The Daily - The Jungle Prince, Chapter 1: The Railway Station

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

The story passed for years from tea sellers to rickshaw drivers to shopkeepers in Old Delhi. In a forest, they said, in a palace cut off from the city, lived a prince, a princess and a queen, said to be the last of a Shiite Muslim royal line. Some said the family had been there since the British had annexed their kingdom. Others said they were supernatural beings.It was a stunning and tragic story. But was it real? On a spring afternoon, while on assignment in India, Ellen Barry got a phone call that sent her looking for the truth.In Chapter 1, we hear of a woman who appeared on the platform of the New Delhi railway station with her two adult children, declaring they were the descendants of the royal family of Oudh. She said they would not leave until what was theirs had been restored. So they settled in and waited — for nearly a decade.For more information, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Ouch! Now I'm having trouble finding my way out. Huh. It's really strange. It always was strange. I never thought I'd be telling you the story I'm about to tell you. But here goes. In the spring of 2016, which is when this story begins, I was the New York Times bureau chief in Delhi,

and I was spending a lot of my time trying to solve problems that were not strictly journalistic. For one thing, our power blinked on and off at two-minute intervals for much of the day. This seemed to be related to the troop of monkeys, rhesus macaques, that lived on the roof of the building and had been chewing through the rubber insulation on the wiring. During the monsoon, water had seeped into the walls of the office, which had begun to ripple and smelled like damp cardboard. We solved these problems the way we solved all our problems, with makeshift solutions. There's a word for this in Hindi, to God. It served to preserve some kind of complex equilibrium that kept everything running.

This approach could seem like negligence or, on occasion, like kindness. Our retired office manager, who was in his 80s, had been disappointed at the news that he had to retire, so we let him come in and spend every day at his old desk. Morning. A few feet away from the woman who had replaced him. Our landlord insisted on being paid six months' rent in advance, in cash, so we would have to take the money over to her in rolling suitcases,

as if we were hitmen. When I did get a chance to focus on journalism, the bigness of it all could be paralyzing. My beat contained 1.6 billion people, one-eighth of the world's population. We were writing about budget reports. There were landslides, mudslides, floods, droughts,

stampedes, avalanches, outbreaks of chikungunya and encephalitis. But there was another kind of story that rarely made it into the newspapers. These were the dramas that captivated people in their everyday lives. Doomed lovers, epic battles, stunning reversals of fortune,

magical transformation, legends. These stories were at the heart of the city where I lived, but they were not part of my standard workload. Every morning, when I dropped my kids off at school, I drove past a narrow road that led into a forest. It was said that deep in that forest, in a palace cut off from the world, lived a prince and a princess, the last surviving members of a Muslim royal family.

Few people had actually seen them, but everyone knew the story. It was like a story being born in front of your eyes, and a story that could easily be fiction. I don't think I will ever hear of such a story in my lifetime again. They were kind of semi-mythical figures themselves. They turned into almost figures from an Indian epic. And once we were just going for a walk in the forest and he said, Oh, have you heard about these friends who lived in these ruins of the forest?

It was all so, so bizarre. Their story was passed between tea sellers and rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers in Old Delhi. But how could there be a king in the jungle? There were different versions of this story, depending on who you spoke to. Some people said that the family, the royal family of Avad, had been there since the British had usurped their kingdom in 1856, and that the forest had somehow grown up around the palace, engulfing it. In the bushes, I just couldn't see much, but I just saw him, he was running.

Some said they were a family of jinns, the shape-shifting spirits that were seen at Delhi's holy sites. What do you ask what the jinns look like? It was a story that had lodged in my mind. And then one day, in the spring of 2016, I got this message from our office manager. Ellen, have you been trying to get in touch with the royal family of Awadh? I hadn't. There was a call from Princess Sakina Mahal, or her secretary, I guess.

