have you?
Gauri and I, whom she had nicknamed Hulo, like the Bengali stray cat for my wild ways, we are connected somewhat. Soul-mates? I don’t think so…but I felt totally at ease around her and vice versa, even now. To think that there was no sexual chemistry at all would be wrong though. We had our fling, had a huge fight, and then realized we were absolutely necessary in each other’s lives. We moved in. The Indian and Bangladeshi families knew we were ‘cousins’, the yanks didn’t give a damn, Steven and Juan, her true soul-mates and a bona-fide flag bearing gay couple suspected, eluded and hinted that I should join their ‘cause’ since ‘Gory’ was the perfect fag-hag; Alan, Rishi, Rithik, and Eddy, her ‘beaus’ in that order suspected me as her boy-friend on the side, and Teresa, Leslie, Laura, Maria, and Tanya suspected her to be the same while I supposedly double-crossed the lot. She initially tried to cater my cravings for the occasional home-cooked meal by serving blackened chicken and burnt fish and rice more like the ‘moorie’ but harder, and eventually I would look up the recipe books and cook up connotations that never seemed to last in the fridge. Between her coursework and readings, she would swoop down to the kitchen and devour everything in sight. In short, eventually, it was a perfect arrangement. She did the laundry, we cleaned, I cooked, we studied, partied, and got high together, picked up each other from our dates, conveniently disappeared from our flat when someone had to stay over or during the end of our living together, just gave up all pretences and the three of us, in whatever permutations combinations would end up would have breakfast together.
By the time Gauri reached Kolkata after her prolonged Bachelors and Masters, her marriage was already arranged. Dates were fixed, the trousseau was arranged without any fanfare from her side and I was shocked. This girl could don a skimpy mini-skirt, do a table dance on a C&W bar, and kick someone’s ass for being nasty with those crocodile leather boots and she had agreed to wed this character called Shuridoy, Sid for short, after a brief phone conversation between NY and Kolkata, and that was it. I kept asking, ‘Are you sure about this? You know what you are doing?’
Her great grandfather was the last of the hereditary Rai Bahadurs of this principality close to Beltala up north. While the previous generations were righteous with foresight, this particular gentleman was cut from a different fabric altogether. Multiple marriages, tons of children, both legitimate and illegitimate, and this one particular passion for gambling, which included stakes of lands as pawn all over the estate. By the time partition had happened, the estate looked more like a piece of rotten Swiss cheese, with pockets of ownerships distributed between the cash rich and the landed gentry, going all the way up to the royals of Bhawal, Rangpur, Cooch Bihar and far away Tripura. When the Cripps commission looked at the situation, instead of the Chit mahals created up north, they decided to do away with the arrangement all together. Thus came five generations of English ass-licking to an end. Her father, claimant to that illusive and non-existent title, had made it his mission to reverse the situation, at least reputation-wise. Gauri’s only brother was Oxford returned, doing very well, married the daughter of former titled scion of an estate, and now it was her turn to do the same. “Sid’ had been to Harvard and Don Bosco, his great grand-father was Cambridge educated, titled ‘Sir’ for his contribution to the Raj, and doing very well in business.
The marriage took place in November of ’93. She was gracious enough to push the marriage by a few weeks to make sure that I could also come, since I was also returning for good. The marriage was fantastic, colourful, full of pageantry and yet totally appalling. Sid came with his retinue riding this fantastic Arabian horse to the gates of the Grand Hotel. What dismounted from the horse was a creature from another planet. While Gauri did yoga, went to the gym, and maintained herself, this fellah was bald, short, pugnacious, and …and …I was totally lost for words. With two rosy cheeks that looked more like Baldrick after a shower, I was stunned, and for a few brief seconds was overcome with the idea of ‘rescuing’ her and run off to Dhaka.
After all the feasting and rituals, it was time for the portraits. Gauri kept insisting that I was in as many of them as possible, with her in-laws, cousins, but I kept avoiding looking at her. She knew what I was thinking and kept slowly patting my hand which she kept making me keep on her shoulder, not sure whether she was reassuring me or herself.
She had her fun and now ‘duty’ beckoned.
My wife Anjali has been more accepting of Gauri as my friend, specially after she met Sid on the very first trip. We had gone to Kolkata for a few days. The deal was we were to stay at the Tallygunj Golf Club for the first two days and then move to their house after their other guests were gone. It was obviously not Gauri who was in charge of the situation of the household. It was Sid. He ran the place like a five star hotel, immaculate, the guest room had three sets of towels, for each part of the day and were changed everyday. It was Eggs Benedict for breakfast, and porridge, followed by Earl Grey, which apparently also traveled with him , but not in tea bags, mind you, loose tea with a strainer. Gauri apparently had plenty of excuses to eat lunch outside, since the ‘smell’ of home cooking at the home kitchen made her husband very squeamish. Dinner was a western sanitized affair. In a sprawling household how the aroma of curry permeated to his royal olfactory was a total mystery to me. The first day Anjali was ‘why cant you be a little bit more like him? The house is immaculate.’ I just told her I just wasn’t ready for an upgrade and that was that, but by the second day, her sympathies were more with Gauri. She took her to her ‘den’ on the top floor on the roof with a beautifully laid out tropical garden. The room was more ‘Ikea’ than ‘Ethan Allen’, …the Gauri I knew. She had forbidden Sid from that room. There was a wall full of pictures attached with simple blue tack, but all composed and in straight lines. There was some of us, including one of me, kissing her on the forehead, and which also required some explanations later.
