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Magazine
Jottings
Princess Di and I
INDU BALACHANDRAN
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The story of two expectant lives…
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Somehow, my thrilled mother-in-law was convinced that our impregnated states were divinely linked.
Photo: AFP
Parallel lives: Of mothers and sons...Waxwork reproduction of Diana and Prince William at Madame Tussauds.
Roughly around the same time, Princess Diana and I got pregnant.
While my mother-in-law greeted me outside the doctor’s waiting room with a huge smile of approval, Princess Diana, I remember, got world press.
“Mum’s The Word!” “A Prince for the Princess?” and other such witty headlines trumpeted the good news all around us. We, however, stuck to simple hand-written letters to our elders declaring that there was some “good news” regarding myself…
Somehow, my thrilled mother-in-law was convinced that our impregnated states were divinely linked. And I would have whatever variety of baby Lady Di had. Just see. Eagerly we followed every bit of the royal expectee’s trimesters. We knew all the colours of Diana’s designer smocks. I too secretly made myself a billowing, blue knee-length dress with white collars for my late evening walks. I looked quite like a housemaid from Bandra. Meanwhile, Diana’s blue-smocked walk was featured in every TV fashion channel.
Google not having made an appearance in our lives yet, I used to search furtively in foreign magazines like People at airport bookshops, for parallels in our expectant lives. I had a craving for ice cream: bowls and bowls of vanilla. Did she too?? (Only later, much later, I read that it was her bonny Prince hubby that had a craving: bowles and bowles of Camilla…)
Parallel lives
Then magazines wrote all about her baby shower. I had a shower too — the kind that involved water — a sort of ritualistic public bathing, in a new Kanjeevaram sari. Many happy elderly ladies sprinkled sacred water on my head, as I sat on the ground amidst fruit and flowers and incense, like a very large bangle-wearing cow. “May you have a boy!” they wished for me unanimously. (“But what if Diana has a girl? Then?” I wondered silently in my head.)
I must tell you now that ours is a hugely girl-dominated family. I’m one of three girls. And my elder sister too had a talent for producing only girls. My first-born is a girl. Now, while the girl-child is definitely a loved, treasured and celebrated variety of progeny with us, it’s time, thought the elders, “for a change”. Several prayers were going up to assorted gods and goddesses that this time they must definitely send our family “a male issue”.
Speaking of issues, the June 1982 issue of People, The Sun, Daily Mirror, Time, Cosmopolitan and even our good old Kumudam were going berserk with joyful impatience. Any day now! The royal would pop!
Boy or girl? Girl or boy? The world breathlessly waited.
Waddling in slow heavy steps to my living room TV, I too waited breathlessly. Only my breathlessness was due mostly to a common final trimester condition. Hey, I began to wonder suddenly. What if it was the other way round? What if Diana was destined to have whatever gender of baby I had?! Already, so many powerful mantras had been murmured by several devout elders for eight long months…
Shortly after Diana’s water bag broke, the news also broke in every single news channel around the world.
IT’S A BOY!
Time to celebrate
All the servants in our house got large laddus from my mother-in-law. Diana had not let her down. Now we too could go right ahead and only look at the boys’ names list in our house.
A beaming Diana and her baby were flashed soon after everywhere and she looked as radiant as if she’d just stepped out of a beauty salon, not the hospital. Right then I was in that bizarre state when a single word “bloat”could describe my face, my waist, my arms, my feet, and most inexplicably, my nose too.
And then quite suddenly, it was TIME…
I was screaming so loudly it may have been heard all the way in Kensington Palace where Diana was prettily powdering her baby. While I screamed, my mother-in-law beamed: all was going perfectly according to plan.
And then my son was born.
Some day, I had hoped to personally tell Diana that her production of a son and heir was all due mainly to my grandmother offering a garland of vadas around a powerful deity’s neck, and making a fervent wish. For me.
Anyway, languishing in a horrendous post-natal state in my hospital bed (how did Diana manage to go home looking so trim and gorgeous the very next day? I would probably lie here like a beached whale for a week…) I craned my neck sideways to watch the latest royalty footage on my hospital room’s TV monitor. Diana’s son was being christened! He was named after a King. William.
Immediately we grabbed our own name list, scanning it for right royal kingly names too. Indian kings, of course.
And that’s how my son got to be named Kanishka.
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