The Daily - The Jungle Prince, Chapter 3: A House in Yorkshire

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

In a ruined palace in the woods, rummaging through discarded papers, our reporter finds a clue.For more information, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

So I kept hearing about this family from a long time back. And they were kind of semi-mythical figures themselves. But I still don't know the true story of what happened to them. There was a lovely quote I read somewhere by the American Sanskrit scholar, Wendy Doniger. Myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. The great myths may help survivors to think through this unthinkable catastrophe, to make sense by analogy, drawing some sort of truth out of the chaos of life. Chapter 3, A House in Yorkshire Please do not leave your luggage unattended in the station. Luggage unattended.

A few days after I got back to London, I hopped on a train for Bradford in Yorkshire. It was farther north than I had ever been in England. When I got off the train, it was a blustery, rainy day. I walked from the bus stop past takeout Chinese, bedding parlors, vape shops, rows and rows of nearly identical brick houses. Their house is right next to a business hall. Until I finally reached the address on the Western Union slips, the home of Shahid Butt, the man who identified himself as Cyrus's brother.

In front of me stood a neat small house with a trim patch of lawn. The yard was full of garden statues. There must have been at least 40 of them. There were gnomes, fairies, buddhas, leprechauns. As I stood there, I realized how nervous I was. I paced in front of the house a little bit. It was just me and the gnomes. Hey look, it's Ellen Berry from the New York Times. Hi Ellen. Good luck in there, Ellen. And then I finally worked up the courage to ring the bell and waited.

The door was opened by a big man in one-piece tiger print pajamas. He looked to be in his mid-80s. His eyes were cloudy with age. But he was still imposing, barrel-chested, with hands that seemed twice the size of normal hands. I could see that as a young man, he had been a giant. But the thing that struck me most of all is that he had Cyrus's face. The same jutting cheekbones, the same pale skin.

I introduced myself and told him why I was there. I had known his brother. I wanted to understand the story of their family. A little to my surprise, he stepped back from the door and gestured for me to come in. And I followed him into a small room at the front of the house. He laid down on a cot and motioned for me to sit. Do you have the flu? Pains. on a cot and motioned for me to sit. Do you have the flu? Most of the show is developing so fast today. Do you have any pains?

Do you have any pain? Ha! The TV was on and he turned his head toward it. He didn't seem particularly eager to converse. So here I was. I put down my bag and looked around. The room was narrow, crowded with furniture, and had a window facing onto the front yard. Beside his bed, I saw something. Two framed photos of an imposing-looking woman in a sari. It was Velayat, the Begum of Avad.

I'd seen those pictures before. Cyrus had them. We sat like this for a while, and I asked him about his health. Is that from, did you get that joint pain from your work? Oh, yeah. And then I started to gently prod him about his family. But when I mentioned Cyrus, he looked at me blankly.

He didn't know him as Cyrus or Prince Cyrus or Prince anything. Instead, his name was Mickey. Mickey Butt. I asked him about his mother's claim to Avat, but he was vague and trailed off,

saying he was confused in his old age. But I could tell that the subject made him uncomfortable. Okay. So instead, I asked him about how he wound up in England in the first place. And he told me he'd left India as a teenager, left his family behind. He didn't say why, but eventually he made his way to Bradford. I was very big for my age. Ha, where his enormous build helped him get work in an iron foundry.

I should have all women, different women. Every time I tried to steer the conversation back to the royal family of Avad, he'd say some version of this. This is what the main thing I'm saying. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. I want to forget what people are trying to remind me. Yeah. I want to forget what people are trying to remind me. I'm like a bird long, long, lost bird, lost land. I don't want to revise my past. I don't know how long I had been sitting there when his wife, Camelia, walked in with a bustle of shopping bags and a yappy white dog.

I explained to her why I was there to talk about Shahid's family. And then Shahid said something about wanting to go feed his chickens and left me alone with Camelia. So your statues, are they yours or Shahid's? Those, the dogs. No, all of them, because you have a huge collection of statues. She was a brisk, chatty Lancashire woman. Do you want some coffee or tea?

Tea, sure. Tea would be fine. Why don't you let me help you? No, I'm just... woman. She made me a cup of tea and we sat down to talk. I asked her about her life with Shahid. Camelia and Shahid had met in 1968. She said in those days he could fight four men at one time. And he would say, before I die, three of you will. He was a lunatic. He was the lion of a man. She reported that he had a 46-inch chest and a 32-inch waist.

