New Delhi, the grand capital of the Jewel in the English Crown, was built to rival Rome. No economy was observed in building the city; a mind-boggling sum of money was expended out of the limitless funds available to the Empire from India. Its commanding heights were the magnificent Viceregal House, the largest palace in the world after the Vatican; then came the North and South Blocks, the Houses of Parliament, and the grand central boulevards – Kingsway and Queensway – with spotless green lawns on either side. The Queensway led to the circular Connaught Place, patterned on London’s Piccadilly Circus, with a large central park.
The entire area came to be known as Lutyens’ Delhi, after the chief architect of the imperial city, and all along its leafy avenues were built large colonial bungalows, painted white. Each bungalow stood amid large lawns lined with well-maintained flower beds. The Secretaries of State, the councillors to the Viceroy, the commanders of the King Emperor’s army, navy and the Royal Air Force lived in these houses ex officio. Some distance away was the iconic Imperial Gymkhana Club, the watering hole of the crème de la crème which, until the country’s independence, proclaimed at its entrance: “Dogs and Indians not allowed.”
Amidst this imperial grandeur stood the mansions of the native princes, adorning tree-lined avenues leading to the splendid Viceregal Palace towering over Raisina Hill. The rajas, nawabs and nizams had been encouraged, even coerced, to put up these structures as cockleboats to the great ship of the British Empire. The most magnificent of these were the palaces of the biggest princely states – Hyderabad House, Faridkot House, Bikaner House, Baroda House and Jaipur House. There were others, only a little less grand, among which was Mubarakpur House, set in a vast acreage of land in the heart of New Delhi. It was here that the hero of our story, the heir to the lost throne of Mubarakpur, spent nearly two decades of his short life. And for much of that time, this half-palace rang and sparkled with music, conversation, gossip and bon mots.
Rupert was around 20, in his final years of college, when he made Mubarakpur House, New Delhi his permanent home. Back in the kingdom, with the pomp and glory gone after India’s Independence, life had rapidly become, to quote the Prince, “savagely common”. ‘I have no problem with democracy,” he would say to his friend, whom he called “Hunch” on account of his bent and twisted spine.
“The starving millions can have their vote – I mean if it makes them forget their hunger and squalor, good luck to them. But for us, this democracy business has been beastly. Overnight we were not royal, merely rich, and even that only moderately. Things got even worse after the privy purses were abolished. It was humiliating, and deathly dull. So we ran, we young lot. And here we are.”
They did not come to Delhi to set up business, of course, or join the government – which would have been at the very top, naturally. In princely India, doing nothing was the norm. Working a job was greatly looked down upon. Partying was the only respectable way to keep oneself busy – after tennis, golf and the warming of one’s buttocks on the sofas and bar stools of the famed Gymkhana Club. None of these occupations appealed to Rupert, who abhorred small talk and the sweat and grunge sport. “What’s the point of it,” he said, watching a tennis match one afternoon. “It’s stupid – hit a ball here, hit it back there, grunting like a retarded gorilla.”
Rupert was an aesthete and an absolute sensualist. Struck by ennui and driven as much by a need for the wonder of music, dance and conversation as by an almost constant longing for what he called “the musk of men”, Rupert partied harder than most. And bravely, he continued to hold his daily evening salons even when he had all but run out of liquid money. Never one to give up on pleasure, incapable of moderation, he kept the liquor flowing – the Black Label and Vat 69 replaced with the cheaper Officer’s Choice and Duke. But we are getting ahead of our story. Let us begin at the beginning, if such a thing is possible at all.
Rupert was the second child, and only son, of the seventh Maharaja of Mubarakpur, a princely kingdom whose rulers were entitled to a 13-gun salute within the dominion of British India. It is said that once, on the return of the Maharaja from a meeting with the Viceroy in Delhi, the cannonade of salutations splintered the fragile crystal glasses holding chilled champagne for the grand lunch organized as welcome by the second Maharani.
This second Maharani was Ambar Kaur, the Maharaja’s cousin, whom he had married after the mysterious death of his first wife, Roopinder Kaur. This latter lady, mother of Rupert, had been packed off to the summer palace in Mussoorie after the Maharaja fell in love with his cousin. Roopinder Kaur, daughter of an enormously wealthy zamindar of Western Punjab, had brought a massive dowry, which included the palatial residence in the heart of New Delhi in which Rupert would come to live some thirty years later. Once she had delivered an heir, four years after having disappointed him with a daughter, she was little use to the Maharaja. He had always found her too rustic, and not inventive enough in bed. When Ambar, his cousin, twenty years younger, returned from finishing school in Switzerland shortly after Independence and came visiting with her parents, he was smitten.
The Maharaja had seen Ambar as a child, and now she was an androgynous beauty who returned his hungry stare with a wink as she dipped a forefinger in her red wine and licked it. That night, she left the door of the guest room open. When he came to her, she had already disrobed. She took her time stripping him, then straddled and rode him till he was weeping in joy and then begging her to stop. It was curtains for Roopinder after that. She died some years later in Mussoorie. No one quite knew of what, although it was rumoured that a trusted household retainer had fed the first Maharani crushed glass in her food for months, on the instructions of the second Maharani, who had also paid him handsomely for the deed.
Rupert, barely seven when the Maharani died, was put in the care of a kindly English lady, June Bailey, the widow of one of the Maharaja’s aides-de-camp. He was a beautiful boy, very aware of his delicate beauty, who hated the outdoors because the sun made his skin dark. This both bewildered and angered his father. Rupert did not like sports, unlike his Gupta cousins who laughed at him and mocked him, till he surprised them by becoming an enthusiastic swimmer at age ten. This happened around the time a couple of his father’s friends from the army, sturdy Dogra officers, came to Mubarakpur on a holiday. They would be in the pool for hours, hirsute sun-tanned men in dazzling white trunks, and young Rupert would watch them from the verandah, entranced.
Excerpted with permission from The Secret City: A Novel of Delhi, Robin Gupta, Speaking Tiger Books.