35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘IF I DIDN’T WANT YOU TO LEAVE THIS PLACE’
That night he had arranged for us to watch old sixteen-millimetre
home movies. The projector was set up beneath the stars in a
courtyard, the screen a bare wall daubed with scaly whitewash. Our
projectionist turned out to be the mad cousin. I did not like having
him behind me. But, after burning several yards of film, then getting
a sleeve caught in the machine’s teeth, he encountered another hitch:
a power cut. No one seemed too upset, including the rajkumar, who
confessed that he’d never seen for himself what the thousand rusty
canisters of film, now piled up in a corner, contained.
I was composing a diplomatic speech about having to leave –
wondering if I’d ever be allowed to – when my host suddenly
announced that he was driving to Madras the following day and
could take me along. If I wanted to go, that is.
I felt quite sad saying farewell to the little princesses, and they
seemed sad to see me go. The thought of leaving them to spend the
rest of their lives watching their world literally fall apart around them
haunted me for months. I still think of them there, watching Bombay
videos, reading the film magazines, dreaming.
The last time I saw the rajkumar of Venkatagiri was in a restaurant
in Bangalore. It was a warm December night, and he came over to
my table, wearing a thick sweater, hunched and shivering,
complaining about the appalling cold. We exchanged small talk
that seemed oddly strained and formal. Perhaps he regretted letting
me inside his life, telling me about his financial woes, his Tamil
starlet? Then I noticed, far back at a corner table, the portly form of
a shabbily elegant woman, staring around at the other diners with
abject terror in her eyes.
‘Isn’t that your wife?’ I asked him.
‘Yes. Wife is there,’ he replied, as if he’d forgotten she was.
‘Is she all right?’ She didn’t look it.
He grinned his cartoonishly deranged, toothy grin, his nose
virtually spiking his chest, and his eyeballs almost squashed against
the lenses of his glasses. Then he said, ‘She is little nervous, isn’t it?
You see, this is first time ever she is travelling outside palace.’
Perhaps there was hope for those daughters of his after all?
Rob Howard, a photographer friend of mine, visited Venkatagiri
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