His arms were absolutely huge. I was told that once, as a young man, Shahid had been run over by a car, then rose to his feet, pulled the driver out of the car, and punched him in the face. Are you joking? No. The neighborhood kids used to call him Tarzan. Yeah. Very brave. There was no fear whatsoever in him. I wonder what that's like to be a giant. When Camelia and Shahid had first married, she corresponded with her new mother-in-law and was impressed by all the talk about Avad.

She told me she was a direct descendant. Yeah, that was her claim. To this warrior queen. Yeah, Hazrat Maham. But as time went on, she had become more sceptical. And Shahid didn't have many answers. I don't know whether Shahid would have blocked this out. Yeah.

Because he keeps telling me he has memory lapses, but he doesn't because I can ask him places from the 1960s and he can remember everything. I think it's selective memory loss. It seemed that during their 48 years of marriage, Shahid had said very little about his mother's claim. But she never stopped wanting to know more. Is this something that you openly debate with him? very little about his mother's claim. But she never stopped wanting to know more. Is this something that you openly debate with him? No. He just doesn't want to talk about it?

No, he doesn't want to speak about it. Especially not about Sakina and Mickey. He did send money. I told her everything. About how I had become friends with Cyrus, who they knew as Mickey. I told her everything. About how I had become friends with Cyrus, who they knew as Mickey. And he would go so quickly through the forest that I almost had to run to keep up with him. About how he had been living in the last years of his life.

And about how confused I was by the story of their family. I took out some of the newspaper clippings to show her. A palace is all that they want. The statesman, 1978. That in itself is ridiculous. A palace is all that everybody wants. As we spoke, I realized that she was as perplexed by this whole thing as I was. Where has he got this Cyrus name from? I don't know, where did he get Cyrus? You think it could have been Valiant's invention? Do I?

Yeah. It was definitely embellished. Ha. Yes. Well, they said things like her suicide was she crushed diamonds and she drank the crushed diamonds. This is not, this can't be true. That hasn't been proven.

But also it sounds like a fairy tale. But who was the bearer? I had at last found someone who shared my fascination with the family. A co-conspirator. It's a very interesting story. But neither of us knew quite what kind of a story it was. What is true and what isn't. Exactly. Right.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Back in London, I spent most of my time in the parliamentary hamster wheel of Brexit. But whenever I got the chance, I researched the family's history. Then, occasionally, I'd take the train to visit Shahid and Camelia. I've got lots of things. Shaw had seemed increasingly worn down.

Should we ask him? Camellia, by contrast, was full of piss and vinegar. No, you can't go in 10 minutes. She's come to talk to you. You'll have to go later today. She would sit with me, gently prodding him to remember those early years with his mother. Good girl. She fished out old letters that they had received from Delhi.

Letters from years ago, when Mickey still called himself Mickey. And they referred to their mother as Mommy. There is bordering on the ridiculous. So I'm on my way to Bradford. I guess Shahid is not well. He had a fall. It was on my fourth visit to Bradford that something seemed to break loose for Shahid. On that visit, he told me a story that was different from anything he had told me before. It was a story about his family's experience of partition.

This was right after World War II. Great Britain had mobilized India's resources to fight that war, and in exchange, had promised the country full independence. So once the war ended, Britain had to make good on its promise. At Delhi, Lord Louis Mountbatten arrives to take up his appointment as India's viceroy and governor general. The government instructed its new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, to deliver India's independence and get Britain out

as quickly and smoothly as possible, to find the least worst way to retreat from India. Religious violence was breaking out across the country. And Muslims were demanding a state of their own. And so the British decided to create not one country, but two. India would be majority Hindu.

Pakistan would be majority Muslim. Mountbatten had a year to divide things up. But he also had a promotion in the Navy that he wanted to get back to. He moved the deadline up by 10 months and appointed another official, a legal scholar, who had never set foot in India, to carve up the territory instead. He gave him five weeks to do it. So he drew the lines and set in motion one of the largest forced migrations in human history. For Shahid's family, prosperous, educated Muslims, it meant the end of life as they knew it.

Shahid's father had a plum job as the registrar of Lucknow University in India. But he wanted to join the stream of Muslims headed for Karachi, Pakistan, where they would make up the government of a brand-new country. But his mother, Vilayat, flatly refused to go. All the relatives I spoke with remembered her as a fiery, forceful woman. Lucknow was her home. She didn't want to give up her elegant house, which overlooked one of the palaces of the city's great hero,

the Nawab of Abad. The family was deadlocked. And then, an event decided it for them. Inayat Butt, Shahid's father, was riding his bicycle home one day when he was stopped by a group of young Hindu men. They began to whack him over the head with hockey sticks. Someone drew a knife, and by the time he got home,

this is what Shahid said, his hand was cut to the bone. As he described it, I could almost see it. This distinguished man, his spectacles askew, knocked to the ground. And so a decision was made. Shahid's family was going to Pakistan. They were among the 15 million who were uprooted from their homes by partition. Muslims headed for Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs headed in the other direction. Trains of refugees going to and from Pakistan arrived loaded with corpses.

