Background recommended reading: French Connection and Bourbons Of Bhopal
The angel’s destination was a city on the Malwa Plateau called Bhopal.
Bhopal—built atop volcanic rock, its own ancient palace crumbling upon itself, streets clogged with cows and goats and sari-clouds of color, birds circling at dusk in the pinkish-orange gloaming like the slow movement of a dark scythe. Looming over the lower city was a giant mosque, Taj-ul-Masajid, its pale white domes hovering in the shimmery heat like an extraterrestrial incursion, its minarets reaching to heaven, its tiny rooms full of boys memorizing the Koran, their voices murmuring across the hot stones of the vast inner courtyard. And there was one other notable landmark, a death memorial really, the abandoned chemical plant—that of Union Carbide—on the north edge of town that on a particular December day twenty-two years earlier oozed methyl isocyanate, a toxic plague that ultimately caused 22,000 deaths.
Why had this angel come to Bhopal now, you might ask? Of all the cities of the world, why this dustier, irascible, ignominious one?
Fate, friend: The wheel spun, the globe revolved, and the angel landed in central India, making his way through the town of Bhopal, among the vegetable and meat stalls, among the poor and hungry, among the Hindus and Muslims, to the gate of our unsuspecting hero, Balthazar. The angel wore a pressed white tunic and a silk vest. He was a tall white man of nearly 70—well preserved, of regal bearing, with a full head of silver hair. In this frenetic, rural city, he was a celestial vision of calm and erudition. He seemed not to shed a drop of sweat.
He knocked on the large wooden door near which the French fleur-de-lis greeted all visitors as Balthazar sat in the cool blow of air conditioners, in a disconnected kind of gloom. He possessed an ample belly and a Taurus-like bellicosity, though his were harmless snorts, loving snorts, humanitarian snorts, his were ineffectual snorts, snorts to what might have been, lost snorts in the winds of time. He had big, rounded cheeks and wore a bushy mustache. Hair sprouted from the nape of his neck. He seemed to be missing a tooth or two, upper back. “Ours is a life of insecurity,” he would sometimes say. “What will happen tomorrow? And how can we be safe among all these hidden grudges?”
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| Prince Balthazar IV and Princess Elisha |
The angel pressed the doorbell and Balthazar rose heavily, making his way through the house, swinging the door open wide, and this otherwise ordinary Indian man looked upon the angel glowing there, who looked down upon Balthazar, and reflexively they embraced.
It is not uncommon for angels to take corporeal form, to appear before us on earth as people with names and credentials. Some may be street sweepers or poets, and this angel here, this bearer of good tidings, was known as Prince Michael of Greece. He and the Indian man before him shared a name: Bourbon.
On his front stoop, Balthazar was blinded, flummoxed, could only utter the words: “Your Highness.” Prince Michael clasped his hands to Balthazar’s shoulders, looked him in the eye, and replied, “Nonsense, we are cousins! You shall call me ‘Cousin.’ ” The feeling that came over Balthazar then was one of “great warmth,” as he would later put it. Referring to the royal Bourbons in Europe, Prince Michael told him, “You are in their talks—and have been for many years.”
In their talks. But who were they? And when and where did they talk? No doubt in the gilded rooms of capacious castles, nibbling cookies, sipping tea served by tailcoated butlers.
Balthazar could not begin to imagine such a scene, but technically this was his family the angel was talking about—more cousins, blood brethren in France, a place he’d never been. How his line of the family had been separated and removed to India led back to the fateful day in the sixteenth century when the king’s alleged nephew Jean-Philippe had killed a man in a duel. The tale had been told time and time again: Jean-Philippe fleeing for his life from France; Jean-Philippe kidnapped by pirates; Jean-Philippe sold in a Cairo slave market; Jean-Philippe escaping and making his way to India, where he presented himself at the court of the Mughal emperor, Akbar, thus becoming one of the emperor’s most trusted advisers.
Prince Michael had become fascinated with that early swashbuckler, the progenitor of the Indian line, Jean-Philippe, so much so that he’d written a book based on his life. After years of research, Prince Michael said, he had found out a little secret, too. He believed that the long-forgotten, down-at-its-heels Indian strain of the Bourbon family might, in fact, be its most senior. More senior than other lines, including the Orleans, the Capetians, and the Navarres. It had been nearly 200 years since the Bourbons ruled France, or since France had a monarch at all—and yet the royals still kept competing lists that itemized who stood in line for the throne. At stake was not just one’s place in line but one’s social stature and relevance, as well as a claim to the vast family holdings, estimated in the billions.
