Last Nizam (9781742626109) (34 page)

‘There were a lot of dubious characters who made a lot of money at the time,' says Rashid Ali Khan. ‘Jah would ask me: “Don't you think so-and-so is a swindler?” I would say, “I know.” But he would say, “Leave him alone,” and just ignore what was happening.'
⁴²

For now Jah had no shortage of diversions to obviate the need to deal directly with what was happening in India. His dozers needed constant repairs, he was busy putting a bridge across the Murchison using steel from an old railway carriage and was finalising plans to build a mansion on a rocky outcrop overlooking a bend in the river, using his now watertight amphibious tanks to transport building materials. Even if his Indian assets were being eaten into, he still had a vault full of jewellery in Switzerland to draw on. And he was, after all, still the Nizam. ‘I just want to be left alone,' he told
The West Australian
. ‘I don't need the publicity. I know I am the Nizam of Hyderabad and that's all that matters.'
⁴³

J
AH PREFERRED TO KEEP A
low profile whenever he was in Perth. In the mid-1970s Western Australia's capital was said to have more millionaires per head of population than any other city in the world. An Indian prince with an apparently limitless fortune was an irresistible lure for Perth's high-fliers. Jah found any discussion of money matters distasteful, avoided flaunting his wealth and looked down on the new rich. One of the few highfliers he saw regularly was the flamboyant Israeli-born architect and property developer, Yosse Goldberg. Once described as ‘WA Inc's most wanted man',
¹
Goldberg was the business partner of one of Hebros (Australia)'s directors, Ronald Wise, who had introduced him to Jah. Seeing that his Indian friend was in need of female companionship, Goldberg set up a dinner date with his new secretary, 27-year-old Helen Simmons.

Helen was the tall, blonde-haired daughter of a staunchly Catholic family from the upmarket Perth suburb of Dalkeith. She had just returned from a four-year overseas trip, and rather than going on the dole, filled in for a friend who was working as Goldberg's secretary. She had no idea who the mystery guest was that her boss had invited. When Goldberg introduced her to ‘Mr
Jah', she thought he was incredibly handsome. ‘It was love at first bite, if you'll excuse the cliché,' she later told the
Express
for an article that featured her recipes for yoghurt kebabs and seafood mousseline. ‘It is a part of
Kismet
, fate, predestination, fortunate coincidences in which I believe.'
²

Fate would turn to tragedy for the Perth secretary who became the Begum of Hyderabad. But for now her only worry was that the Indian prince she had fallen in love with was still married to a Turkish princess. ‘I remember we had a nice dinner, there was a wonderful clarinet player and that we danced, well, at least half the night. We talked a lot, about India and Hyderabad, about the Islamic faith . . . and about the fact that he was married. It was a problem for me, because in the beginning I couldn't envisage a future with the man I'd suddenly fallen in love with. He had a strange lost quality about him. He was marvellously genteel and very quietly spoken. He told me his first marriage had been failing long before he met me, but it still made things difficult for us.'
³

It wasn't long before Perth's gossip columnists were describing the fairytale romance of a ‘vivacious young lady with an infectious laugh' who had fallen in love with Goldberg's mysterious dinner guest only to find out that he was the fabulously wealthy heir to a dynasty that stretched back to the Mughal Empire. Though Helen didn't mind the attention, Jah baulked at being in the media spotlight. He took Helen to Murchison House, where she not only outlasted Esra's stay, but helped rescue sheep stranded by a flood on the Murchison. ‘I come from a farming family so it was nothing to me. But Jah said later: “You know that's when I decided to marry you.”'
⁴

Helen's parents were unimpressed. Her father, John Simmons, said he didn't care if Jah was the King of England, he would still be against the marriage. There was opposition from Jah's side too. Durrushehvar was aghast, telling her son it was all
right to have an Australian mistress, but marrying one was out of the question. She never spoke to Helen. Esra warned her husband that the relationship would bring disrepute on the family. Their children, Azmat and Shekhyar, were adamant that their father should not remarry. Jah's close friend and financial advisor, Sadruddin Javeri, resigned in protest.

Rebellious by nature, Helen brushed aside her family's protests, converted to Islam and changed her name to Ayesha – the Radiant One. Heavily pregnant, she married Jah in a Muslim ceremony at Havelock House in 1979, with Goldberg and Perth antique dealer, Rod Kelly, as groomsmen. Their first son, Azam, was born in Perth a month later, an event that so thrilled Jah he sent a telegram to Hyderabad telling people there to have a public holiday.

