Almost every week, Zeppelins were dropping bombs on London. Traveling up to 85 miles an hour and carrying as much as two tons of explosives, some Zepps were as long as 650 feet—longer than three blocks in London. By the end of the war, Zepps would kill 557 people and injure another 1,358, and H. G. Wells would say the airships had ended the fiction that England was an “inaccessible island,” protected by the Atlantic on one side and the channel on the other. When Noor was three, Inayat wrote to her from the road. Pray, he asked, “that the Zeppelins may not drop [a] bomb on him.” A terrifying request, but Inayat rarely coddled anyone, not even his children.
In the summer of 1918, Noor began kindergarten. Teachers admired her “musical little voice,” her conduct (“very good”), and how well she “listens and enjoys stories and can tell one herself.” Her major faults were her chattiness (“too talkative”) and her difficulty concentrating (“needs steadying and strengthening”). In the middle of the school year, Ora gave birth to the sister Noor always wanted. With Claire’s birth, Ora and Inayat had four children. (Two boys, Vilayat and Hidayat, had been born in 1916 and 1917.) For the rest of their lives, the oldest two, Noor and Vilayat, would be preternaturally close, largely because of their intense interest in Sufism and the family’s mystical legacy.
Inayat’s letter to Noor: No bombs, please.
When the war was over, the Khans (along with Inayat’s brothers) returned to France, eventually moving into a large house near Paris which a wealthy Dutch disciple, Mevrouw Engling, bought for them. Inayat named it “Fazal Manzil”—the House of Blessings.
Fazal Manzil ended the wandering of the Khan family. Without Mrs. Engling’s generosity, the family might have continued to reside in near-poverty, uncertain about where they would live, how long they would be there, and how they would pay for it. Contributing to their precarious situation was Ora’s brother’s refusal to help them in any way from the United States. Living now in a mansion north of New York, Pierre Bernard’s yogic proselytizing had earned him fame and some wealth—enough to help Ora, if he wished. But smarting from her marriage to Inayat, Bernard had disowned her soon after she left the country.
Fazal Manzil was in Suresnes, a largely blue-collar town directly west of Paris along the Seine. Its nineteen thousand residents were mostly farmers, vintners, merchants, and factory workers who made cars, ambulances, and taxis. Suresnes was no industrial backwater: in the 1920s, the Darracq auto factory located here produced ten percent of France’s cars every year. Some residents of the city worked in plants that blended expensive scents for France’s finest perfumers—Coty, Volnay, and Worth. At the same time, Suresnes was so informal that you could walk into one of its wineries, buy a bottle of Chardonnay, and enjoy it with your meal in a restaurant a few blocks away, no questions asked and no fee charged. If you attempted to do this across the river in Paris, you’d either be billed for decorking—or asked to leave.
Near the Seine was a maze of shops and cafés and a cluster of cottages that emulated the Tudor style that was fashionable in England. All these were near a new bridge that had recently shut down the small ferries that had carried passengers to Paris for over a century. The bridge provided a new way to enter Suresnes: on the Paris side, first you passed through Bois de Boulogne, two and a half times the size of New York’s Central Park. Then the river opened up before you at almost the same time that you saw Mont Valérien, the formidably steeped hill that loomed over Surenses. The entry was as majestic as it was convenient.
Thomas Jefferson had been familiar with Mont Valérien. While ambassador to France in the 1780s, Jefferson often left Paris—“Away to my hermitage,” he told friends as he turned his horse toward a monastery that sat on the crest of Mont Valérien. Jefferson was often drawn toward Mont Valérien’s solitude. In the monastery’s silence, he could read and walk and think. No amateur oenophile, he also enjoyed the monastery’s wine, harvested from vineyards that had flourished on Valérien’s slopes for nine hundred years.
Noor (far left) and her siblings enjoyed playing dress-up in Indian clothes.
Fazal Manzil was two-thirds up the steep slope of Mont Valérien. Square and stolid, its thick stone walls made it seem larger than its 3,500 square feet. A stone balustrade along the edge of the flat roof lent balance to the overall design; the eight-foot-high stone wall surrounding the house ensured privacy; and the upper floors provided a stunning view of Paris—in the 1920s, the home of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Dalí: expatriates and experimentalists trying to make sense of a world shattered by the Great War. In Paris, they hoped, you could start over and forget about everything that was rotten in life. For the French, there was little starting over, not after 1.4 million of their countrymen had been killed in the war that didn’t end all wars. Fazal Manzil had little to do with the lost, grieving city of Paris. In fact, it had little to do with Suresnes.
As Noor grew older, she played games and climbed trees in a large field across the street from Fazal Manzil, often picking apricots that her mother used for jam or playing dress-up—with a white sari and a long scarf that reached her waist, and her neatly braided hair draped over one shoulder, pretending, however briefly, that she was in the India that she had heard about from her father.
On the first floor of the house was a room where Inayat met privately with students and a dining room whose long table was rarely underused: a lot of people lived (or visited) here. A wide staircase led to the upper floors. Though Engling had given the house as a present to the Khans, Inayat invited her to move in. In India, this was how you treated a respected relative. He also hoped she would provide company for Ora, who was increasingly isolated from her husband, who was often traveling to teach Sufism. Ora was also isolated from Inayat’s brothers, who lived on the third floor.
Half of the second floor of Fazal Manzil was devoted to Engling’s bedroom, so large it was almost a salon. The other half was divided into a large bedroom for Ora and Inayat and two smaller bedrooms for their children, the boys in one room, the girls in the other. Engling provided allowances to Inayat’s family, paid for the upkeep of the house, and ruled Fazal Manzil with a starchiness at odds with Ora’s American informality.
As if that wasn’t enough for Ora, Inayat’s brothers were freezing her out of life at Fazal Manzil. They hadn’t liked her since she set her sights on Inayat in New York. Their dislike hardened in Moscow when one of Inayat’s brothers, Musharaff, fell in love with the daughter of the Tatar nurse who cared for Noor. Ora opposed the marriage. Married to Inayat for barely a year, she was the only non-Indian in his entourage. She didn’t want another relative who wasn’t a Westerner. Ora vetoed the marriage, and Inayat sided with her.
Noor’s family’s home opposite Paris. A “house of blessings,” sometimes.
Until then, Inayat’s brothers had been willing to tolerate Ora. Now she had ruined Musharraf’s chances for happiness, and the brothers had little doubt Inayat had made a terrible mistake by marrying her. She could never be one of them. As far as the brothers were concerned, Ora cared about one person: herself.