The secretary left precise instructions on when you should call her, between 11 and 12 noon. She ended this message by saying, If you're interested. I was. I'm Ellen Barry, and this is the story of The Jungle Prince. Chapter 1. The Railway Station. The story goes, in the early 1970s, a mysterious woman appeared on the platform of the New Delhi railway station, announcing herself as Valayat, the Begum of Avad,

the great-great-granddaughter of the warrior queen Hazrat Mahal from the fallen kingdom of Abad. Abad was a Shiite Muslim dynasty that once ruled an area the size of Scotland until the British annexed the kingdom and exiled its rulers. And at that point, that's when the queen, Hazrat Mahal, led an uprising against the British. It's sometimes called the First War of Indian Independence. But her army was vanquished. She died in obscurity. So the woman in the train station said she was Hazrat Mahal's great-great-granddaughter,

and she and her two children had come back for their property. It included mosques, shrines, and palaces, famous buildings now maintained by the Indian government. It's almost as if she had come into Washington and asked for the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the White House, and the Washington Monument. She declared that she would stay there in the railway station until they had been restored to her so she settled in the VIP waiting room and unloaded a whole household there carpets potted

palms a silver tea set huge glossy Great Danes she and her children settled on red plastic chairs and waited They waited for almost a decade The Begum was an arresting-looking woman nearly six feet tall and broad-shouldered with a face as craggy and immobile as an Easter Island statue She wore a sari of dark heavy silk and kept a pistol hidden in its folds. The children appeared to be in their mid-twenties.

They were known as Prince Cyrus and Princess Sakina. I'm told that they were strangely submissive, reluctant even to accept a mouthful of food without their mother's permission. They addressed her as Your Highness. They were attended by Nepali servants in livery, wearing white turbans, so overawed by their mistress, the Begum, that they approached her on their knees. If you wanted to talk to the Begum, you couldn't just go up and talk to her. You had to submit a written petition on embossed stationery that would then be placed on a silver platter and carried

to her. She would write back a response, which would be read aloud by one of her children. Crowds would sometimes gather around the Begum, sometimes weeping to see a queen in such lowly condition. Sometimes people walked away backwards so as not to insult her by turning their back.

Once, during Muharram, the annual Shiite ritual of mourning, a visitor found her surrounded by pilgrims, flagellating themselves with chains to which razor blades had been attached, leaving the railway platform battered with blood. The mention of the Kingdom of Avad, even today, stirred feelings in most Indians, but especially in Shiite Muslims. And seeing them, homeless, on a railway platform was even more powerful. Her story of treachery and dispossession had found an audience. But still, the government wouldn't budge.

And after several years of this, Villi had hit upon a far more effective way to advocate her case. Journalists. In particular, foreign correspondents. The Washington Post, Sunday, August 9, 1981. Stubborn queen holds court in New Delhi Railroad Station. Heir to a long-vanished throne, the Begum's dogs have teeth. Princess stationed at depot

waiting for her people. The palace is all that they want. The Begum imposed stringent conditions on journalists. She could only be photographed when the moon was waning, one outlet reported. The journalist complied, delighted by the gothic peculiarity of it all. For the

51-year-old matriarch of a royal line that once ruled five million subjects in an area the size of West Virginia resides today just off platform number one at the New Delhi Railroad Station. Her aristocratic bearing and an entourage that includes seven servants and nine Doberman pinches lend a regal air to her presence.

Her surroundings definitely do not. Hoping to shame the Indian government into returning the family property in Lucknow. Her Royal Highness now lives in decayed grandeur in a fly-infested, 15-foot-square, open-sided portico of the train station with her son and daughter, surrounded for security by 10 dogs

and waited on by two Nepalese servants. This coverage worried the government. It was inconvenient and embarrassing. The last thing they wanted was more unrest. The dogs appear to be ferocious, and people are wary of them. They seem to have free run of the area near the quarter. A staff photographer visited the station. The dogs, Labradors, and the animals are being fed.