Balthazar’s bushy eyebrows shot up. A man of congenial hospitality, he offered Prince Michael a seat at a table set with mutton curry and chili chicken. The annunciation scene was in place. On the wall nearby were framed images of the Eiffel Tower, a château, the Arc de Triomphe.
The angel-prince-messenger spoke.
“If my theory is correct,” said Prince Michael, “then you are France’s king-in-waiting.”
Balthazar seemed not to understand.
“If there were a throne,” Prince Michael said for emphasis, “you would be the Dauphin.”
When it finally dawned upon our Balthazar what was being said, he found himself transported to a state of fuddled joy. Could it be true? He, king? One day—just this morning—he’d been a man at great risk, hunted and haunted by his family history in India, living as a Catholic among Muslims and Hindus, threatened with bodily harm. And now…this! In a fairy tale, this is where the man living in proverbial rags would ascend in ermine to the throne, to the loving cheers of his subjects, jeweled scepter flashing, shining an infectious happiness, which would in turn infect his kingdom with everlasting happiness. This is where the royal trumpets would be cued, and so would begin the commencement of celebratory cannon fire.
But it didn’t happen that way.
The cousins finished their meal and embraced on the doorstep, Balthazar filled with “great satisfaction, great love” for the angel. Lost in the moment, he thought he heard the prince make a promise, that he would prepare for Balthazar to visit the homeland, France. At which time, with the proper introductions, Balthazar could assess for himself just what his auspicious future might hold.
Sometime after their good-bye, the prince took leave of Bhopal, flying back over ocean, desert, and mountain to the swaddled comfort of royalty. And Balthazar was left behind, ecstatic, near bursting, in-waiting with his dreams.
*****
O what bright news was this? What orbed luck? Who hasn’t come to a moment of desperation in life, and who hasn’t dreamed that one’s ill-starred existence might be suddenly solved by a knock at the door, an angel announcing: You have been found! You shall have riches, power, happiness!
It is, for one in a position of vulnerability, a dream come true. Elation. For the angel-messenger who might liberate us from our torment also completes us, brings us to the full glory of our delusions. So would you, friend, take the throne? There’s hardly a knave among us who wouldn’t, though it’s a profession that often ends poorly, conferring upon one a lifetime of paranoia and longing. If the truth must be told, kings carry bleak outcomes in their bones. Look now—Lear on his heath, Arthur betrayed by Lancelot, Oedipus killing Father, marrying Mother…
But we have wandered far afield from our dear friend Balthazar and his precious joy.
In the afterglow of the prince’s visit, there was an excitement like none Balthazar had felt before in his life, barring births and first love. Knowing that he might soon take leave of Bhopal, he saw the city in new and wondrous ways. The old tensions—of feeling exposed at every turn, of being one in a very small Catholic minority—were overridden now by an inflating sense of possibility. One could almost regard the colorful street scene outside his door as poetic rather than maddening and insane, pitting neighbor against neighbor for survival. One could stand at sunset by the shore of the upper lake, watching the blackbirds wheel above, and remark, “There is no light in all the world like the light of Bhopal!”—and truly mean it.
Balthazar had spent a lifetime in dialogue with his family’s history, with all the Bourbon ghosts who came before him: the jeweled, wealthy, powerful progenitors of his line, from Jean-Philippe down to his own father, Salvador, who had passed away thirty years earlier. The Bourbons had always served the Indian rulers with distinction, honor, and great loyalty—and for their services, they’d been richly rewarded with privy purses, which were monetary allowances, and jagirs, which were land entitlements. But then, with India’s independence in the late ’40s, the state had abolished old jagirs, over time robbing the Bourbons of most of their holdings—and then, in the early ’70s, abolished the privy purses, which had been the Bourbons’ primary source of income. After hawking their jewels, after being moved from the palace to what the family called an “outhouse” near the church, Balthazar’s father had finally been forced to take work as a low-level government functionary, trapped by servitude to the very force that sought to undo him.