According to Ann Morrow, the birth of Azam convinced Esra that the only way to protect the inheritance of her own children was by filing for divorce. During the acrimonious negotiations that followed, Jah arranged for Esra and Helen to meet in the sitting room of Havelock House while he tiptoed away ‘innocently thinking that the women in his life would get on like pals at the golf club'. But as Morrow points out, they could not have been more different: ‘Princess Esra with her green eyes and slightly impervious air and the emotional, cuddly Helen Simmons. The meeting was not a success.'
⁵
Nor, for that matter, was the settlement Jah's lawyers finally agreed to – a rumoured £12 million payout plus jewellery and antiques. The finalisation of the divorce, however, cleared the way for Jah to marry Helen at a civil ceremony in 1981. Their second son, Umar, was born two years later.

Helen quickly put her stamp on Murchison House Station. Bill Shimmons was turfed out of the main homestead. A swimming pool was dug into the garden, trees were planted and a sprinkler system was laid to keep the lawn green. Jah had two
water cannons installed to cool the house down in the late afternoon which produced rainbows visible for miles around. A large swing made from the front bench seat of an old Toyota Hilux hung from the front veranda. Jah also bought two massive diesel generators to provide enough electricity to run several air conditioners and a system of floodlights for security. Apart from the odd upholstered Louis XVI chair and a Georgian sideboard, the furniture was low-key and described as unpretentious and having ‘a lived-in look'.

Havelock House, in contrast, began to resemble Hyderabad in its gaudy and ostentatious heyday. With Rod Kelly's help, Helen filled the rambling Federation mansion with antiques shipped from Jah's palaces. The dinner-service consisted of Wedgwood china, ivory-handled Mappin and Webb cutlery sets and cutcrystal glasses embossed with the royal insignia of Hyderabad. Two life-sized bronze leopards flanked the entranceway, six nineteenth-century crystal chandeliers each two metres wide graced the ground-floor rooms alongside 200-year-old Indian lanterns. The lounge was painted in the royal colours of green and gold and the dining room in burgundy. The drapes were copies of those that hung in Falaknuma Palace. Huge Venetian glass mirrors filled the hallways. European oil paintings and Mughal miniatures hung from the walls over giltwood console tables. Marble statues surrounded a kidney-shaped swimming pool set in a leafy garden of gums and bougainvillea. ‘It would take days to really appreciate and understand the splendour,' remarked one visitor.
⁶
Jah's touch was to install security grilles, closed-circuit TV cameras to watch for intruders and fit bulletproof glass on the windows. He also had the garage modified to accommodate his two-door Rolls-Royce, the blue Bentley he had used in England, a Volvo, a Jeep, a white Cadillac bought from Alan Bond and Helen's red Triumph Stag.

For all the outward extravagance of being married to an
Indian prince, Helen found herself drawn into Jah's intensely private lifestyle, which oscillated between Murchison House Station, Havelock House and their six-bedroom weekender at York. In Perth their social life was restricted to the occasional dinner party with a very select group of friends, outings to the cinema to satisfy Jah's insatiable appetite for movies and the odd meal in town. A compulsive traveller, Jah took Helen on trips to Europe, the US and England, flying first class and staying at the best hotels. He also took her on a pilgrimage to Mecca. ‘I was hoping she would be the first Australian woman to go on the Haj, but then I found out that an Afghan had married an Australian and brought her to Mecca in the early 1900s.'
⁷

It was not until 1983 that Helen first accompanied Jah on one of his visits to Hyderabad. Arriving at Begumpet Airport she witnessed Jah the laid-back sheep farmer become Nawab Mir Barakat Ali Khan Bahadur, the Eighth Nizam of Hyderabad. Government ministers met them on arrival, bowing almost to the ground as Jah stepped off the plane. Police cleared the way for their motorcade as it made its way from the airport. At the Chiraan palace, Arab guardsmen dressed in tattered red and blue dragoon-style uniforms stood to attention every time the royal couple came down the driveway. Ancient-looking servants shuffled silently as they dusted the antiques and polished the parquet floors. The city's Muslims still considered Jah to be their religious leader. Helen was staggered to see hundreds of thousands of people filling the courtyard of the Mecca Masjid and the streets outside to hear him speak.

