The Palace Courtyard

Ajji tried her very best to stop panting and match her 12 year old grandson's ebullient and unstoppable run across the vast and sprawling courtyards of one of India's magnificent palaces---the Mysore Palace. Amma sat in the garden outside and was generally bored. She and my father had made so many trips to this palace and the city---thanks to the pressures of their son--- that almost every brick there seemed familiar.

"Look here, if you continue to run this way, i am not coming with you to the library", Ajji's terse statement halted my gallop. I needed her help and she knew it. That she had convinced me to stop and keep pace with her brought a triumphant smile on her face. Thanks to the connections that my father had in the Mysore Palace, given his eminence in the bank, we were led to an old and dusty library in the basement of the Palace. It was dingy and grimy and the people there wore a long and disinterested look on their faces. History stood frozen in the many shelves of that old library and that they sat guarding a mortuary didnt make them feel too nice about themselves!

After a few niceties, Ajji got one of the manuscripts out from the shelves. Given as i was to dust allergy, i burst out with an outpour of sneezes. That didnt distract Ajji though. With single-mindedness she turned a few pages and came straight to the chapter titled 'Immadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar' and flipped through it and also found mention of Maharani Lakshmammanni. She was convinced that this was what we were looking for. WHile i looked at her questioningly with my pen and writing pad ready to copy down whatever she dictated, the history of Mysore's Kings seemed to open itself in front of my little eyes, slowly and softly.

It was just a few months back that on one of the Saturday nights Sanjay Khan's magnum opus 'The Sword of Tipu Sultan' had made its presence felt on national television. The serial had kindled enough public interest, many times for all the wrong reasons--a fire accident, an unknown and seldom spoken hero, a Hindi serial on a south indian king...I was in class 6 those days and though i loved stories of Kings and Queens, thanks to Ajji's marathon story-telling sessions, the idea of History as a subject in school was dreadful. It was a humungous exercise for the neurons memorizing dates and wars and blah...who planted how many trees, how the kingdom was divided into X, Y, Z administrative units, which poet wrote which poem under which king----overall a bunch of completely irrelevant information pushed down our little throats. But a serial based on history would be any child's delight and i too sat through with stars in my eyes.

But 3-4 episodes down the line, a strange and comical figure caught my attention. An obsese and slightly retard looking King dressed in gawdy silks and his wife whose eyebrows twitched like some of the vamps in today's K-series serials made me nudge Ajji and my mother about who these characters were. They just stared silently at the TV and said to one another--What a shame! how can they show the Maharaja of Mysore and his wife this way? My dad, a Tamilian and usually inimical to all things Karnataka (!), was also candid enough to say--but wasnt Jayachamaraja Wodeyar a great man, even a road is named after him in Bangalore. While their conversation carried on, i watched the buffoon on television trying to even dance with the court dancer and in comparison to such a weakling was the brave, handsome and young Haidar Ali---who certainly won my mother's admiration:-)

For many days after that, i kept asking Ajji to tell me more about these so-called "great Maharajas" of Mysore. She told me what little she knew but then realised that by then her grandson had become restless. She managed to find out the name of the King and Queen who were shown in the serial (the serial didnt even bother taking their names or when they did, it was plain wrong!) and one fine day said "why dont we go to mysore and see what is written about these people? "
Mysore!!! woow! that would mean a nice vacation and i jumped at the idea...so the very next holiday, we were off to Mysore, to start what began then as a little voyage of discovery !