When some theosophists heard that holy men from India were performing at Maxim, they convinced the Royal Musicians to quit. Maxim was no place for them. The Royal Musicians were meant for a higher purpose than playing background music in a smoky nightclub. To thank the theosophists, Inayat invited them to join him and Ora to celebrate the recent birth of their first child.
The theosophists bought a dozen white lilies for Ora at Noev F.F. and Sons, a noted florist at 14 Petrovka Street. In the Khans’ hotel room, they talked politely with Inayat and his brothers, wondering where the mother and her new baby were. Finally, everyone fell silent as a curtain separating the sitting room from the bedroom parted and Ora entered, cradling Noor in her arms. As Ora settled into an armchair, Inayat announced to everyone that Noor, barely two months old, was already a mystic. The theosophists were impressed. They believed it was rare, though not impossible, for a baby to be a mystic. To Inayat, this didn’t make Noor unique: for him, every baby was a mystic. Babies knew that their most important task was to preserve the “air of heaven” they had brought to earth—a small vestige of the pristine paradise they had left behind.
Noor-un-nissa—“Light Among Nations”—had been born on the first day of 1914. She was a princess through her father’s ancestors: through Tipu Sultan who had fought the British in India in the eighteenth century, then through her great-grandfather Maula Bakhsh—“the Beethoven of India”—whom the Maharajah of Mysore had awarded in the 1860s for his musical excellence. The jewel for his turban, the scepter, the gold chain, and the golden umbrella the maharajah gave Maula were all emblems of royalty. This was royalty by selection, not by lineage or birth. Without these accoutrements, and the subsequent elevation in Maula’s rank, he could not have married Tipu’s daughter: in India, as in most countries, only royalty married royalty. With that, Noor would have royal roots through a military hero (Tipu Sultan) and a musical savant (Maula Bakhsh) who married the daughter of that hero.
At birth, Noor weighed 7¾ pounds and her skin was a light tan. Precisely where in Moscow she was born is hard to pinpoint: birth certificates were rarely issued in prerevolutionary Russia. One story is that she was born in the home of Sergei Tolstoy, the eldest son of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Though Sergei and Inayat were good friends, it is improbable Noor was born in Tolstoy’s apartment. A birth in the home of a new friend would have been a considerable imposition.
Birth information of the Khan children in their mother’s handwriting. For Noor: 10:15 p.m., Moscow, December 15, 1913, in the Russian calendar; January 1, 1914, in the Roman calendar.
Noor and her father, Moscow, 1914.
Another account is that Noor was born in the Monastery of St. Peter, a two-hundred-year-old complex about a quarter mile from where the Khans were living in Moscow. Yet the monks’ cells were never used as delivery rooms, and the monastery didn’t have an infirmary. In any case, only sixteen monks were living in the monastery in 1914—a fraction of what was needed to properly attend to the six churches that were inside the monastery’s high walls. A monastery that could barely sustain itself had little time in which to help strangers deliver their first child.
A third possibility is that Noor was born in a hospital a block north of the monastery. The hospital was part of Catherine the Great’s plan to improve Moscow. After a plague killed one-fifth of Moscow’s population in the late eighteenth century, Catherine set out to modernize the city and make it healthier. Factories and slaughterhouses were moved from the city center; cemeteries were placed outside the city limits, downwind from inhabited neighborhoods; water supplies were cleaned up; and new hospitals were built. The most impressive was the Catherine Hospital, with eighteen acres of gardens and wards, and a towering entrance whose twelve Ionic columns may have convinced peasants fortunate enough to receive medical care there that they had already died and gone to heaven. By 1914, when Noor was born, the hospital had expanded considerably, but the quality of its care had declined just as much. Equipment was old, beds were rusty, and in the summer patients often lay on beds with no sheets. Luckily, Noor and her mother were not there during the summer. The hospital provided warm blankets in the winter, and mother and daughter would have been reasonably comfortable.
Free of Maxim, thanks to the theosophists’ intervention, Inayat’s life in Moscow was decidedly different. He had long discussions about Sufism and music with the composer Alexander Scriabin, even giving him some melodies from India, one of which, the Afghan Sword Dance, Scriabin incorporated into a symphony. Inayat’s dinner with the opera singer Chaliapin lasted so long that he didn’t return home until the next day. And he and Sergei Tolstoy began collaborating on a musical based on an ancient Hindu story. But after four years in the West, Inayat missed India. He hoped to return there on a British passport that stated he was a “Protected Person” and a “Native of the Indian State of Baroda.” But his way was blocked. For almost a century, Great Britain and Russia had been jockeying for power in central Asia—wooing allies and splitting countries into fiefdoms run by surrogates and puppets. Britain called this The Great Game—a global chess match bloodied by thousands of casualties, mostly in Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Turkey, where Britain lost every war it fought. Traveling directly from Moscow to India would have taken the Khans through countries that were either fiercely anti-British or reeling from recent massacres by the czar. No one’s safety was guaranteed. India would have to wait. In early summer, the Khans left Moscow for a conference of musicians in Paris. Inayat was ambivalent about leaving. He had learned to admire the Russian people—their idealism, their hospitality, their friendship. They were, he said, a “warm people in a cold land.”
Traveling with a baby is difficult. Traveling with a baby in a foreign country is harder, especially in Russia in 1914. Inayat and Ora’s journey with Noor turned out to be a blessing, if family lore is true. An angry crowd stopped the Khans’ carriage near the border: their elegance and apparent wealth infuriated the local peasants. Worried that they would never get out of Russia, Inayat threw open the carriage door. Emerging in his full height, Inayat towered over the peasants. With his black cape flapping around him in the wind, he held Noor high above him. Seeing the infant, the crowd pulled back, and the Khans slipped away in the night, never to return to the country where Inayat felt most at home outside of India.
If nothing else, Noor left Russia with a nickname her Tatar nurse had given her—“Babuli,” Father’s daughter. Noor’s family would call her this for the rest of her life.
CHAPTER 2
NEVER BE A ‘NAUGHTY GIRLY’
After a brief stay in Paris, the Khans moved to London, wanting to put some distance between themselves and the war in Europe that everyone believed was imminent. They settled in Notting Hill. Until recently, Notting Hill had been known as the district of “potteries and piggeries.” It was still not much more than a slum. The family’s timing was impeccable—hostilities broke out a few weeks after they left France. Soon, Inayat was giving concerts throughout England to benefit the war effort. He sent what money he could back to London for Ora and Noor. As it turned out, Ora’s brother had been right about what would happen if she married Inayat: she would be poor and she would be hungry. On some days, Ora had no more than a loaf of bread to share with the rest of her family. A meal of rice and dal was a rare feast.