The Railway Station

Jungle Prince

The New York Times

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2019

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The story passed for years from tea sellers to rickshaw drivers to shopkeepers in Old Delhi. In a forest, they said, in a palace cut off from the city, lived a prince, a princess and a queen, said to be the last of a Shiite Muslim royal line. Some said the family had been there since the British had annexed their kingdom. Others said they were supernatural beings. It was a stunning and tragic story. But was it real? On a spring afternoon, while on assignment in India, Ellen Barry got a phone call that sent her looking for the truth. In Chapter 1, we hear of a woman who appeared on the platform of the New Delhi railway station with her two adult children, declaring they were the descendants of the royal family of Oudh. She said they would not leave until what was theirs had been restored. So they settled in and waited — for nearly a decade.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, ouch.
0:14.0	Shh.
0:15.0	Shh.
0:17.0	I'm having trouble.
0:19.0	We're having trouble finding my way out.
0:24.0	Huh.
0:28.0	Really strange.
0:31.0	It always was strange. It always was strange. I never thought I'd be telling you the story I'm about to tell you. But here goes. goes.
0:54.0	In the spring of 2016, which is when this story begins, I was the New York Times Bureau Chief in Delhi,
1:11.0	and I was spending a lot of my time trying to solve problems that were not strictly
1:14.4	journalistic. For one thing, our power blinked on and off at two minute intervals for much of
1:21.2	the day. This seemed to be related to the
1:25.2	troop of monkeys, Reese's, McCocks, that lived on the roof of the building and had
1:30.6	been chewing through the rubber insulation on the wiring.
1:35.0	During the monsoon, water had seeped into the walls of the office,
1:40.0	which had begun to ripple and smelled like damp cardboard.
1:45.5	We solved these problems the way we solved all our problems, with makeshift solutions.
1:52.2	There's a word for this in Hindi, to God. It served to preserve some kind of complex
1:58.8	equilibrium that kept everything running. This approach could seem like negligence or on occasion like kindness.
2:09.8	Our retired office manager who was in his 80s had been disappointed at the news that he had to retire
2:15.2	So we let him come in and spend every day at his old desk
2:19.4	A few feet away from the woman who had replaced him
	...

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