ancient mounds overlooking an oxbow lake – dating back to Mahabharat times, according to legend – a road through a 500 acre forest leads to the palace. and it’s on this road that my raja would take me out for flexing my – rather long – legs.
Once in a while we would go for a drive, passing by several old temples and palaces in the lush green undulating countryside, getting occasional glimpses of the swift and wide Sharda river as it flowed down from the hills of Kumaon.

partition separating the rear section from the chauffeur’s cabin – would communicate with Naim via a set of buttons marked left, right, quick, slowly, turn, home and stop, which when pressed would light up the corresponding tell-tale sign in the dashboard for Naim to know what the master wanted. Life went peacefully and I had a relaxed time, being used sparingly for special occasions, as the raja had other cars to ferry him around. But around 1935 there was a flurry of activity, and

emperor, Sultan Mourad V. As the 33rd sultan he had a rather short session at ruling the empire – just 93 days in 1886 before being deposed on the grounds that he was mentally unsound. Mourad lived on till 1904, marrying several women and having many children, of whom Selma’s mother, Princess Hadice Sultana, was the only issue of his third wife, Sahcan Kadin.
The marriage was an arranged one. And again, listening in to Selma’s conversation, I suspect that her cousins,

years later, the palace and the region would provide the picturesque locations for the raja’s son, Muzaffar Ali’s films such as Umrao Jaan, Gaman, Aagaman, Anjuman and Zooni, other than serials like Husne Jaana. Incidentally, I provided the inspiration for Muzaffar’s film company’s name, Integrated Films or IF! But i’m getting ahead of myself. Back in India, chauffeuring duties befell a six-footer from Garhi Bhilwal, Naim. And the raja, ensconced in the rear compartment – a sliding glass

then I heard that the raja had stood for state legislative elections as an independent candidate. He went on to win comfortably, becoming a member of the legislative assembly for the state of Uttar Pradesh, a position that he kept getting elected to, till 1952.
It was in early 1937 that the raja got married to a beautiful woman from Turkey called Selma Rauf Hanim Sultana. Overhearing a conversation between the raja and her I gathered that Selma was the grand-daughter of the Ottoman

Princess Nilüfer and Durreshevar, probably had something to do with the matchmaking, as both of them had had arranged marriages to the sons of the Nizam of Hyderabad.
With the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, eight-year-old Princess Selma and her mother became another victim of history, fleeing Istanbul, in 1924, for Beirut. With her father abandoning them, it became increasingly difficult for them to make two ends meet and so Selma’s mother thought it best to get her