Kate's second child was in the news for entering the world a week or so late. I felt for Kate, it's unbelievably tedious to have a late baby. I should know!
THE END of April was hard on me. I went through all the usual symptoms: panic attacks, back ache, heartburn, inertia, the feeling it would never end. Every moment of my own Great Wait 26 years ago was relived and groaned over. The anxiety about timing it right nearly killed me: would she be able to evade the Queen’s birthday, would she manage it before the UK elections? Finally, on May 2, when Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana of Cambridge was born, no one — and I include the Duchess of Cambridge here — was more relieved than me.
You cannot live in the UK and not follow the royalty. The media are intensely obsessed. Ten minutes of waiting at your GP’s are enough to keep you up-to-date. And the British public are eagerly curious or casually dismissive, but seldom blasé. When we won tickets to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert and the picnic in the Buckingham Palace grounds that preceded it, even the blasé asked us bitterly, “How?” They were assuaged only when we revealed that the Queen had not come to the picnic; with her husband in hospital, the poor woman had barely managed to make it to her own concert.
From the royal-gazer’s point of view, the husband and I could not have chosen a more serendipitous time to move to the UK. We’ve seen, in addition to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, Will and Kate’s wedding, the birth of Prince George and, now, his sister. We’d even caught a glimpse of the Prince of Wales with his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, in their car on Oxford Street.
I’ve personally come a long way from the time I used to swing on the gate at home in Saharanpur, waiting for the postman to bring me theWoman’s Weekly, six weeks or more after it was published in London, so that I could see for myself the details of Princess Diana’s hugely lavish wedding gown. The miserly black-and-white clips Doordarshan afforded us had only whetted my appetite. The husband, ensconced as he was in his public-school ivory tower, would have been more likely to say, “Huh? Diana who?”
Diana was every girl’s fairy-tale princess come alive. Her magnificent, over-the-top wedding gown was the flamboyant symbol of her story: the shy, retiring nursery school assistant who got chosen by the prince of the realm to be his queen. Later events, as unsavoury as they were, never quite obliterated the shine Diana was to sport all her life. I still have a picture of her with Prince William in her arms, soon after he was born. Added to it now is one of Kate, with George in her arms.
It is a sign of Diana’s enduring symbolism as a true romantic that she is still thought of as a tragic figure, when the real love story here was that of Charles and Camilla, but nobody thinks of that, do they?
The British royalty wear their blue blood lightly, and with immense grace and dignity for the most part. Quite unlike the erstwhile royals in India, many of whom continue to believe that they still rule. Some of them do, but as elected representatives in a democracy, not as a matter of right of birth. You wouldn’t think it though, to see them hold court, entire electorates deferring to them and calling them Hukum and Maharaj.
when he went to interview one of these so-called kings, who was then a minister of some importance in the Union cabinet. He was kept cooling his heels in an anteroom while Maharaj had his breakfast. When he was finally granted audience, the manservant offered them water, the Maharaja in a silver glass, the journalist in a regular steel one. That’s not even good manners, leave alone majesty.
As a journalist, I got to hear lots of stories like the one about the water glasses and they routinely made me snigger. What made these folks so condescending? We were citizens of a free country and all equal in the eyes of the law.
Then came August 1997, and the famously spectacular car crash and death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I watched in awe as the entire world, literally, wept in unison! Suddenly, it did not matter whether you were a democracy or an oligarchy or an autocracy, whether you’d been colonised or looted, whether you were white or brown or black. Here was a royal who had caught the imagination of the world and she was mourned in every corner of it. It helped, too, that television was ruling the roost by then: 24x7 coverage always boosts a cause.
Will and Kate’s wedding ruled the air waves, too, perhaps not as comprehensively as his mum’s death, but for weeks there were programmes aired on the wedding dress, the designer who was designing it, where the royal couple would go for their honeymoon. For a late riser, I was up uncommonly early on April 29, 2011, to watch the wedding. Kate’s wedding dress, when it was finally revealed, was not the Cinderella confection her ma-in-law had worn; it was more understated and — dare I say it? — elegant!
Prince George’s arrival was waited with equally bated breath. We traced every detail of Kate’s pregnancy from her extreme bouts of morning sickness to her enrolling for pregnancy yoga, buying pregnancy books on Amazon, what kind of pram she was buying, to details about the Lindo Wing in St Mary’s Hospital, where she would be confined. Huge bets were placed on whether it was to be a boy or a girl. Thoughtfully, in April, just before George made his appearance in July, the Succession to the Crown Act was passed, which rendered the sex of the imminent baby quite immaterial.
We were visiting with an equally royaltyobsessed friend when the little prince was to be born. Nobody could have scoured the television screen, which showed mainly the road outside the hospital, more than the two of us, much to the scorn and mirth of our husbands. When the baby was finally born, bets were placed on what he would be named. Much to my chagrin, I lost — he was not named James!
In comparison, Princess Charlotte has had a relatively easier entry into the world. The news she did make was more to do with her own entering the world a week or so late, causing all the media to dub it The Great Kate Wait. I felt for Kate, it’s unbelievably tedious to have a late baby, I should know!
The Sunday Express made an extra effort when it hired a team of American forensic computer age-progression experts — who usually help in solving crimes! — to make up a picture of what Princess Charlotte would look like when she will be 18. She was shown to have her mum’s dimples and her paternal grandmum’s lips. Believe me, Kate and Will might do well to save up for a bit of help for her in the looks department, if you go by this reconstruction.
Meanwhile, I wonder what the Queen thought of her newest great-granddaughter combining her name with that of Diana, of whom she was reportedly not too much of a fan. Speaking of which, maybe it was divine intervention that caused the crash that killed Diana. Can you imagine that tragic fairy-tale princess now a grandmother of two?