THE MEGHANDRAMA: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FALL INTO THE CRACKS

SANGEETA WADDHWANI ZOOMS IN ON THE ‘DRAMA DUCHESS’ AFTER A CLOSE LOOK AT HER PREDECESSORS AND THEIR TRAJECTORIES

“I was told to lie low…one can’t just call an uber and go out!”shared Meghan Markle with Oprah Winfrey. It may sound trivial but as an independent career woman one gets her…

So whether or not we swallow every utterance of the Meghan narrative, one thing my years covering royal stories does reveal to be true. Being a royal figure makes you public property. You live in a gilded palace, maybe, but in actuality it is a fairytale only for the cameras. I am still digesting what I heard in the Harry and Meghan exclusive with Oprah, when she stated that she had stepped out of Buckingham Palace but twice in four months, when the media was baying for her blood. . It was life in permanent lockdown mode! One recalls the same notion of controlling women of high births in different cultures around the world. In China, princesses had their feet tied from childhood to keep their feet under- developed and fragile. In India, princesses wore payals (euphemistic chains) so their movements could be tracked.

The loneliness at Buckingham Palace must have been real, because in a documentary called The Wives of The House of Windsor, we see that Princess Di also found the palace empty and boring, full of suffocating protocol. She was used to sharing an apartment with four girlfriends…a happy Bachelorette existence, free of cameras and the bloodhound paparazzi. Instead now, she may have the best wardrobe in the world, and chauffeur driven stretch limos, but an empty heart with an emotionally unavailable husband who slept with her but once in three weeks…

With Meghan, at least the marriage was authentic. But her mixed heritage? Unforgivable! Is it not ironic, when the world looks at London as a cultural melting pot, far too evolved to make race a point of discrimination…that at its heart the very institution of British monarchy could not really move with the times? Yes Meghan was not the virginal 19-year-old Princess Di…! But her ‘otherness’ was a chink they could plunge into. So while the British took their tea, their cotton vests, their paisley upholstery, their spices from people of rich colours, such colours didn’t make sense in the royal bloodstream!

In a sense I could feel Meghan’s humiliation when questions about the baby’s skin colour arose. So much for deep humanism and all its posturing when the royals go out on military missions, or charity balls, or go looking for ways to uplift the people of the Commonwealth countries. Somewhere coloured people are to them, a species apart. To be helped, sure (after historical exploitation) but not to include in their blue blooded blueprint. Remember Shilpa Shetty being told she smelled like a curry in the Big Boss house by Jade Goody? Cancer swallowed up Jade and Shilpa subsequently shook hands with an anti-rascist Queen…but now we see that these are mere tokenisms.

I was stunned when Harry shared that they left the House of Windsor only with the funds Princess Di left for him. It was chilling when he shared, “Somewhere she must have foreseen this.” How empty are all the grand gestures of a royal family that disinherits a Prince because he followed his heart? It was kind of naughty of Oprah to point out how Harry and Meghan’s royal blueprint was enough branding for them to multiply their wealth…which he gamely shared happened by default. But then honestly, who would blame them?

Here’s what I see as the real Meghan narrative. She did have a productive, exciting, independent life as an actress. Do note she earned US$ 50,000 per episode of SUITS. She earned US$ 23 000 per week on Deal Or No Deal (which had her on set at 5.30am, filming 7 episodes a day). She earned US$ 300 per day earlier in her career, for work on Tori Amos’ 1000 Oceans video. And going further back, she earned US$ 4 a day, working at Humphrey Yogurt!

She was enticed by the Fairytale when she met her Prince Charming. She thought – like many women do when they enter into the patriarchal structure of a powerful family – that she will strike a balance between her royal identity and herself. But when the press brutality started (one tabloid used crude terms like “Harry ‘knocked up a whore and the Queen is zipping it up with a wedding)…when the true ugliness of Brit racism manifested in 360 degrees around her, she must have felt reviled, unwanted, an imposter in a pristine historical portrait. So the £32 million wedding, the 12 private charters in 11 days which burned 82 tonnes of CO2 (but why weren’t Kate and William’s private charters being fussed about?) The many privileges that came with her newly adopted identity started killing her softly, like a knife turning in a hidden wound. Remember Princess Di had not been half as empowered before marriage, as Meghan had been. In an ironic masterstroke, Princess Di was a product fabricated by the very royal machinery she later cast off. But Meghan was feeling the race guillotine over her head every day…after having grown up in the American emotional ecosystem where you tend to say and do things as they come. So if you are feeling suicidal, you say it. You ask for help. Of course Meghan is an actress. You could say she was wearing her best victim expression. But somehow, I could sense her seeking a ‘sista hood’ with Aunty Oprah (Opera Winfrey!), a fellow coloured American. She wanted to let Oprah help her heal by letting out the lurid hues of her hapless marriage to ..not Harry…but the House or the Firm.

Is Meghan Markle going to pay a gargantuan price firing these missives against the British monarchy? Will the title-less Archie marry another self-made industrious and articulate young woman of mixed heritage?

And why doesn’t the Queen respond to Meghan’s allegation that all protection was withdrawn to this much loved grandson-Prince…she claimed to be okay with her own and Archie’s security being dropped. But why drop Harry?

What really do the Windsors do if a Duchess goes asking for psychological help…do they really just say, “You are being ripped up by the media? Oh no worries darling we are there for you…just don’t go to a shrink as its bad news for a perfect family to have mental issues, we just shut up and go to the next charity engagement. And smile, beta..always look like a million bucks and smile.”

So who wants to be the next Exotic Duchess in the House of Windsor? As Harry puts it, “they live in a system…nobody talks about real issues, they just look over them and keep the status quo. It is the only way they know how to be.”

Pity as both Meghan and Harry adore the Queen Mother. She gifted Meghan pearl jewellery when they travelled on a short train ride together, when Meghan was a brand new addition to the family. The Queen as matriarch still adores Harry..they talk several times in a month. And I recall my own fondness for the sweet old lady when she sat in a subway train to have a civilian ‘moment!’

Truly this tale of vows and woes, embraces every possible issue ..colonial hangover, patriarchy, class, race…and even continues the feminist trajectory of Princess Di.

“There were three of us in this marriage…it got a bit crowded”…were Diana’s blithe blows against the hypocrisy of her royal alliance, in her now legendary interview with BBC host Martin Bashir. What words of Meghan Markle will arrive at such immortality from this epic tell-all with Oprah Winfrey?