Appointment in Calcutta

Ramendra Narayan Roy, Kumar (Prince) of Bhowal, was the despair of his tutors. When the Kumar was 25 he was--in the opinion of a learned judge reviewing his life years later--an "unlettered oaf who spent his days with stable boys and his nights with harlots."

First Call. In May, 1909, in fashionable Darjeeling, death called for Roy. His shy, modest wife, Bibhabati Devi, 19, wasted few tears, gave no thought to immolating herself in suttee. She had his body laid on a funeral pyre. Then she invited her brother to manage the Kumar's 100-square-mile Bengal estate and enjoy its $400,000-a-year income. The brother-in-law was too Westernized to spend much time with stable boys, but otherwise Roy's old tenants found him no better than Roy. In fact, they forgot about the stable boys and the harlots and took to praying that the Kumar might be resurrected.

Then in 1921, a loinclothed mendicant with long, matted hair and body smeared with ashes turned up in Dacca. Rumor said he was the dead Kumar, and the tenants rushed to hear the beggar's story. Roy (if it was the Kumar) said the brother-in-law had poisoned him in Darjeeling. As he lay, unconscious but not dead, on his funeral pyre, a great rain had revived him.

His mourners scurried away when the storm broke, but a party of naked mendicants had heard him groan and rescued him. Next morning the brother-in-law had rustled up another body to put on the pyre and finish the funeral. Shocked into amnesia, Roy had traveled and lived with the beggars for twelve years while his memory gradually returned. That was his story: now he was home.

Roy's sister and aged mother came to see the beggar who claimed to be their relative. They gave him a good bath and looked him over in the sunlight. Yes, there were the old scars. There was the Kumar's broken tooth, his birthmark and the familiar scales of the family skin disease on his feet. Reluctantly they claimed the beggar as their own.

Roy's tenants raised money among themselves to support their resurrected prince and take his case to law. For 25 years, in one Indian court after another, he fought to prove his identity; each time, Bibhabati--now 56 and no longer shy--fought against him. Finally the case reached the Privy Council, the British Empire's highest court of appeal. For four weeks the Council sifted a musty mountain of testimony, boiled the issue down to one question: did it rain in Darjeeling on May 9, 1909? Last week the Privy Council decided that it had. It ruled in Roy's favor, restored to him the privileges and wealth that rightfully belong to the Kumar of Bhowal.

Last Call. Three days later, in Calcutta, while he was receiving friends' congratulations on his hard-won fight for legal life, Roy suffered a lung hemorrhage, died the next morning. Two doctors signed his death certificate and his body was thoroughly and finally cremated at Calcutta's Keoratolla Ghat. This time witnesses stayed to the end.

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