They're tied to trees outside. The servants of the media are waiting. One person who worried a lot about the Begum's appearance was the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Avad had once been based. The Shiite population there could easily explode if they believed that their queen was being abused. So the officials there put together a plan to get the family out of the public eye. Omar Rizvi, an aide to the chief minister, was sent to Delhi to present the Begum with an envelope

containing 10,000 rupees to be used for her return to Lucknow. The Begum's reaction was imperious and dramatic. She threw the bills up into the air so that they fluttered down to the platform Rizvi asked his personal assistant to run around and pick them up They returned with an offer of a four-bedroom house in Lucknow which the Begum dismissed as too small

She wanted something grander a palace of a four-bedroom house in Lucknow, which the Begum dismissed as too small. She wanted something grander, a palace, something that would separate her and her children from the commoners. The Begum has rejected as meaningless an offer in 1976 of a modern home in Lucknow, formerly known as Avad, in Uttar Pradesh, bordering Nepal. I never even looked at it, she said. It isn't good

enough for my precious dogs. I would rather die in one small ruined palace or in this dirty, vulgar railway station than accept dishonor. This offer still stands. The case is at a standstill. The petitioning continues. As the years went by, the government got more anxious. And then, in 1984, nearly a decade after the Al-Fad family began its campaign on the railway platform, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi accepted their claim. She granted them the use of an abandoned 14th century hunting lodge, with pavilions and a commanding view of Delhi. It was known as Malchamahal, a retreat built for an emperor. It had no electricity or running water, but

it had grandeur and separation, the things that the Begum had demanded. had demanded. The Begum found this offer acceptable, and so they packed up their trunks, rolled up their carpets, and with their ferocious dogs and their loyal servants, vacated the railway station for good. They moved their belongings into Malchamahal and proceeded to cut themselves off from the city that surrounded them. They lined the perimeter of their property with loops of razor wire and menacing signs warning, intruders will be gunned down. And that's where they stayed for the next 40 years. In the middle of the city.

In the middle of the forest. Hidden from the world. It's the time of year when everyone is traveling, or running around getting thoughtful gifts for the people you care about. Think about giving yourself the gift of an Audible membership. Now is the best time to do it, with a special offer of 53% off your first three months. For a limited time, you can get three months of Audible for just $6.95 a month. Visit audible.com slash JunglePrince or text JunglePrince to 500500.

My name is Sachit. I'm a rider, cyclist. And one day while riding, we saw this road going up. And we never knew what is up this road. So just we noticed a strange sort of haunted and quiet place. There were no windows, no doors. There was a board over there that said that if you cross this line and if you come over inside, I have the authority to shoot you. So we were scared initially and we went off. A lot of times what happened was that a few guys, local guys,

they were trying to sneak in. And once I saw that the prince was running and those guys, they got scared and they jumped off the fence and they ran away. He was very, very thin. Very thin, pale. That's the only visual contact of the prince I have ever had. They never interacted with anyone.

The Begum and her family had settled in the woods, in absolute seclusion. But they were still an object of fascination in Delhi. People would come to the lodge, braving the guard dogs, hoping to get a glance of what was inside. Scholars,

artists, filmmakers. Your Highness, I'm a Dutch writer residing in New Delhi and was very interested in retelling their story. I am an artist and would like to draw some sketches of my home. It came as a profound shock to me to learn that the royal house of Awad is devoid of light and water and honorable allowances. Most of their visitors were journalists. BBC News and Current Affairs, 18th of July, 1997.

Your Highness, I thank you for kindly sending me the dynasty of the dead and the dead. Your Royal Highness, please accept our salutations and forgive us for interrupting your Sunday morning. Most respected majesties, Christopher Thomas of the Times told me the story of your family and I've been doing a little research of my own. It is one of the most amazing and moving histories I've heard about. And I would like to tell your story on international television for those who have not read about it. Leaving letters full of flattery and compassion. I would be honored to meet you. I greatly admire your courage for taking such a principled stand to regain your palace and what is rightfully yours.

Sometimes outright begging. and what is rightfully yours. Sometimes outright begging. I am truly sorry for this botheration, but we have tried every option on flights to meet your highness's specified time. The Begum would speak only to foreign correspondents. Commoners, by which she meant Indians, were not allowed in,

and her children followed suit. Your highnesses, I am a Canadian broadcast journalist in India preparing a one-hour radio program for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC. I feel your own words in your own voice will set the record straight. We do not wish to pry into the private and personal grief which Your Highness clearly feels. But this, I repeat, is a story which must be told to the world. Accurately, carefully and in your own words.

