When Amarinder was a bratty ‘Yuvi’, and hard to teach!
CHANDIGARH:Who doesn’t love insight into the lives of the royalty, especially when it’s about a royal family closer home? Maheshwar Dayal might have been four years old when he first met ‘Yuvi’ in Patiala but the memories are still as fresh.
“I am three months older than Yuvi, short for ‘Yuvraj’ that everyone then addressed him as. He was the heir apparent and even at four behaved like a Little Prince in charge,” reminisces Dayal as he refers to Punjab chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh. The two grew up together from 1945 to 1950 during the time Dayal’s mother, Hede, a German teacher who had escaped from Nazi Germary and married an Indian, worked for Maharaja Yadavindra Singh and his wife as a governess to their children.
“When a four-horse Victoria with the Patiala royal crest engraved on its side arrived to fetch us, I realised we were in royal company and was very impressed. But when I first met the children, I was most disappointed to see they wore no crowns,” quips Dayal, who has penned his memories of the early years at Patiala and those of his mother’s — she left him a detailed manuscript — in his debut book, ‘People, Places and Memories’.
“Yuvi was the most difficult to teach because he was not used to instructions. He was distracted by, say, his Papa’s Dakota airplane taking off,” recalls Dayal. “I was closer to Malvinder or MK, as we called him,” says Dayal who worked in Mumbai before settling down in Chandigarh with wife Indira.
The book came after Facebook posts last year. “I would share snippets and it got many people interested. They coaxed me to give it the shape of a book and I was also keen,” says the author.
Lavish summer vacations in Chail, winter in Patiala, the blossoming friendship between Hede Dayal and the Maharani of Patiala, Mohinder Kaur— it throws up many stories and photographs too. One of them involves Yuvi again. “Once his parents had to go on a trip abroad and he threw himself on the ground and kicked up a royal tantrum. His mother told him they were going for a short time and he was needed to be home ‘to look after everything’.” He took the task too seriously. “He started behaving like two Maharajas rolled into one. He would ride his father’s car with the royal flag flying; go hunting with friends; at home, he would have mattresses laid out and everybody would have eat in the old royal style.”
It was only when complaints started pouring in that the governess took to reprimanding the young prince. “He was furious and charged at my mother who stood her ground,” mentions Dayal who also writes how the children’s nanny, Sister Welsh, later tried pacifying him and was heard saying, “No Yuvraj Sahib, you can’t send her away...you cannot shoot her, that won’t do!”
Today, at 76, Mickey Dayal is friends with the family. “I think he (Amarinder) went from being an obnoxious boy to a true gentleman after his years in the army,” he says.