The passengers slaughtered by mobs along the way. Partition has become a byword for horror. In his book about partition, Nisid Hajari described it this way. An appalling slaughter ensued. Unending waves of refugees watched over the East Punjab. They left grim reminders of their passage. Trees stripped of bark, which they peeled off in great chunks to use as fuel, dead and dying bullocks, cattle and sheep, and thousands and thousands of corpses lying alongside the road or buried shallowly. Vultures feasted so extravagantly they could no longer fly. So-called corpse trains

rolled into Lahore Station, dripping blood. The carriages filled and hacked off limbs and women without breasts or noses and babies hacked off tails. Infants were found literally roasted. The conflagration stands

as one of the deadliest and most brutal civil conflicts of the 20th century. There are no good estimates of how many people died. But Shahid and his family made it through. They set up a new household in Karachi. His older brothers joined the Pakistani Air Force, and his father, according to relatives, got a new job in the Civil Aviation Authority. But there was still no peace in the house. Shahid said his mother was angry. She was angry about what had been taken from her, what she was forced to leave behind in India. She wouldn't accept it.

She lobbied Pakistani officials for her lost properties. And then one day, Shahid said, she crossed a line. I've heard versions of this story from almost everyone I've contacted. And I'm piecing it together. There was a scene in a public place. Vilayat confronted a government official,

maybe even the prime minister, at a public event and demanded the return of her property. Whatever the official said in response, it didn't go well. She slapped him. And then this proud, defiant woman was arrested, confined for six months to a mental hospital, and, one relative told me, was treated with electroshock therapy. Shahid was still young when this happened. What was the hospital like? It was horrible. Tell me.

Medieval. On my last visit with him, as Camelia and I sat by his bed, he remembered visiting his mother in what was then known as the Punjab Mental Asylum. He recalled one girl who had been bound to the wall with four chains, two on her hands, two on her feet, spitting furiously at anyone who walked by. His mother was no longer fiery. She did not protest.

And what was her state? Was she still as fiery? Or was she quiet, subdued? Or? Was she still as fiery? Or was she quiet, subdued? Shahid said she just sat in a chair, quiet. Did they put her there to teach her a lesson? I think so. I think it was to quieten her. It was clear from the look on his face that all these years later, he had not quite recovered. He never told you about the mental hospital?

No. Never spoke about it to me before. Who was it? It was sometime after she was released from the institution, Shahid couldn't say exactly when, that she decided to return to India. She told relatives she was going back to retrieve her property. Some of them had the sense that she was going to pursue a career in politics. She packed her household belongings in trunks and gathered together her youngest children. Family said she smuggled them across the border illegally.

Shahid was one of the children she took, the oldest. But somewhere along that journey, Shahid said it was in Bombay. He decided he couldn't go along with his mother anymore. At one point, Vilayat asked him to go out and buy bananas. She gave him some money, and he took the money in his hand, walked out onto the street, and never came back. He didn't give them any explanation, and he never saw his mother again. And it's sometime after that that Vilayat Butt and her two youngest children, Mickey and Farhad Butt, appeared at the railway station and set up a home in the VIP waiting room.

She was no longer the wife of a university registrar. Her children were no longer citizens of Pakistan. They had new names, new titles, and a single impossible mission. They were now the royal family of Avad. But I guess what I wonder is, do you think that it was partition that ruined your mother's life? Yes? Why?

How? Because she had to go to Pakistan. Yeah. Why did that ruin her life? Well, we had to start all over again. You had to start all over again. We had everything. You had everything. But your mother wasn't happy.

We were all surviving. Who knows about happy or unhappy? We were all surviving. Who knows about happy or unhappy? Shahid wouldn't say much more. His storehouse of memories seemed to shut just as quickly as it had opened. just as quickly as it had opened. He wouldn't watch Petition, you know, last year.

Oh, really? I had every programme on that was on about it, and I said, Shai, come and look at... No, no, I don't want... No, I was there, I don't want to see it on TV he just did not want to see it it's not like Germany where there's been lots and lots

of processing of this is what the deaths were and who killed them and who's responsible and how we can deal with the history, it's almost like it all just got papered over yeah in some ways you could understand Almost like it all just got papered over. Yeah. In some ways, you could understand Vilayet's anger.

