Hope Cooke

Her description of how India annexed Sikkim seems accurate enough. Having seen that "palace", I can imagine how claustrophobic her life must have been. And her comments about how Sikkim was developing continue to be accurate.

The perennial description of her as a "socialite" isn't accurate. Yes, her family was well-off and she attended private schools and Sarah Lawrence. But she didn't have expensive habits or trifling interests or socialite friends (they included the actress Jane Alexander). She had lived in Iran (with an ambassador uncle)and was a very serious student of Asian philosophy, arts and religion, likely heading for grad school. Not so common for a woman in the 1950's.

But she ends up agreeing to marry the much older widowed king of Sikkim on second meeting (the first was at the Windermere). And you never get a clue why. He's cheating on her even as they are engaged (with a European woman) and the affair seems to continue for years. You never get a clue what they talk about. She mentions that her husband and the Sikkimese drink a lot, then there's the affair(s) so I don't know how serious he was about Buddhist practice. And what's with the in-laws who have been separated since forever?

I kept thinking of that smallish house. It wasn't like she could even go to Darjeeling and be inconspicuous. She'd have to go all the way to Calcutta, which in those days would be a long day's drive, or a drive and then hours on the train.

It's not like Sikkim or Tibetan Buddhism were her strongest interests but, regardless, most of that intellectual curiosity seems to instantly evaporate on marriage. She's already got a young, speaking son (5 or 7?) when she says, in an aside, that she still doesn't speak Bhutia. And what of Nepali? What's the attitude to the language of the majority immigrants?

Despite the overseas trips, which must have been expensive in the day because of plane flights, the family lives quite modestly by the standards of, say, The Thai upper-middle-class today. They have old cars. When they stay in England,they rent a dinky apartment and welcome Sikkimese students in school there. They also had a apartment in Calcutta for a while but it's not luxurious. I don't think they even had air-con.

Strange story. What happened to her?… (mehr)