Standing in front of the bookshelves, I am thinking, "I need something to read."
It is a familiar situation, and usually a pleasurable one. The feeling may not exist in a hundred years time, and is probably already unrecognisable to many people, but for me, when I don't have a book 'on the go', I feel uneasy, like I have gone on a trip and forgotten something.
In front of the bookshelves, I always trust my instincts. It often works. In mid-February, I picked out Stalingradby Anthony Beevor. By the end of the book, and the month, I was wondering if history always repeats itself in strange distorted mirror images: like the Israelis building their walls in the West Bank to keep people out, when walls had been built around them only half a century before. Now here are the Russians, victims of an unprovoked invasion in June 1941, doing precisely the same thing to another nation. It's like abuse, seeping down the generations of some afflicted family, each victim destined to become a perpetrator.
But now Stalingrad is back on the shelf and I am not having much luck. I come to the section where the old paperbacks reside. The pages of these tomes are yellow and spotty, perhaps that's why I reach out and pull down a thin volume called The Leopard. There is an old birthday card tucked into it at page 22, discouraging proof that someone has tried, and failed, before me. Despite this, I will soon discover that my instincts have worked; this is going to be a great read.
The Sicilian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa only wrote one novel and it doesn't even reach 200 pages. In his life Lampedusa experienced several rejections, his editor said the manuscript was unpublishable. When Il Gattopardo finally appeared in 1958, three years after the author died, it was critically denounced on all sides. Translated, not very accurately, as The Leopard, it began to gain traction and within a decade had been recognised as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
The Leopard is about regime change. How does a society transition from a feeble old order that has run out of ideas and energy to something different, without entirely destroying everything? As one character memorably puts it, ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’
Democracy at least gets the transition done without bloodshed. Merkel becomes Scholz. Hollande, Macron. No one gets hurt. But with an abuser like Vladimir Putin...?
In 1997 I set off on a journey through India that would become the book Chasing the Mountain of Light. The subject, I thought, was diamonds, in particular the Koh-i-Noor diamond, but the real subject was the people who own diamonds. All across India were the last ageing survivors of the rajahs, the princes. I had tea with one of them on the pitch at Bombay cricket club. He put me in touch with a few others. Most were grumbling old men in their last dilapidated palace. They had been retired by history, their regime ended. In dusty basements they kept one last car, a Humber Super Snipe or a Chevrolet, and in one case there was a sock in a drawer containing an uncut ruby as big as a coconut.
When I heard that had once been a Gujarati princely state called Bilkha that was only seven miles wide and ten long, I wanted to visit. Such a tiny kingdom sounded interesting. Once in the town I was directed to the palace, actually a small house surrounded by a high wall and guarded by a couple of ancient cannons. There was no answer when I knocked, so I pushed the door open and went inside.
If I had expected something palatial then I was wrong. There was a dusty yard where a large hunting dog lay asleep, undisturbed by my arrival; beyond was an unkempt garden filled with pepper trees, and to the right stood a small square villa with porticoed entrance. Under the shade of this was a WWII American jeep with a pair of stout muscular legs emerging from underneath.
I walked over and called out a greeting.
“Ah! Where are you from?” A big booming voice. There was the clash of a spanner flying off a nut and a grunt of pain. “Go inside and sit on the terrace. The boy will see to you. Rajoooo!”
I went and sat on a dusty verandah. Through a flyscreened door I could see rooms full of dark wooden furniture and paintings leaning against the walls. There was a stuffed lion at the foot of some stairs and a coffee table bearing a pair of spectacles. Raju, the boy, now appeared carrying a metal cup of tea, a wad of paan and a cigarette. He set them all down next to me and left. A few minutes late my host appeared, a middle-aged man with a generous belly and impressive moustaches.
“It is an army jeep from 1942, but the starter motor has gone and spare parts are difficult to get. Drink your tea and have a puff, I will take a bath.”
I had met the last Rajah Bilkha.
I would end up staying with him in his diminutive palace for a week. He took me to see the lions of Girnar, the only population of wild lions left in Asia, and on long drives – in the jeep – across the local mountains where rare blackbuck deer lived. He told me how his ancestors had fought against Alexander the Great and were descended from the Sun. When he was a child the family had a court poet who would sing the entire genealogy.
“I’ve never met anyone descended from the sun,” I told him.
“On my mother’s side it was the moon,”
Bilkha liked cars and told me about all the models they had once owned: Bentleys, Rolls-Royce, Hispano Souzas and Packards. “One neighbouring prince had a Rolls Royce built in the shape of a swan,” he told me.
The Indian princes were the kings of billionaire bling when the ancestors of Russian oligarchs were still queueing for bread. In the 1920s, Bilkha’s grandfather had attended a wedding ceremony for the Nawab of Junagadh’s favourite dog, a bitch named Roshanara. “On the morning of the wedding, the Nawab accompanied the bride on a caravan of 250 elephants down to the railway station where they met the groom: a golden retriever called Bobby from Mangalore. After that there was a sumptuous breakfast for the couple and 700 guests. The bride and groom wore silk gowns and necklaces of jewels.”
Many of those jewels had been bought at knockdown prices from Russian emigres fleeing the 1917 Revolution. Various accounts of the subsequent canine marriage exist. In one Roshanara was caught in flagrante with another dog and executed for adultery. More likely is that Bobby was not liked and consigned to the common kennels (the Nawab had around 800 dogs). When the Nawab was forced to flee in 1948 he reportedly left a wife behind, filling her seat on the Dakota plane with two dogs.
In Bilkha’s palace were little reminders of past grandeur. A book on etiquette that had been published at the start of air travel reminded passengers to pack clean pyjamas, close all bottles of hair oil firmly, and never tip the stewardess. One morning I found Bilkha adjudicating on a dispute between two farmers. The men, dressed in loose white tunics and turbans, were smoking beedis and listening to his opinion.
“We have no power now,” he explained after they had left, “But they still come.”
Living alone in the house, Bilkha had only several servants for company. “Would you ever eat with them?” I asked. “I mean, just for the conversation.”
Bilkha shook his head. “The lady who cooks for us – her family have been with us for six generations, but she would never eat with me.”
The cook, apparently, considered it beneath her dignity as her own ancestors had been rulers once in an area called Gogha.
Bilkha regarded the endless rollercoaster of human power relations as great entertainment. “The Scindias of Gwalior were shoekeepers to the rajah when they got an opportunity to take over – and so they did, well why not? The Gaekwars of Baroda were shepherds.”
I used to write to Bilkha for a few years after my visit, then the replies stopped and I heard he had died.
In The Leopard, the hero Don Fabrizio is the last of his kind, an old courteous Sicilian aristocrat whose good breeding and manners have finally elevated him to being completely ineffectual and irrelevant, a process that he recognises as cyclical and inevitable. His replacement in power is the greedy and brash peasant called Don Calogero Sedàra who eventually earns Don Fabrizio’s grudging respect…
“Don Fabrizio found an odd admiration growing in him for Sedàra’s qualities. He became used to the ill-shaven cheeks, the plebian accent, the odd clothes and the persistent odour of stale sweat, and he began to realise the man’s rare intelligence. Many problems that had seemed insoluble to the Prince were resolved in a trice by Don Calogero; free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency and plain good manners…”
As always, a perfect Saturday morning read. Thank you!
Marvellous Kevin. Really enjoyable and profoundly pertinent