Balthazar now lived in the old section of Bhopal, among the masses. It was here in the ’90s that Hindus and Muslims rioted and burned whatever they could, including Balthazar’s law office down the street. Recently, when a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl eloped, they were burned in effigy not far from Balthazar’s door. He’d come close to losing his own life, too, when a small mob attacked him with iron rods, striking him first in the legs, until he fell, and then raining blows on his head and back and arms. Was it because he was Catholic or because he was a Bourbon?
If nothing else, our Balthazar was an absolutely sane man, a highly religious man who believed God’s hand moved the universe. As a lawyer, he possessed an intellect marked by logic. He understood the burden of proof, which in the case of would-be kings was quite complicated. And yet, with the prince’s Amazing Revelation, one based on conjecture and opinion, he was willing to suspend his disbelief for a moment. The prince had placed him before the Duke of Anjou and the Count of Paris, the two leading contenders for the crown (which, by the way, did not exist). If they wanted to test his DNA, they’d find he came by his last name honestly.
So did that make him king?
More than anything, this new status marked a very important reversal, the beginning of a vindication for the family’s long, slow fall from grace. He couldn’t think of his own father without being overwhelmed by anger for what they’d done to him.
Even producing an heir had been taxing and heartbreaking. The first three boys had died before a year, then there were four girls, and finally him, Balthazar, the chosen. Even when Balthazar was a teenager—much to the boy’s embarrassment—his father would hold his hand walking down the street, half out of love, half for protection. And now, at the age of 48, almost thirty years after his father’s death, Balthazar had received the prince bearing news of his good fortune. And his vindication. Oh, had Daddy lived for this day! Somewhere in heaven, he was smiling down. His son Balthazar would salvage the family name. But how?
“To fully rise again in the Bourbon sense,” Balthazar said, “would be to win the hearts of the French people.”
*****
Amazing was the news that Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon held within his breast, but it wanted to be sung out! It was the kind of urgent revelation that might hasten one’s ascension—and on the other hand (that of the European family, pure-blooded France, all of Christendom), it seemed so far-fetched that it was, well, like the perfect cosmic joke.
Q. Who is the king of France?
A. That’s right, mesdames and messieurs—a short, hirsute man of bushy ’stache living in…Bhopal, India!
When the prince’s book about Jean-Philippe de Bourbon was published shortly after his visit, he proclaimed his theory to the world. Soon there was a cavalcade of reporters knocking on the front door to the home of Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon, the media-anointed lost king of France. Journalists from Agence France-Presse, The Guardian, and The Statesman came to report on his life. They wrote about his history and how, though he’d never set foot in France, he was a Francophile who spent much time dreaming of the homeland. They described him as portly and rotund. Some thought he was a -mechanic, a farmer, whatever made a better story. They asked him how it felt to be king, a question he sidestepped with quasi diplomacy. “I’m not desirous of any fortune,” he told them, “but if I’m truly the legitimate heir, I should get the recognition.” They photographed him, often standing before the fleur-de-lis, part of his family’s coat of arms, the great symbol of monarchist France. And for each, he painstakingly recited the history of the Indian Bourbons, almost five centuries’ worth, from Jean-Philippe to the he-who-would-be-king, Balthazar.
It would be fair to say that the attention was quite heady, especially after having had so little attention at all—and after having been completely ignored by his European cousins. Balthazar had waited all his life for some message of hope—anything to reclaim the family’s former glory—and here it had come out of the blue, with repercussive force. Random letters arrived, like this from one Kenneth Hesselwood of Belgium:
“I am now sixty,” Mr. Hesselwood wrote. “My father died when I was seven…and [I] am a retired chief inspector after forty years with the Brussels police district. I hope you shall accept this humble letter. I admire your great work at…the court. I wish you and all the members of your family the best for the future. I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant.”
Even his colleagues at the high court greeted him with respectful jocularity. “All hail the king of France!” they said. Or, in a hush: “So when will you leave us and take the throne?”
What throne? the would-be king wanted to bellow, brows flaring—and by whose authority? He bespoke whoever would listen: “My friends ask me, ‘Should we come for the coronation?’ How to explain it to them, in their ignorance—wait, should I say ‘their ignorance’ or ‘their love for me’? ‘We don’t need any proof,’ they say. ‘You are king! You are!’ ”
And now his cousin the prince was, he hoped, setting the stage for Balthazar’s first visit to France, though there was no word yet of his progress. It was delicate; it might take a month or so. “I don’t want to go as a tourist. I want to see the family homes and my relatives,” announced Balthazar, “but given our history here in India, I need to be careful not to stir jealousies.”
