FROM SINNER TO (SLIGHTLY LOOPY) SAINT
Jonathan Aitken’s daughter was a party-loving It Girl. Today, split from her Sikh warrior husband, she uses potatoes as deodorant, is chaste as a nun – and, oh yes, wants to save the planet
ALExANDrA Aitken doesn’t mind what you call her, so long as it’s nothing rude. Nothing that will dent her holy karma. The daughter of former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken has famously adopted a Sikh way of life and has changed her name to Uttrang Kaur Khalsa. This follows her whirlwind marriage to Sikh warrior Inderjot Singh six years ago.
Gosh, it was all so romantic at the start. When she recalls their first meeting in the Indian city of Amritsar in 2009, the former socialite and girl about town makes it sound like something out of a Bollywood film.
‘I was sitting on the roof of the Golden Temple at about 3am, and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my whole life walked in. He seemed 100 per cent man, gentle and intuitive and poetic and sensitive, but also extraordinarily strong and manly. And you don’t see many of these around. So I was like: “oh wow!”’.
Back in 2010, there was a glossy photo spread on the wedding in Hello! magazine. The new bride wrote an article for this newspaper, telling of how hundreds of holy men came out of their caves to bless their union.
However, despite all the good vibes and multiple benedictions, the marriage turned out to be short-lived.
As early as 2013, her father Jonathan was talking of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘a rocky patch’. Local Indian newspapers claimed in 2014 that Mr Singh had left his wife and was living elsewhere. Now it seems there is nothing left but memories.
‘I am not the kind of divorcing Sikh but I have to say that to my knowledge, I am not even legally married,’ she says today.
For although they affirmed their commitment to each other in a ceremony attended by 300 guests, there is doubt that the marriage was ever officially registered. ‘It is a grey area but all I can say is that Inderjot is still romantic and incredible, we talk on the telephone sometimes but I have not seen him for over a year,’ she says. Now 35, she once said she hoped to have children with him. There were grand plans to build hospitals and schools together — but all of this has turned to dust.
‘Essentially, I am bound to him for all time. I don’t think I will fall in love with someone else now,’ she adds. ‘I live like a nun and it might be like that for ever.’
So, what went wrong? The usually voluble Mrs Singh is not keen to elucidate, but vaguely alludes to religious concerns and the kind of culture clash that was perhaps inevitable.
‘No matter what he did, I would always act as his wife,’ she says, mysteriously. ‘He is a very holy person. I was an It Girl and by comparison a huge sinner. Do you see?’
Not really, but we move on. For while she may have given up on love, the former Alexandra Aitken has not given up on the planet.
Currently back in London from her base in India, she is a woman on a mission. Her aim is nothing less than to become a ‘bigger environmentalist than Leonardo DiCaprio’ by encouraging people to make ethical choices and think about what she calls their ‘karmic balance’.
‘Think about the cows,’ she cries. ‘Think about the chickens. Any person with a heart does not want a chicken to suffer, so choose food that cares.
‘I am a vegetarian because I care too much, but every person has the capacity to choose either the loose vegetables or the ones which come in plastic. Spend the extra ten pence on organic milk. Get solar panels, think positive thoughts. Promise you will do this, promise.’
ToDAy, the former Miss Aitken is chiefly based in Anandpur Sahib in the Punjab region, where she lives mostly in a gurdwara (a Sikh temple) alongside yogis and meditation masters. In a town of around 16,000 people she is probably t he only unattached Western woman.
She spends her time translating Sikh scriptures from Gurmukhi — a script associated with the Sikh religion — into English and studying Sikhism. The temple is high in the mountains where the air is fresh, the cows are hand milked and the day begins at 3am with prayers, followed by temple sweeping and more prayers.
‘Then after this perhaps I will buy carrots for everybody and chop them up for us all, so there is this great sense of a kind of spiritual family,’ she says.
‘It is a miracle! It is so innocent and it is so pure and so kind. Then sometimes after my lunch break I do all the Hoovering in the temple.’
Certainly, it is quite a change from the days when she posed naked for GQ magazine, hung out with bad boys like George Best’s son Calum and disgraced TV presenter John Leslie, and attended film premieres in the tiniest of dresses and the highest of heels.
People still talk about her 22nd birthday party in London, where the privately educated art school graduate had dwarves wearing Dennis The Menace costumes serve her guests with shots of toffee vodka. Not even her father can entirely understand her abrupt metamorphosis from party girl to devoted Sikh.
‘She is the most exotic and strange and difficult to understand of my children,’ he once told me. ‘I find it very difficult to get my head around all of this, but I love her dearly.’
We meet in a cafe in Hyde Park because she likes to be near to nature at all times. Walking along a path between the trees and the lake she cuts an exotic figure; her 5ft 10in frame topped off with a large turban, her indigo robes ruffling like sails in the chill February wind.
A silver kirpan dagger is tied to her waist and her feet are bare in tattered bio-degradable shoes, with a hole as big as an egg in one of the soles.
In the café she orders an orange and some water and explains that she follows the Sikh practice of never cutting her hair ‘ because it is an extension of the nervous system and also connected to the brain’.
Under her turban, her hip-length tresses are wound into a knot. Her once-celebrated legs, formerly waxed and bronzed in true socialite style, are now as hairy as a bear’s.
HEr grooming routine once involved salons and appointments, now it is primitive and totally natural; she brushes her teeth with crushed mango seeds, chops up soapwort roots to make soap and rubs a cut potato under each armpit as a deodorant. She stays true to this invention of herself, even if very few Sikh women wear these types of warrior robes or follow her extreme routines.
She says she is entitled to wear the outfit because ex-husband Inderjot was a member of the Nihang warrior order, although even this is disputed in some quarters.
