Heavenly

HYDERABAD, INDIA
January 2003

At the end of a dusty road wide enough for three elephants abreast, which winds to the top of the hill, past the sentry post and the decrepit elaborate arched gate house, lies Falaknuma Palace, home of the Nizams, ancient rulers of the kingdom of Hyderabad. I sit at a table across from an employee of the current Nizam and sip Indian tea thick with milk and honey and spice, waiting for a private tour of the Palace. While I wait, I hold in my hands enlarged photos recently sent from the Nizam’s own collection, each carefully captioned in pencil on the back with the names of European royalty from the late 1800’s, the men imperial on noble horses and the women in ornate dresses standing on the very staircase below where I sit on the breezy marble veranda. I am trying to catch the story of this Palace, whose name falak means heaven, modified by –numa which means –ly, and of its people, particularly the current Nizam, who lives in Australia and London and wherever jet-setting royalty lives, and whom my host met once and spoke to for forty minutes during which time the Nizam asked his employee if he, the Nizam, could smoke, a fact with which my host still can’t come to terms, and his words run higher and faster as they do so often in India when the speaker is filled with emotion, until I strain to grasp this story and he has to repeat it again slower, and with less significance.

This Palace, Falaknuma, is a relic, abandoned some twenty years after being built and left to decay in the fierce heat of a hundred summers. Everything is as it was, down to the thin packets of toilet tissue in the Nizam’s private bathroom. We step, awed, through the foyer, the eyes in the paintings on the ceiling and walls following our moves, half-naked women leaping into the sea and turning to face us as we walk slowly about the room. The library is filled floor to ceiling with carved wooden bookcases, the glass fronts enclosing leather-bound books in Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and English, great works of literature, art, religion and science from all the cultures of Hyderabad. The rooms are dressed in a style at the crossroads of Victorian excess and the Indian luxury, silken draperies that hang tattered from great rods high above doorways, marble and gold leaf and rich woods lining the walls, once-thick oriental carpets now so faded and frayed the straw padding beneath is exposed, tooled wall coverings made from the leather of camels cracking in the dryness, springs in chairs pushing through the brocade upholstery.

The Palace is shaped like a scorpion crouched on the hill, and the cooling breeze for which it is named drifts through the tall narrow windows as we wander quietly from room to room in the scorpion’s belly. The ceiling fans hang motionless, and the crystal chandeliers and ornate mirrors collect a thin layer of dust. The dining hall has chairs enough for one hundred guests along an enormous table; we are told the room is designed so that a whisper at one end can be heard at the other, we try this and are amazed. There is a ballroom with a rich parquet floor and mirrors that recede into infinity in the four directions when viewed from the very center, a sitting rooms for ladies, a larger sitting room for men, a sweeping unsupported staircase which we climb clinging to the wall lined with photos of the British Viceroys of India. The furniture is of the finest inlaid woods, and the rooms are filled with delicately painted folding screens, and enameled Chinese vases, carvings of ebony and ivory and jade, and photographs of royalty: William and Mary who slept here, and Queen Victoria.

We walk outside through the tail, a vast open courtyard lined with rooms for servants and the harem, beyond the arched walkways along the sides; the façade closest to the scorpion’s head modeled on Versailles and on the other end, the White House. We open the creaking wooden doors of the White House and are on a balcony high above the ancient cow trails and tiny white plaster houses and the odd rock formations of the city beyond the Palace walls; we are in the scorpion’s sting and the tour is done.

As we walk back through the courtyard, beneath a dozen circling eagles, I begin to weep quietly, for age has softly touched this place with a worn and tender beauty that feels like peace. Once inside the cool walls, a whisper of a gaze touches me: an ancient man in flowing Muslim white. He sees my secret tears, and the fingers of his cupped right hand brush his lips behind the beard, and he slowly places them across his heart, while the gentle wind of heaven flows through me.