With respect and every good wish. Respectfully yours. Respectfully yours. Yours humbly. Yours respectfully. Very truly yours. Newsweek magazine. The Associated Press.

The Washington Post. The CBC. Newsnight. The Associated Press for India. BBC Newsnight. And then, in 1997, the Begum's children, Prince Cyrus and Princess Sakina, told the Times of London that their mother, in a final gesture of protest against the treachery of Britain and India, had committed suicide by drinking a poison made with crushed diamonds and pearls.

They called it the drink of silence. She took her life. You ask me how you crush up a diamond, I think it's pretty difficult. But crushing diamonds, drinking them, which then destroys the esophagus and the stomach and just rips your insides to pieces and is a very empress-like way to take your own life, shall we say. Cyrus, he then took her body and put it in his bed

and lay with her for several days or weeks or months until she decomposed to the extent that they decided to bury her. Then the dogs dug her up and ate her. They then became absolutely paranoiacally obsessed with the fact that the spirit of the royal tradition of Awad was also inside the dogs. Because the dogs ate part of the mother. I think so, yeah. I really do believe so.

In the early 2000s, a man named Nick Koulikundis, a friend of a friend, heard about the story over dinner one night and decided to look into it. So anyway, we did some background research and we come to understand quite a lot of this, which meant we wanted to get in. And myself and Sachin persevered and persevered. I don't think anyone, you know, some journalists had been allowed in. They didn't let anyone in. Nick and his brother-in-law, Sachin, weren't far from Malchumahal.

And they decided to take their chances and walk through the forest up to the lodge to see for themselves. Eventually, a figure came slowly, slowly down and we spent about an hour, I think, watching him come down. He came to us, and it was Cyrus. And he said, go away. You're not welcome here. Nobody is welcome in here. But he had a dog, and it was a very big dog, and it was looking

vicious. But I like dogs. So I said, what a beautiful dog. He said, oh, you like dogs. With that, Cyrus softened, and a kind of friendship began to form. Whenever they were in town, Nick and his brother-in-law would go back to visit Cyrus in the woods. We would. Let's go and see Cyrus. But they were never allowed inside the lodge. And if he was there and we shouted loud enough, he'd come down. But we started talking, and he would talk about himself in a very peculiar

language which you're probably familiar the royal we the we the us the queen the princess we had no idea what any of this meant we never saw the sister not for many years i mean not for three or four years of going there but i did once have a camera i was taking a picture and i just had a very long telephoto lens and i got an image of this woman standing up on the sort of parapet of the lodge but with hair literally to the floor. And she looked weird. I mean, I was transfixed. This is extraordinary. What is this?

When you say weird, what do you mean? There's a feeling that she was almost... She looked like a human animal. And I saw her wearing a black robe but with this hair all the way to the ground, and just matted into solid lumps, as I could see. But then finally, one day, Cyrus invited them in. There were lots of carpets, cannons, gold, swords, things on the wall, pictures. And what they found was a grand building, but one with no electricity, no running water, a little glass with pearly nail on its side like this,

covered in mold and stuff. This was the glass as she had drunk the crushed diamond. It had fallen there like this, at this angle, the sort of moldy stuff here was the remnants of whatever the drink was into which she'd inserted the diamond. And it was as it had been. We sat down, there was just Cyrus. This is exactly as—we have changed nothing since the day. They'd changed nothing since the day their mother took her own life, years before. The siblings had been frozen in time. There was a big dining table set with absolutely beautiful gold and silver and all this. And

it was a looking darling to except for one thing that on each plate there was a mountain of mold about this high this was the deep the dinner that had been on the night that she had first ingested this entire they hadn't changed anything and the mold was was about a meter high oh my high of postulant almost oh my god almost jewel like mold but mold nonetheless and it was just laid for dinner so after we'd seen that and being okay we're quite broad-minded me and such we managed to deal with the uh it was weird but we thought in for a penny in for a pound as well we were then led back and we sat down in the two chairs and Cyrus said, would you like a drink?