And what were the provocations to which he alluded? It was the history of a pale-faced family making its way in a dark-skinned country, as for several centuries the Bourbons took only European brides, thus preserving their bloodline. It was the history of a stubbornly Catholic family making its way among Muslims and Hindus—and more than once paying a bodily price for its faith. It was the history of interlopers currying favor with the -emperors and nabobs to their own great material gain who, no matter what their largesse to the nation, inspired resentments among the natives whose land it was.
It was Balthazar’s namesake, his great-grandfather, who had done the unthinkable and paid with his life. As the legend went, that Balthazar (his Indian name was Shahzad Maseeh) had acted as first minister to the rulers of Bhopal and ended up sleeping with the queen. Regardless of whether the queen had seduced him, the affront could not stand, and he was poisoned by his Muslim rivals at the court.
Balthazar, the supposed king of France, knew this history by heart, so many times had it been told to him by his father. It was after his great-grandfather that the Indian Bourbons started taking Indian women for brides, perhaps for their own survival, which to their minds hardly lessened their royalty. In fact, his father had bequeathed him an old history book with an inscription on the opening page, there in neat hand, that read:
For my sweetest son, Balthazar,
You are a toddler, two years old. Please do not lend this book to anyone for the sake of chapter accounts of the Bourbons in Bhopal. This book is purchased, this book will make you understand that you are a son of a dynasty and will inculcate and instill in your mind the qualities of a noble family that might help you to shine according to my wishes.
Your loving Dad,
Salvador Bourbon
And now maybe Balthazar was King—and a very important visit to France was in the offing. What vindication indeed!
“There will be a lot of interest should I go,” said Balthazar. “When it’s time, I shall notify the press.”
*****
And so he waited with his dream. Inside the cloud castle of his own mind, the King’s voice was all-powerful—and with no other voice in his head, soon his ascendancy was all but official: His Royal Highness. The King. Of France.
The King did not like waiting. It was very awkward, indeed. But with no invitation yet proffered, his initial joy settled into a kind of protracted yearning. How could it not? To gaze upon the boulevards of Paris, to consume the fromage, to promenade the halls of Versailles, to be properly received by his cousins, the princes and marquesses of France, to claim what was rightfully his, that scepter, that royal gravy boat of bone china finely etched with swans—when, in fact and deed, would this all be forthcoming?
After the initial rush of media coverage, the King found himself right smack back in his old life. Working at the court, defending common criminals as well as arguing civil cases—divorces and the like. Helping his wife with the school his father had founded, the Bourbon School. On the streets, he was just another face in the crowd, shuttling the children to school, trolling for fresh fruit. Zooks, he was a king! Wasn’t this engagement with the hoi polloi beneath him? One had only to ask Prince Michael.
Another thing piqued him mightily: If one had perused the list of royals that stood in line to the French throne, his name had never warranted so much as a mention. An unpardonable slight—and even as the Indian Bourbons now clung precariously to the last branch of honor, the European Bourbons had never once contacted them directly, by mail or phone. The only thing that linked them to Europe was the rare royalty-magazine article about the swarthy Indian Bourbons, separated by 5,000 miles (Paris to Bhopal) from their lily-white kin.
Now time itself was the main offender. One week had turned to one month, then three, then six. Stuck in place, the King saw the traumatic events of his past come rushing forward again. The humiliations suffered by his father, who had only the biggest heart, who literally picked broken men up off the street and gave them roofs over their heads. The humiliations suffered by him, the King, who was seen as the embodiment of his family’s past affronts: All hail the Bourbon, taker of Indian women, taker of Indian land, taker of Indian treasure, believer in that heretic Jesus Christ! From the attack, he still had scars and clots on his back and a thumb that didn’t work.
Behind the broad smile, the King sank into a darker mood. He cloistered himself in the cool, shadowed inner depths of the “outhouse,” his rambling abode. He had servants. A driver. A woman in the kitchen. Men farming his land. He had four ferocious Great Danes that ate better than most Indians—and would eat most of them, too, if they came over the high walls surrounding the property. In truth, he was not so poor after all! But His Highness dismissed all that with an angry flare of eyebrow. His family once rode by elephant from their palace to church, to the houses and lodges in their possession. His coach now was a Maruti Suzuki, a common economy vehicle; his houses numbered one, this one here. His family once owned more than twenty miles of land, what would have carried a value of $1 billion today, according to the King’s calculations. His family now owned sixty-five acres. His possessions, he said angrily, were a mere splinter of his family’s former glory in Bhopal. He liked to call his line of the family “Bourbon on the Rocks.”