I find it very, very sad. But it also consumed her children. I think what started off as a ruse became too big for them. Or became the reality for them? Or just was a ruse that they had to continue until the end? Yeah, and then it became a way of life. Well I suppose once you've sacrificed 20 years of your life to an idea, to admit that it was all... It can become part of your life then and you can you can half believe it do you do you live the life that long that you you have to believe it though what So he does all of the unclaimed bodies.

After Cyrus died, I tried to find out where he was buried. The police who came to collect his body at the hunting lodge couldn't identify any next of kin or any friend or even any acquaintance. So they assigned his body a number, DD33B, and sent it to a pauper's graveyard on the edge of Old Delhi, an expanse of uneven, scrubby land beside a cricket stadium. When an unclaimed body, like Cyrus's, comes in, they bury them wherever there's an empty space, between other graves. The land is porous, so the bodies sink, and they bury other bodies over them. They mark these graves with a shard of pink rock,

and that's all. So there was no way to know where Cyrus was. I wandered around for some time, from one mound to another, and then sat down next to a tree. I took out my notebook and wrote, He's lost in a city of the dead. The story I had to tell about him was grim as well.

Not of a returning warrior queen, but of two children who followed their mother into the woods and never came out. Cyrus would have hated that story. I was unraveling the central work of his family's life. I walked back to the entrance of the cemetery and asked the clerk to look through his records of unclaimed bodies one more time

on the off chance that I could find him and at least mark his grave and that's when I noticed a man sitting in the room listening to us intently he was wearing a voluminous, cheap-looking tweed jacket and he had a squiff of jet-black dyed hair bobbing over his forehead. He stood up and introduced himself, rather formally. He handed me a plastic folder.

It was filled with newspaper clippings about Cyrus's death. He told me that he carries the clippings around with him every day. In Old Delhi, he told me, this was the only topic of conversation from street to street and from house to house. People were saying, such a big king passed away like this in such a way that nobody knew him. How can the scion of such an illustrious royal family

get lost in the darkness of oblivion? The man had become visibly distraught and began to recite verses of Urdu poetry, asking God why he had done such a thing, brought low the rulers of Avad. Because they all knew the story. Fifty years ago, a woman appeared on a train platform. She had been dispossessed. Her family had been torn in half. She had come to reclaim what had been taken from her. The people who came to see her, they were also dispossessed.

Their families had also been torn in half. They were also dispossessed. Their families had also been torn in half. And this man in front of me had revered the royal family for so long. The story had sounded a note within him. He would be telling it for years. It would be passed among tea sellers and auto rickshaw drivers, the story about the prince who lived in a palace,

in the jungle, in the middle of the city. And they'll be telling that story long after my story has come and gone. I will be I, I, I cannot forget you. Most welcome whenever you feel like your death. So it's all good. Well, I'm not leaving yet. I'm just thinking about the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

But one more thing. I really want that it should crumble. If it hasn't crumbled for the last 600 years it's not going to crumble this week. Yeah, very true, very true. You found yourself a very stable castle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I have a roof, a very strong roof, that's all. And a pillar to hide, and a pillar to protect myself and that's all. Well, it's something to be proud of. Not everyone lives in a place like this. You see a little light over there in that arc, just turn. I do. Where is that from? Is it just a reflection? That's what the main candlelight. Wait, wait.

I want to see whether it is still on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How often do you put on candles? Candles over there. You come and see what I've done. It's a very strong pillar over there. So I do place over there. That's a natural one.

So this, I like. And we don't want that anyone should copy us. Copy us. So, the learning is very important. It's very romantic. Very romantic. You can take it for a trip. Yes, I allow.

I think it's too dark. But anyway, take it from your mobile network. This is not a be-all and end-all. Naturally be-all and end-all. I don't understand. Since you stay up so late at night, how do you manage without light? Well, you know, one thing I can do. Usually I just put a... I don't know.

Usually. So your eyes are just... I love you. The Jungle Prince was produced by Lindsay Garrison and Sindhu Yanasamuddin. Edited by Wendy Doerr, Lisa Tobin, and Mike Benoit. Original music by Brad Fisher and Dan Powell. Mixed by Brad Fisher and Dan Powell Mixed by Brad Fisher and Dan Powell Special thanks to Jim Yardley Michael Slackman Christine Kay

Suhasini Raj Stella Tan Julia Simon Shalini Venugupal Supriya Sopti Nisit Hajari Salimim Kidwai, William Dalrymple, Leonie Brookstra, and Michael Simon-Johnson. Thank you.