AUG 31- Her wedding was watched by 700 million people around the world and her funeral, by 2.5 billion people.
What can be written about someone who was chased in life, death and beyond? What tale is obscured from the world? Probably none, probably all.
Fairytale bride, estranged wife, divorced mother- princess of hearts, Princess Diana died 16 years ago, on August 31, 1997, in Paris in what the world calls a tragic accident, barring some, who claim it was murder by the royals’ secret services.
Lady Diana Spencer would never have fathomed her life would be as tempestuous, as it turned out to be, when she faced the press for the first time after her engagement to Prince Charles. The year was 1981.
An evidently blushing, giggling and besotted Diana had said they were very much in love. “Whatever in-love means,” was Charles’ reply.
In 1995, though, BBC’s historic Panoroma interview to Martin Bashir, saw an austere and dismal Diana, with almost a ghostly presence, reflecting a person who was barricading an inundating stream of emotions.
“At the age of 19, you always think you’re prepared for everything. Although I was daunted at the prospect of marriage, I felt I had the support of my husband-to-be,” she had told Martin Bashir.
Diana had metamorphosed. From an unsophisticated kindergarten teacher to a beguiling royal wife to a bulimic woman to a humanitarian. What had happened in between those 14 years?
Rewind
“What a stupid man,” Diana, 16, had thought when she first met Prince Charles, who was then dating her older sister Sarah, at her ancestral house in Althorp in 1977.
Two years later, though, when the much sought-after Charles was hammered to find a suitable bride, an artless, fresh and unglamorous, Diana somehow flickered an interest in him.
After seven months of dating, in which they met just 13 times, Charles asked her the question that millions of girls had bestrewn their lives around.
Diana bid adieu to her unassuming, shared flat in Kensington to move in with the Royal Family when her newly-acquired personal policeman said the words that were to vanquish her life, and death.
“This is the last night of your freedom, ever, in the rest of your life. So make the most of it”.
Five weeks into the engagement, Diana developed an eating disorder, bulimia. NBC’s documentary, Princess Diana: The Secret Tapes revealed that some time before their betrothal, Charles had put his hand on her waist and said “Oh, a bit chubby here aren’t we?”
A day before her wedding, she told her sister “I can’t do this.” As she walked out of the royal carriage on her wedding day, she felt like a lamb to the slaughter. Deathly calm.
As Diana trotted down the aisle, she spotted her. Pale grey, pill box hat.
Away from the impeccable public facade of royal chimera, lay a covert saga of betrayal. And at the apex of it all was one woman, Camilla Parker Bowles.
But, Diana was optimistic. She felt she was the luckiest girl in the world. And she fairly believed that after her wedding, her ever-burgeoning suspicions about Charles’ former lover and her husband-to-be would die an impetuous death.
Only to be mistaken.
“There were three people in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” Diana had told Bashir.
Why did Charles not marry Camilla?
Charles couldn’t marry the very ‘earthy’, but non-aristocratic Camilla as she was not ‘princess material’. Diana, much later, had jokingly told a friend that she’d lost to a woman with “bad teeth and dandruff”.
But his love for Camilla was undying, as the world knows now. It only became known to the public after a licentious scandal, Camillagate, rattled Britain’s royal reverie in 1989.
Intimate, tampon-laced conversations between him and his lover, bared to the world the veracity behind the relationships in the Royal House, and that Princess Diana’s instincts and conjectures weren’t a sign of an ‘unstable’ person, like some would have loved to believe.
Charles’ love for Camilla was enduring and Diana’s quest for love, palliative.
Britain’s kindergarten-teacher-swept-off-her-feet-by-a-prince and happily-ever-after dreams were annihilated. The royal couple separated in 1992.
Diana’s unyielding probe for support began henceforth, and how.
Her quest for love
Cavalry officer James Hewitt, the only adulterous relationship she admitted to, went on to churn millions out of ‘Princess in Love’, a book he wrote on his affair with the princess. “I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was let down,” she had said.
Her discomforting closeness with an old friend who called her ‘squidgy’, led to the infamous ‘Squidgygate’ scandal. She was also associated with a popular rugby player and accused for the end of his marriage.
After her divorce, she met ‘Mr Wonderful’, Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who she was known to be ‘madly in love with.’
And finally, summer romance with playboy and son of Harrods’ owner Mohammed al Fayed, Dodi, blossomed on Jonikal in St. Tropez and ended with their death in Paris in 1997.
But this is not how people want to remember their entrancing princess. They were acutely biased towards her, so much so that they bought the prince’s jealousy. “She’s on the other side,” they used to say, but much to Diana’s discomfort.
Diana had divulged in copious amounts, for a royal, before her death. Why would a princess reveal what Diana had? Why did she want, with a subtle desperation, the world to hear her story?
Why would a princess reveal what Diana had?
Diana had no lovers before marriage since she felt something profound was coming her way, she fell into the beehive of a man who loved another woman and unable to bear the avalanche of agony, developed bulimia and was besmirched in the Royal House as mentally unbalanced.
The innocuous princess started loathing herself to such an extent that she cut her wrists with razor blades, scratched herself down the thighs, threw herself down when pregnant.
“The public wanted a fairy princess to come and touch them and everything would turn into gold and all their worries would be forgotten. Little did they realise that the individual who’s crucifying herself inside because she didn’t think she was good enough,” was what Diana felt.
The only right thing that happened for her in her ‘Shakespearean’ life, was her connect to the public. Midas touch, which often piqued the Establishment.
And that is why she had to tell her story before anyone else defiled her with apocryphal stories. And that’s what sprinkled magic as people empathised with their despondent princess’ travails.
Although Charles’ loyalists would often describe her as an excruciatingly needy, manipulative, often vindictive woman, also claiming that his care and affection for her was paramount. But if we believe that the pregnant princess had to schedule her delivery date according to his polo schedule, yes, it would be a cinch to seed preferences.
Was she inimical and scheming or broken and depressed? Or was she just human, a trait not expected from a royal.
Legacy
Her tragedy-hit mystical life has been stacked into myriad books, her close friend and butler Paul Burrell’s ‘A Royal Duty’ considered the closest to reality.
Another movie dares to capture her romance with Hasnat Khan. ‘Diana’, starring Naomi Watts and Naveen Andrews will hit the theatres in October, although Khan has quashed the film already, saying most of it is based on gossip.
A YouTube comment on the film’s trailer says “how beautiful was Princess Diana that I find Naomi Watts ugly.”
Well, she was the most photographed woman in the world, often considered the most beautiful. But, she did, also, reveal that her husband made her feel inadequate in every possible.
After the breakdown of her marriage, she alighted her eyes on ample directions to navigate in, but she had a unique affinity towards the world’s afflicted and disadvantaged, specially AIDS and leprosy patients. Her charity, humanitarian work fixated the spotlight on her.
It is also believed by some that prior her divorce in 1996, Diana had premonitions about her death.
In a letter dated October 1996 and written to Burrell, she says fearing her assassination, “This phase in my life is the most dangerous. They are planning an accident in my car.”
The accident took away the princess whose life was anything but a fairytale.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BjYU7Q7hqEI
INDIA TODAY
