SCURRYING along a narrow Paris street which I thought would be a shortcut to Boulevard Madeleine, I noticed with a chill that it was the Rue Cambon and that I was face to face with the back exit of the Hotel Ritz. At this exact spot, Diana had come rushing out that night, as if riding on a fireball: it was the white winged steed of ancient legend that she had her burning legs astride, which comes by sometimes to accompany those who like to fly very high. As if on cue, that day’s evening news showed actual video footage of Diana and Dodi at the Ritz. It seemed that the mood had been one of disarray, tight wrinkles of tension in their faces as the cast of characters entered the scene one by one through the revolving door. And in that ungrounded state, minutes later, they were to be caught up in the Hit of a Hellish Wind!
I must touch upon the circumstances of my being there at all. On the Thursday preceding, at 2:30 in the afternoon I had been made, out of the blue, an offer I could not refuse, conditional on my signing a piece of paper while physically present in Paris by Friday midnight, next day. As I was in Dhaka at the time, unwinding slack in the approach to the weekend, this took some rapid sword strokes of arranging. Aided by great wedges of good fortune, I arrived in Paris well in time, and after concluding a handsome afternoon’s business, (in the course of which I squeezed in Friday prayers at the Pakistan Embassy just off the Champs Elysees) was deftly deposited at a hotel, not five minutes away from the Place de I’Alma.
Saturday was spent on preparing me. That afternoon I went to seek Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” — the 2-hour version. Taking full advantage of the liberties granted by the medium of film, Branagh has illuminated the innerlines of the play with a clarity rarely seen before. The setting is lavish, featuring colour compositions in which vast stretches of white are punctuated by blood-red splashes. But of relevance here is the way Ophelia is shown being driven to destruction on an ivory chariot, the very colour most associated with Diana. Not for nothing was it that a few days later one remembered the fury of Laertes when Earl Spencer was denouncing his sister’s sad fate. Shakespeare has a way of pre-inventing reality.
Following the film my head reeled all night with visions of princely chaos, of the way in which a tangle of knots is at risk of ending in cataclysmic dissipation. Sometimes the web is drawn too tight, as in a bad dream — from which the only escape is to quit.
Then I woke suddenly at about 4 am, as is the way with jetlagged sleep. It was dark. I wanted to know what the time was. Instead of stretching for my watch, I drowsily grabbed the remote control from the bedside table and switched on the TV. The After-Glow of the Explosion flooded the room. Bits of distended space, crumpled black Mercedes, and shards of whirling speculation drifted in through the TV window. And all this happening outside my real window, within touching distance.
What was it I had been brought thousands of miles, to the very epicenter of the quake, to witness?
Diana shed her hurtful carapace and woke to New Transcendent Life.
She had solved some key conundrums of living and was on the verge of blissful awareness. So was John Lennon cut down when he had just tasted peace and fulfillment and John Kennedy even as he spied the Portals.
What the House of Windsor could not comprehend, too much crazy inconsistency for them, too post-modern in effect: even white trash has heart of gold.
In the days following the accident Parisian drivers became extremely solicitous, meekly stopping at zebra crossings. It takes bravery to acknowledge how petty one has been, how uncivil in society. And across, on the other side of the Channel, the British people, after all those Thatcherite years of dog-eat-dog road rage, shucked off some lingering vestiges of frigidity.
The measure of the nation’s consternation I see in the scene that unfolded on her return to British soil. Through the day, that heavy Sunday, the grief had seeped in. Now late in the evening Diana’s coffin was being driven from RAF Northolt base towards London. As it reached West London, on the Westbury Motorway the news spread to vehicles on the other side of the motorway that the hearse was approaching. People jumped out of their cars, abandoning them by scores on the road, and rushed to the central reservation to watch the passing procession of her body under the dark and lowering sky. Thus did Ophelia’s body make a spectacle floating by on the stream with flowers in her hair.
Inside a vast circle of worldwide accompaniment, the British people, young and old, man and woman, punk and professional, were first into the Purging Blaze. All were touched by the sight of a noble stage cornered and gunned down in a crossfire of spotlights. But even when at bay Diana always fought back, defianty, unexpectedly. Her head was always high, with a crown of horns.
She was like our Universal Sister, who preceded in death the Universal Mother.
In subsequent days, general consciousness seemed to have been raised by an order of compassion. In a similar manner, and on a much greater magnitude of scale, the sacrifice of the Prophet Jesus (Peace be upon his soul) had once violently raised the earth’s compassionate-consciousness level by many notches, so much so that we consider a new era begun from that Almighty’s Day.
A diverting side-effect of the spiritual elevation of the British nation was a string of unlikely sporting successes, all consciously dedicated to Diana’s memory: Rusedski in the final of the US Open, Coulthard storming through to win the Monza Formula One Grand Prix, and most memorably Gascoine and Ian Wright putting together with the English team some of the most compelling football ever seen in the history of the game in the match against Moldova: aggressive runs which knew just when to taper off into perfectly timed pivot passes.
In her campaign against landmines, one feels that in some recess of her being she identified in pain with the fate of an innocent victim who gets suddenly blown up. The US Government’s reasoning against banning landmines, which might have been just plausible before, becomes, after Diana’s death, monstrous, betraying the insensitivity of a dinosaur mentality. It will cost the United States much in accumulated bad karma.
Yet she stays in mind, with her lithe body which slipped like a glove into clothes. The last suite of pictures (in Vanity Fair’s July 1997 edition, also used on the Newsweek commemorative cover) show her suffused with a melting joy, almost evanescent, uncannily like Marilyn Monroe’s final photo-shoot. It seems that before rising one is made a rose.
And who could object when, to intensify the brew, a most unusual prince was thrown in. Complete with all the trappings: palaces, minions, even the minor kingdom of Harrods to inherit! As he proved to be both personable and devoted Diana responded with all the pent-up “wish to love a man” in the make-up of lovely woman. Jemima must have paved the way, showing that it was not disallowed to love a Muslim man, provided he merit such grace.
The suspicion cannot be put away that there was a sigh of relief in certain quarters at the news of her death. Had her course continued as seemed probable, the man who would have ended up holding the keys to the royal system would have been none other than Mohammed el-Fayed; a worse nightmare is difficult to imagine from the Establishment’s point of view. The wily oriental gentleman who had grabbed one of the Crown Jewels (Harrods) from under their noses. was he about to snare another?
So did they avert an incredibly unwelcome outcome for themselves by inflicting another incredibly unwelcome outcome on the rest of us? The clue to the most plausible way in which it could have been done is given by the Mercedes’ leaving a long skid mark even though the ABS (Auto Braking System) is designed to prevent skids under any circumstances. The car’s microprocessor controls could have been remotely accessed electronically — a known technique — and sent viciously off-line (No. no I don’t think this is really true but the scenario is worth a view).
A life of Diana charted from mega TV-broadcast to mega TV-broadcast, wedding to funeral.
And now, looking back, emotionally exhausted, at the panorama of the scene, it was truly a Jewel of an Event, which lights up the dying embers of the Second Millennium of messy, glorious human endeavor. Who knows what awaits next, around the corner.