We looked at each other. It was quite difficult not to laugh sometimes. We would love a beer. Cyrus disappeared and returned with two beers. And it opened and it was treacle. Oh, Jesus. It had turned into a thick syrup.

The beers had been in a pantry for 30 years. But we realized that, I mean, because he was watching us, you know, we had to drink this, whatever it was. They sat there in Cyrus's company for a little while, sipping their beer, until Cyrus turned to them and asked, would you like to meet the princess?

And he said, her grand majesty is coming. And from a passageway emerged the princess, who was pretty much actually in line with what I'd seen through my telephoto lens. She was a person who had been living like an animal for 30 years. According to Cyrus later, she had neither washed nor had a bath nor washed her hair nor nothing for more than 30 years, since they moved in.

She'd never left the place. she'd stayed in that property and she had it reverted to a state of living which is a stone age person i mean extraordinarily you've seen matted hair on people like burning man and stuff imagine that over 30 years it's solid lumps of hair it's branches of hair that kind of hang down, weighing her head down. In her face? I mean, wrinkled like a dead person, thin like a skeleton, stretched over the bones. But her eyes, when she removed her glasses, were completely alive. She was completely safe. She was unbelievable. She was to the point. And the first thing she said... Nick came to feel that in her own way, Princess Sakina was carrying on her mother's legacy.

I felt that she was aware that she had taken the decision to ruin herself in this way, in order to try her ultimate best to get something of progress in what her mother had tried to do, but also knowing she was never going to get there. That's the only thing that kept her going, I think. I think without that, she would have died long ago. That was her mission, her entire objective. That was her focal point. That's why she got up. They wanted their country back.

They wanted the nation of Awad back. The princess had passed the years trying to preserve the history of Awad. She'd spent her days inside the lodge, bent over a stone slab, writing the family story over and over and over. And she made a book and asked them to read some of its passages aloud, which pleased Her Royal Highness.

And she smiled. I mean, there was no smile before. She smiled. And then the princess, with a kind of wave of her hand, indicated that Cyrus should take them on a tour of the lodge. They made their way to the roof. We went down corridors. Many of these corridors had huge wasp's nests.

Through wasp's nests and bee stings. I got stung several times by it. I was in quite a lot of pain. And once they got there, Cyrus told them that this was his kingdom. And then he put his arms around the shoulders of both men as they stared out at it. I looked to the side, and I noticed he was wearing

like a four-carat diamond earring. It was one in both ears. We stood on the roof, and we could see, it was the evening now, looking down, we could see sort of Delhi below. He stood in the middle of us and he put his arm, one around Sachin, one around me, and he said, I want you guys to have all this when we're gone. And I said, well, you know, that's very sweet of you, but have a jungle with all that. But anyway, it was an emotional moment.

It was almost like he had done something in bringing us to the princess. The princess had made a very detailed and quite, you know, a very detailed and quite detailed... Nick described this as one of the most extraordinary days of his life. So one day at the very end of May, that time of year in Delhi when it just becomes dazzlingly, blindingly hot, I walked through the door of my office.

The news that morning was another border incident between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. And I was trying to figure out how we would cover it when I got that message from our office manager. Ellen, have you been trying to get in touch with the royal family of Awadh? There was a call from Princess Sakina Mehle, or her secretary, I guess. The secretary left precise instructions on when you should call her. Between 11 and 12 noon. when you should call her. Between 11 and 12 now.

I was going into the forest in the middle of the city for an audience with a princess. It's the time of year when everyone is traveling, or running around getting thoughtful gifts for the people you care about. Think about giving yourself the gift of an Audible membership. Now is the best time to do it, with a special offer of 53% off your first three months. For a limited time, you can get three months of Audible for just $6.95 a month. Visit audible.com slash JunglePrince or text JunglePrince to 500500.