To come back to the Royal Obsession, there was a bust of Queen Victoria in his mahogany lined library, which was impressive no doubt, but it was the titles that intrigued me. Lives of the Mountbattens, Marlboroughs, Hastings, Curzons, Dalhousie, Earls, Dukes, Royalty of entire Europe, and hundreds of leather-bound copies of the lives and genealogies of the Indian Royals. There was a small framed picture of Lady Diana in that famous turtle neck of hers, and there was a oil portrait of Gayetri Devi, immaculate, beautiful, and regal. When asked about it, Gauri gave a mischievous smile and told me, ‘Why don’t you ask him about it? He would loooove to tell you all about it’.
That mixture of eagerness mixed with sarcasm put me off.
‘Why is that bloke looking down over our plates? ‘ I pointed at the bearded gentleman above the fake mantle piece of the chandeliered dining room.
‘That’, Sid boomed,’ Is Edward the VII th.’ .
‘I know’, I scowled back, trying at my utmost to sound and look as black as possible.
‘But why is he here?’
‘Because,’ he boomed, ‘it was during His Excellency’s tenure that my Great-Grandfather was ‘knighted’ for his contribution to the science of botany’.
I was about to say that King-Emperor did not give out titles those days like the Queen does these days, to the likes of Elton John, and Cliff Richard. There was a Viceroy for that, and if any titles were given, it probably was given thorough a ‘royal firman’, with contacts between the two races kept to a minimum., I knew my history somewhat, but in this case a little knowledge was a fatal thing and the glare Anjali gave me was enough to keep my trap shut. Gauri was having the time of her life, gleefully sipping her watery porridge with sets of utensils cascading out from each side of her bowl. Eerily it reminded me of one of those mornings almost two decades ago when we both had our significant others staying over for breakfast.
Gauri was wearing a simple diamond droplet, significant yet simple. It complimented her long slender neck beautifully. In fact Anjali had drawn my attention to it earlier.
‘That diamond droplet is really pretty…is it from here?’ I asked Gauri to divert the simmering ‘toofan’ based on the Royal of Royals.
‘Pardon?’, she said absently. Gauri’s mind was probably more mired in practical things, like how to manage the car to pick up Rono, their son, from school and squeeze in shopping with us at the same time.
‘Hulo, let ME tell you….’, Sid boomed again. That tiny façade of a body surely packed an irritating voice.
I glared back, literally. He doesn’t have the right to THAT name, and glared at Gauri. She, in turn, snapped into attention and gave a pacifying smile.
‘Zamir, as I was saying…,’ Sid has picked up exactly where he had left off. ‘I had it modeled after the droplet in the centre-piece of the famous Patiala necklace. Surely you must have heard of it. I did send you a message when it was featured in the Discovery chanel. You did catch the show I hope’.
Well I did, unfortunately. The necklace was one huge piece of layered jewelry worn by the ruler of Patiala for some occasion or rather, maybe the Durbar in Delhi. It was one of those obscene pieces of ornament, carted back from Paris that could have fed a million or two, for a week or two. The king also could have had Sid executed for even drawing parallels to the two pieces. It’s like comparing the Himalayas to the ‘tillas’ of Srimangol.
‘Nice’. I said. ‘Can we check out the boutiques after breakfast?’ I am beginning to feel like the nouveau riche interloper in the boudoir of the Prince Regent. But hey, why am I feeling like this for? What is he then? I buttered the muffin and directed my attention towards Gauri and an obscure Rubens that is apparently stored in the Marble Palace and was the subject of agonizing research years ago and from which I plagiarized for another class. I got an A and Gauri made a B+, and she never forgave or forgot. Now totally animated, she started talking about the rest of the collection there while the rest of us ate in silence. ….. Peace.
On the way back, we decided to stop for some ice cream in front of New Market. I pointed out the Grand to Anjli and Gauri and reminisced about the wedding. Since it was just beyond lunch time, the kid has been duly deposited with the nanny back home, and there was no apparent rush for anything. It was a beautiful December morning, sunny and cold, and we started walking towards Park Street. The street has books of all sizes and shapes and price ranges, stalked in the glittery Oxford to the footpaths on both sides. I initially proposed a quick lunch at Ban Thai inside the Grand, but since we were closer to the Park Hotel, the Atrium Café it was instead.
After lunch, the ladies decided to go window shopping. I looked at the Hobby Centre across the street, now a forlorn outlet, but in the early 80s, a real destination for us teen-agers coming from the backwaters of Dhaka. It stocked radio controlled airplanes and exotic accessories for aquariums in those days. I looked up at the edifice of the buildings all around. More than a hundred years old, still standing, stripped of its grandeur and glamour. In one instance, some kind of royal insignia over the main door was painted over with the garish red and gold while the rest of the building looked like it was ready to fall apart but couldn’t out of obligation to history. Having been in London for a few years, I could see the semblance. Looking up, ignoring the throngs of us Bangals below, and it was easy to be transported back to the skyline of London in its Imperial heyday.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Anjali and Gauri was back and my wife was giving me one of those amused looks.
It was then I realized that I had my hands in my pockets, with the jeans jacket on me, looking up to a building across the street and literally laughing away.
‘Nothing’, I said, trying to control myself.
“I know that smile, spill it.’ It was more of a rebuke from Gauri, who looked at Anjali and gave each other one of those all knowing condescending smiles. Those two have bonded, it seems.
‘Oh, nothing, lets go.’, I put myself between the two and put my hands on each of their shoulders.
Looking at that building and its pretentious insignia, I understood Sid.
Sid was that building personified.
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