‘That is because,’ she says, pressing her hands together, ‘ only the most pure person can be a warrior Sikh. Inderjot might have said something like he did not deserve it because he is the most humble person in the world. Like a priest saying I can’t wear my cassock or dog collar because I ate two croissants this morning.’
She’s got an answer for everything, even for the obvious discrepancies that occur when her all-natural, eco-tastic life in India collides with her life in London.
Her iPhone and charger are on the table in front of us, her baby blue Fiat Cinquecento is parked around the corner; a chic, It Girl car that is so tiny her turban grazes the inside of the roof when she drives.
I like her and her bold and cheerful nature, but I’m not sure I want to listen to a lecture on recycled loo paper (‘nowadays, you can get recycled loo paper that plants a tree — you just have to read the packets’) from a poor little rich girl whose carbon footprint is considerably bigger than my own.
‘My life is all about balance. I have to plant an acre of trees for every year’s worth of driving. Look at this,’ she cries, fishing a tatty canvas wallet out of her robes. ‘ See! you can always make an ethical choice.’
I suppose she means the wallet is not Gucci calfskin or Fendi stripes, like it once might have been, but I’m still not terribly impressed.
Inside is a Lloyds bank card, a library card and a stash of crisply folded £20 notes; I count six of them. She also admits that when she flies to and from India, sometimes it is ‘in first class if someone was to buy me a ticket. Lots of people have done that in the past.’
People like Daddy? ‘No. He is not
some sort of billionaire, he is actually quite a humble person. He is a very modest person. I am very lucky I am funded by all kinds of different methods. I was quite lucky because I made a little bit of money before and luckily it looked after me for quite a while.’
Once upon a time, Alexandra Aitken’s life was one of extraordinary privilege and she had every reason to expect it to stay that way.
The daughter of Jonathan and Lolicia Aitken, she and twin sister Victoria, along with brother William, lived in a London townhouse with servants, distinguished guests and hot and cold running luxury.
Everything changed when disgraced Jonathan was imprisoned for perjury in 1999, a case that ruined his family life and bankrupted him. At one point it was alleged he had been prepared to have his teenage daughter Victoria lie under oath to support his version of events.
Lolicia left him after he embroiled her in the case, but the children stood by their father, an enormous source of comfort to him, then and now.
The twins would visit him in jail regularly, put on their best happy faces, then burst into tears after- wards. They suffered and, admits their father, there was ‘damage by me, but t hey have c ome through it’.
Over the next seven years or so, the Aitken girls roared through London life. They never did anything by halves; avoiding the humdrum was their speciality.
After all, what can a girl do when her destiny is to make her mark, to sparkle among all the other bright young things, to be different, to be noticed, to be special? Alexandra tried everything, including modelling, acting and becoming an artist — she once made ‘sculptures’ out of her friends’ donated eyelashes. But her world only began to make sense, she says, when she moved to California in 2007 to study kundalini yoga, which proved to be her gateway to Sikhism.
Meanwhile, sister Victoria was drawn to the spotlight and has been dogged in her pursuit of singing stardom.
Currently a rap artist, Victoria wrote in a recent newspaper article of how being diagnosed with the developmental disorder dyspraxia explained an adulthood blighted by clumsiness and a lack of focus. ‘It explains why other musicians don’t want to work with me,’ she noted.
Someone should make a film about the Aitken girls — they are absolutely fabulous in every way.
‘I am encouraging Victoria to sing more songs,’ says her sister. ‘I think it is amazing she has been in the charts, she was number three in Sweden and is surprisingly really popular. She is way more famous than me,’ she adds, in a rather telling aside.
Despite her unconventional life, Alexandra remains close to her parents, telling me that her mother is wonderful and underrated because she is so beautiful.
She bangs on so much about her father being a paragon of virtue, a really good person who gives his money away, someone who never did anyone any harm, a man who only wanted to make this country better and so on, that I have to gently remind her that yes, but he did commit a very serious act of perjury.
‘So? Haven’t you ever told a lie?’ she snaps. Not under oath in a courtroom, no. ‘My father is one of the world’s biggest experts in prison reform. So the people who might attack him, like you, are in the minority.
‘ What do you know about prison reform?’
To be fair, I wasn’t attacking Mr Aitken, but how interesting to see that underneath all the peace and love and loo paper proselytising, scratch Mrs Singh and you will find the old Alexandra Aitken not far beneath; as patrician and patronising as any duchess reprimanding a serf who dares to utter a word of reproach against her family.
Still, by her own lights she is a woman who only wants to do good in the world, even if she can sometimes envisage a day when she is not a Sikh any more. ‘It could happen, but I hope not.’ She was in Nepal last year when an earthquake hit, another experience which changed her for ever. ‘ The ground started shaking, everyone started screaming,’ she recalls. ‘I thought I had only three minutes to live, so I ran outside and started singing mantras loudly for everyone. I was saying, “Peace be with us”, “God save us”. We thought we were all dying.’
She hopes to come back to England one day and open her own Sikh centre, where she could finally prove to everyone she is not just some indulged girl playing at being an Indian pauper.
‘Everyone could come to it and they would get into it, reading prayers for peace before they go to bed. In the morning Liz Hurley would start washing with my soapwort and Kate Moss would be wearing organic cotton.
‘That’s good, isn’t it? We’d all spread the word, you could come, too,’ she says.
No, I think. I’d be too tempted to run outside screaming, as if I had only three minutes to live.
And with that thought, we walk companionably to her car and she tells me about her new website 1terra. org, which contains even more tips about living an ethical life.
Then she climbs in, turban and all, and roars off into the London traffic.