Over and over, the same haunting question looped in his mind: Wasn’t he the senior of the senior line? Prince Michael of Greece had said as much. Senior of the senior line. King! (Of a throne that did not exist.) It was increasingly hard to be diplomatic.
“If I am in their talks, then why have they not shown their concern or support?” the King asked, half hurt, half in rage, referring to his faraway family. He sat on his own throne now, a gaunt chair with armrests, sipping tea and nibbling cookies, in the cold blow of the air conditioners again. His three children—who ranged in age from 15 to 21 and whom he tenderly called “my dears”—came and went. His wife sat to his right and at his command sprang to the kitchen to retrieve a glass of sweet lime for him. Time was passing; the monsoons were approaching. Extreme weather was upon the King now, cataclysmic, earth-ending rains. The shades were drawn against the heat, and a table lamp was on and glowing.
Exactly how they might show their support was for them—the king of Spain or the Duke of Bourbon, the Duke of Orleans or the Count of Paris—to decide. He claimed not to know but then enumerated abstract possibilities, stressing that he was not asking, that it was a terribly awkward position in which he now found himself. But, okay, for one, a title might be bestowed. The chief of the house of the Bourbons—the so-called titular King Louis XX who resided now in Venezuela with his Venezuelan wife—went by a couple of titles: the Duke of Anjou and of Bourbon and the Duke of Touraine.
Didn’t he deserve something?
For two, there were those privy purses, the grants that sustained one’s royal lifestyle. “Perhaps when the time comes,” the King said, “Prince Michael will share with me how this works in Europe.”
And finally, citizenship would help remove an obstacle to the possibility of his taking up residence in France someday, which would remove the obstacle of claiming the throne as a Frenchman, if it ever came to that, if the royals and commoners would have him.
On the day Prince Michael had taken his leave of Bhopal, the King’s happiness had billowed and proliferated. And so he’d retreated into the safety of his house, where he waited…and waited…and waited.
His chest tightened now with each passing day; a queer venom rose that he could not hold down. What went unspoken was the possibility that they saw him as a bit of a rogue, an eater of broken meats! What went unspoken was that, perhaps, he’d been made a fool by this good tiding, this visitation!
“I am told by my cousin that the queen of Spain is talking about Balthazar Bourbon in Bhopal, inquiring about my health, but after that, it’s finished,” lamented the King. “The inquiries are finished. ‘How is he?’ ‘Oh, he’s doing very well.’ It’s finished. But who understands, who has gone within me to say what is the state of my heart over here? How do I sustain? How do I live?”
Almost on cue, the air conditioners died; the room went dark. The King exhaled a resigned sigh that contained within it a lifetime of sighs. “Blackouts,” he proclaimed. “They are common here.”
*****
Friend, it has been suggested in the tomes of history and the parchments of drama that one of the most common afflictions of kings is madness, brought on by their own fantastical self-delusions. Nothing is ever enough for the king. There is a surfeit of funds, adulation, good times. But he requires more land, jewels, women. He sits, derriere upon sumptuous throne, discontented by his good fortune, and slowly, in this manner, he unhinges from the universe we know.
He wants more, yes, but who among us does not? We may be knaves, but we strive and reach, too. And in the process, we become blind to our own posturings upon that stage of our own making. Let it be suggested that the resonations between us and our King are greater than we may first believe, for there is always one more circle to which we hope to gain admittance.
In the case of our King, that last circle is now closed—and yet he believes. He believes in his own golden fiber, his latent greatness. He believes in the magical powers of his last name. And yet isn’t that name its own curse? Just ask his ancestor, King Louis XVI, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, guillotined by Parisian revolutionaries; ask the Bourbons who were massacred in 1775 at an Indian fortress known as Shergarh; ask his great-grandfather Balthazar, who, after taking the Indian queen, was snuffed out by Muslim rivals.
