Forever Young by Hayley Mills

Author:Hayley Mills [MILLS, HAYLEY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Our final destination was India. After an insanely chaotic press junket in Delhi we were invited to Jaipur in Rajasthan—“The Pink City”—to stay with the Maharaja. Jaipur was the most breathtaking place I had ever seen. India is an experience that everyone should have, at least once in their lives. We were lucky enough to stay in the royal palace as guests of Maharaja Jai Singh and his exquisite wife Aisha, the Maharani, both of whom were friends of my parents from polo tournaments back in England. We were given rooms at Rambagh Palace, one of the royal family’s official residences, which had been converted into a luxury hotel. On the first morning, I was awoken by the sounds of a terrible riot going on outside; the noise was deafening, all the wooden shutters in the palace were being violently banged and slammed, accompanied by murderous screams and shrieks. Fearing for my life, I gingerly opened my door and peered nervously through the tiny gap, expecting to see furious hordes brandishing clubs, with the Maharaja’s royal head stuck on a pole… Instead, I saw armies of furious monkeys leaping about trying to dismantle the hotel! Apparently this was all quite normal goings-on before breakfast.

Queen Beatrice of The Netherlands was also staying as a guest of the Maharaja—and we were swept up into all the grand state occasions. I couldn’t get over the beauty of everything. We went to glittering cocktail parties, all the women draped in exquisite saris. There was dinner in the palace for thirty people, with a servant in white gloves standing behind every chair. We rode on gorgeously caparisoned elephants around a twelfth-century palace. The whole experience was unreal and magical. I was back in time, hundreds of years, somewhere between the decline of the Rajput Empire and E. M. Forster. I began to feel like Miss Quested in A Passage to India. One night we gathered on the terrace at the Maharaja’s hunting lodge, which was built by the side of a lake that reflected the moonlight. Our glasses brimming with champagne, we stared down into a little clearing where, under a single light, a small sacrificial buffalo was tethered to a stake—left as bait for a wild tiger. As the royal musicians played and conversation continued, we waited for a tiger to come and tear his captive prey to pieces. The whole scene was so incongruous: all these gorgeously dressed, bejeweled people standing there under the moon, waiting for something so bloodthirsty to happen. Mercifully for the buffalo—and for me—the tiger was too smart to be caught that night. Returning to my quarters, I exhaled a huge sigh of relief. I wouldn’t have lasted long in the Raj.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.