Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"In my lifetime," he said. Not long ago—he'd been born in 1948. "As a young boy I saw it, the killing of the goat. It was very shocking to me. But my mother said, 'It is part of growing up. If the sight of blood bothers you, you can't be a warrior. "

I loved his candor, his ability to talk about anything, his interest in explaining the minutiae of drug use and goat sacrifice. He leaned forward, eager with a new detail.

"There are subtleties, you see. Apparently, if the goat doesn't shudder, it won't be accepted as a sacrifice. The animal needs to be afraid, to be suitably terrified, to stand still but also to visibly show fear. If not, you take it away and put a ring in its ear. The animal is impure."

Though Bapji did not say so, I later learned from pilgrims that at the Kali temples—deemed very sacred—in Kolkata and Gauhati, goats (always black ones) are beheaded and bled as sacrifices every day, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty. The carcasses are later butchered, cooked in the temple kitchens, and served in curries to the poor.

Behind his head was a shelf of photographs. I recognized one as being the Rajmata of Jaipur, the former Gayatri Devi, a great beauty in her time. Rajmata literally means queen mother. She had endured a number of hardships—not just the early death of her husband and eldest son, but a fairly long and vindictive imprisonment by Mrs. Gandhi for refusing to knuckle under when the constitution was arbitrarily changed. A heavy smoker, known to be a connoisseur of single-malt whiskey, the rajmata lived in Jaipur much the way Babji did, in an annex of her grand palace.

Bapji explained the connection: "The first wife of the Maharajah of Jaipur was the sister of my grandfather. The deal was that his niece would also marry. So aunt and daughter"—that is, the sister and her daughter, I guessed—"were both married to the same man. The aunt was eight or nine years older than he was—you see, he was only fifteen."

I was somewhat lost in this explanation, and not sure of the dates, but it was so steamy in its complexity it didn't matter. I urged him to go on.

"His British guardian wouldn't let them cohabit. She came out of the bedroom in a huff. 'What's the point of being married if I can't sleep in there? Ha-ha!"

He got up and stretched, and we walked to the wide pink balcony that overlooked the palace gardens, a white marble pavilion shimmering in the distance on the green lawn. He said, "I was born in this palace. This was my only home. How old are you?"

I told him.

"You look younger than me," he said.

But then his life had been somewhat more eventful than mine, not just his glorious birth as a descendant of Lord Rama, the relentless rituals, the goat sacrifices, and the prophetic assumption of his mother, the reigning maharani: "You must be a warrior." But his becoming a maharajah at the age of four, after his father, just twenty-eight, died in an air crash. His princely world of privilege had been turned upside down by Mrs. Gandhi. Still in his twenties, he'd been a diplomat, the Indian high commissioner to Trinidad. And there was his son's tragic accident, something else to age him.

As if that weren't commotion enough, there was an unstable younger brother—illegitimate and vindictive—who made several attempts to behead Bapji. On one occasion, the filmmaker Ismail Merchant, who had made a movie at the palace, was present, and watched horrified as the crazed brother blundered into a dinner party and swiped at the guests with a sword. Ultimately, Merchant reported, this mad, disinherited brother was himself beheaded and cut to pieces. All this Babji seemed to bear with equanimity.

"Maybe I should do yoga," Bapji said, clutching his belly through his kurta.

"How did you like diplomatic life?"

"I enjoyed it. I got on very well with the Indians in Trinidad. They were keeping the balance, and so was I. It was like walking a tightrope. But I told them that I was not their high commissioner. They were Trinidadians, weren't they? I made it plain to them that I was not batting on their side."

Probably it was the cricket match on television that brought back the memory and the metaphor.

"My predecessor was an old Muslim gentleman who wrote a memo to the effect that he wanted to ban cricket tours between India and Trinidad because they aroused strong emotions." He laughed recalling it. "A black Trinidadian came to me and said, 'We want cricket tours! We want to see Gavaskar!'"—a great batsman. "'What happens among us is our problem!'"