The King comes to the conclusion that he is owed his ascendency like an unpaid debt, all because one day an angel knocked on his door bearing some news that bathed our King in celestial light. His faith, then, comes to bear a very existential problem: His stated destiny, which is the vindication of his lost family, belongs not to his God but to those who seem less than concerned about him—his brethren, the European Bourbons.
So, friend, be thankful that your own life isn’t one of such fragility. (Or is it?) Be thankful that no angel knocks upon your door now. (Prithee, what is that knock?)
Ask yourself: What comes in the wilderness beyond that light? What any king knows best: danger, darkness, death.
*****
Spring came and went. The monsoons came and went. And then the dry season—and its brain-drilling, sweltering heat. One year after the annunciation that had given birth to nothing and still no word or missive from the prince regarding the invitation.
When the King felt most inert now—when he felt that slow, slumbery, lubricious death inside—he forced himself to move, to escape, sometimes with no destination in mind. He might call for his driver and slip into the backseat of his Maruti Suzuki and exit past the slobbering Great Danes, through a first gate and then a second that opened to the street. And though servants opened the gates—and three women smiled from a nearby guardhouse—the King would pay them no mind, wouldn’t even look at them from the backseat, glowering there as he often was. Soon the car would be crawling past animals and carts of sticks and fabric, people moving in colorful rivers on either side of the street, cow haunches greeting his gaze through the window.
After a while, the King might brighten a bit, caught up in the flow of energy. “This is a lovely city,” he would proclaim, seeming to dismiss his own proclamation with a wave of his hand. (How very French that gesture appeared!) Passing the palace—Palace Shaukat—that once belonged to his family but now stood in disrepair, he might look for his great-grandfather in the windows.
And his grandfather.
And his daddy.
Two lakes organized the city, the upper and lower. The King might skirt the lower, which was smaller and had muddy banks choked with grass, and then climb the hill along the upper, which was vast, beautiful, and retained the wild character of a time when tigers lived on the outskirts of the city. Up the hill, where the homes became larger and more spread out, where Bhopal’s upper class, such as it was, resided.
Now the King uttered words in Hindi, and the driver drove out to the country, maybe a half hour from Bhopal across flattened brown fields, until arriving at his acreage, the place where he’d been beaten nearly to death.
This was the King’s farm and these were his servants, standing in dirty rags, shyly offering him through the window their hands, which he took, filthy as they were, again without making eye contact, and he spoke rather brusquely to them from the backseat, prattling orders: It’s time to send for a plow. Only wheat and soybeans this year. The well needs scrubbing. The wall needs fixing.
One had credit card debt and sheepishly asked if the King might pay it for him. And the King would not, in order to teach him a valuable lesson. “I love my servants,” he said, “but they are not smart enough to understand.”
He directed the driver to a grove of trees where a canopy of leaves offered shade from the lasering sunlight. The King pulled himself out of the car and stood for a moment, alone, scanning the fields, looking up through the leaves above. That feeling in his chest unhitched, and he drew big mouthfuls of air, as if surfacing from underwater to an image of Daddy again, on his deathbed.
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| Prince Adrian and Princess Michelle |
The King had been 19 at the time (a few years younger than his eldest son now, the one who wanted to go to film school in America and be done with India and all this royal nonsense). But those thirty years ago, the family gathered round, and his father pointed to the King and said to his daughters, “Look at your brother. He is your father now.”
Thus, Salvador abdicated to his son. And the King took charge. He mediated all family disputes. (The King often sided with his sisters’ husbands so as not to show partiality.) He oversaw the family holdings. He helped maintain the Catholic church, the one adjacent to his house that had been built by his forebears in 1875. He broached few other opinions but his own, for none were worth as much. Except maybe one: To hear the King thirty years later, his father loomed as large as ever. He was the figure who animated him, who looked down from heaven and actually saw him there, recognized his harrowing travails because they’d once been his own. “I’ve stepped into his shoes,” the King would say. “And his predicament.”
When the King spoke of Daddy, it was always with reverence. “He didn’t have a kingdom, but he was a king,” he’d say. “He was a king with his heart, flowing, overflowing. He could not see anyone in pain. And that is what carried forward.”
Looking at it now, however, there’d been a kind of unreasonable hope bequeathed from father to son. That the past could be resurrected. And once their position of greatness was restored, the Bourbons would change the world—again.
But if deprived of those glories, then what?