After the stories Jah had told her about the greatness of the Nizams, Helen was dismayed at the decrepit grandeur of Hyderabad. The crumbling palaces were overgrown with vegetation and crystal chandeliers the size of single-bedroom apartments lay broken and colonised by pigeons. Hiding her blonde curls beneath a black scarf, Helen tried to make the most
of her time in Hyderabad helping to tend the roses at Chiraan and learning to cook mutton biriyani by watching the staff sweat it out over coal braziers. But she found the strict segregation of princely life oppressive. ‘That was the hardest thing of all I think,' she told
Woman's Day
, referring to how uncomfortable she felt mixing in the courtly circles of dethroned European and Indian royalty. All money meant for her, she once said sarcastically, was ‘that I've put on a lot of weight'.
⁸

Juanita Walsh, the social editor of
The Western Mail
and a friend of Helen's, painted an even gloomier picture. Helen's life in India was one of total boredom spent watching her husband through the wooden grille of a harem with the other women of the household. ‘Jah had food tasters. Sometimes they were human but more often dogs were used for this purpose because Jah's life was always under serious threat. Helen could see the dinner table where the men of the household ate through the grille and was traumatised the day one of the dogs died in screaming agony on the floor after tasting a morsel from Jah's plate. Apparently, Jah calmly asked for another plate. Helen loved her husband but found it very difficult to accept his ways.'
⁹

Unaware of the arcane intrigues of dynastic politics in Hyderabad, Helen soon found herself clashing with her husband over the very things that had caused Jah to opt for a life in exile. ‘You are the Nizam of Hyderabad, everyone knows who you are, but where are your personal friends?'
¹⁰
she asked him on her first visit. She cajoled Jah into dropping in unannounced on old colleagues from his schooldays whom he had lost contact with. She forced him into arranging a party for the hundreds of relatives he had carefully avoided since becoming the Nizam, knowing only too well the jealousy they harboured and the lengths they were prepared to go to in order to get their hands on part of his inheritance.

To Hyderabad's nobility, Helen's innocence and spontaneity
were a welcome contrast to the rectitude of her husband. Begum Meherunissa, a direct descendant of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, remembers a party at Chiraan Palace attended by Jackie Kennedy. ‘It was Jah's birthday and Jackie Kennedy happened to be in Hyderabad at the invitation of the curator of the National Museum. Helen insisted Jackie be invited and arranged for Arab sword-dancers to provide the entertainment. She got up and danced with them. I remember little Azam got scared of the swords and the loud music and ended up astride the shoulders of one of the Nizam's guards.'
¹¹
Lakshmi Raj, who sat between Jah and Kennedy at the banquet, recalls the former US First Lady marvelling at the display and saying: ‘I can't believe my eyes. It's like the Arabian Nights. Am I dreaming?'
¹²

Returning to Perth, Helen's personal fairytale was wearing thin. She felt trapped between the responsibilities of being a mother and an increasingly absent and aloof husband. ‘I think she realised that she'd lost a lot of her own friends for Jah's sake,' her older sister Julie told
Follow Me
magazine. ‘She lived in a beautiful house, with fabulous areas in which to entertain, and she decided that if Jah didn't want to socialise, she did.'
¹³

In 1985, Perth's tabloid press finally got a glimpse of the royal couple's very private lifestyle. ‘I like to start the day with some genteel occupation like arranging flowers and setting the table for our breakfast when we have long, easy chats together,' she told the
Express
. ‘We mostly have fruit juices and perhaps a croissant. I certainly love my food but I don't indulge in it and I like to cook for my family at least a few times a week. It makes me feel busy, creative and committed.'
¹⁴
She discussed entertaining, the joys of gardening and swapped recipes for marrow bone curry with food writer Santina Stransky. ‘I adore Indian cuisine. I learnt it after our marriage and that was quite an experience in itself.'
¹⁵

Woman's Day
carried a photograph of Helen posing in the sun room of Havelock House above a headline reading ‘Royal Blind Date Turns Secretary into a Princess'. The copy left little to the imagination. The ex-Perth Ladies College student who had been swept off her feet by an Indian prince. The Persian pearls and Golconda diamonds she wore that were the envy of her friends. The dynasty she had married into that once ruled a kingdom ‘the size of Belgium' (it was actually the size of France). She was proud of the fact her children had allowed Jah to ‘learn all about being a father again – perhaps for the first time', she told her interviewer. ‘It's been wonderful to watch. He's devoted to the boys and to see him head off to the movies, with Azi holding his hand, or taking us all off to the rock and roll wrestling the other night . . . We go for walks in the park or just sit around in the garden . . . It's the kind of family life I think he's always wanted and needed.'
¹⁶