“I am stuck,” the King muttered, gazing upon the brown furrowed fields, all that was left of the Bourbon empire in India. “It is a mental state, you see. From which there seems no escape.”
Well, there was one escape: the Throne That Did Not Exist. He was a sane man, a rational man, a man who had sworn an oath to uphold the law. He dealt in facts and evidence. His delusions, whatever they were, were held privately.
*****
Woe, this tale of Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon beganeth with the light-filled flight of an angel and endeth with a jail cell. Such is the fate of a monarch’s life. It begins with bright colors and ends in ash.
In the time between the visitation of the angel-prince and that time even now when no invitation has yet been issued—almost a year deprived of this basic courtesy—our King went back to work at the high court, driving his Maruti Suzuki on his own. Morbidity turned to anger turned to resignation—and the cycle repeated itself over and over until the King was characterized by a certain empty bluster, a disconnection from his own life that lay before him, one replaced by an obsession with visions of Paris and Versailles, of a more formal anointment, of the King himself embraced by white people living in châteaus. (Did those even exist anymore? What was real and what was fantasy?)
Unbeknownst to him, even now, the prince, while standing by his theory, denied ever offering an invitation for Balthazar to visit France. He claimed that that invitation belonged to powers beyond him. And he described Balthazar’s family this way: “I met them by accident. I thought they were very nice and very welcoming, and they looked like a typical bourgeois Indian family. Nothing French, nothing royal. Except the famous name of Bourbon was inscribed in their passports. Now he calls me ‘Brother,’ but I said, ‘Cousins, yes. But brothers, not yet.’ ”
Now, on a stifling, overcast morning, Bhopal smelled like a cesspool. The high court was a collection of open-air, sand-colored buildings decorated by mongrel dogs lying in the heat. The rain did little to wash away that scent of mold and urine. Wearing the standard uniform of a lawyer—black jacket, white shirt, and a wide wing collar—the King went to the sweltering library, where he had a book to return. The weak fan on the table almost made matters worse, and then he took his leave, huffing for air, zagging through the crowded hallways. It was like a drill, dodging the press of attorneys and clients as well as a sea of wooden tables set everywhere, what constituted impromptu office stations with the phone number and name of each lawyer painted in Hindi on the wall.
The King did not loiter. He moved with purpose—busily. He breathed heavily, exposed to the heat as he was. That constriction again, across the chest, that queer anger. He smiled broadly when he bumped into colleagues, but he was not exactly one to make idle chitchat—and his expression returned to seriousness and slight agitation after passing.
“And how is the King of France today?” said one friend, making a loud show of shaking his hand. The two exchanged pleasantries, and when they broke off the King was almost buoyant.
So they did love him—right? It was a relief to live in the lacuna between this first question and the one that followed: Or did they?
The King came upon a courtroom where an old man stood in threadbare clothes, slouched in the defendant’s box. The judge appeared displeased by the villain, but it was hard to imagine the defendant, looking frail and almost kindly as he did there, killing anyone. Watching from the back of the room for a moment, the King emitted a low sound—half-grunt, half-complaint. Did he pity the old man? Had he seen enough to know that beneath the broken veneer this toady varlet was a cold-blooded killer? That his brokenness was an act?
The King’s eyebrows flared. He stopped to wipe his brow, and then he was swept up among the others dressed exactly as he was, just another in the crowd. All of his history—his name, his blood—had rendered him as common as the next commoner. And yet it was the displeasure flickering on his face that separated him from them. Perhaps he saw the old man, the convict, as lucky—at least he was receiving justice. Even his jail cell might have been easier to accept, after having been recognized and judged. But the King—the King stood before time, before the great cosmic flow of history, and worse than being unjudged, he’d been completely forgotten.
His jail cell was invisibility. His destiny was inaction (still waiting). His life, he now acknowledged, was nothing but “a tragedy.” Perhaps it’s fair to say that any true king would have preferred the guillotine to nonexistence, if he weren’t sustained by the dream-delusion of what could be: visions of oneself ascending in ermine to the throne, to the loving cheers of his subjects, jeweled scepter flashing. But, dear friend, how likely is such an outcome even for the man who has rightful claim—or who simply desires it more than any other?
When the King returned to his walled compound, he passed his servants again in the driveway without paying them any mind. And they kept up their conversation this time, paying him none, either.
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