Years ago, in Kathmandu, I saw a living goddess. Still a child, she sat in a window while crowds gawked at her. Who knew what she was thinking or whether she liked or detested the role that she had been assigned? Queen Elizabeth II was a great distance away not just geographically but also in circumstances – but she presents the same puzzle. True, the living goddess spent her days in a small wooden house on a noisy, dusty street; the Queen in a series of palaces and castles surrounded by great gardens and parklands, with one of the greatest art collections in the world and piles of precious jewels to rival Aladdin’s cave.
Yet both women trod paths that had been chosen for them by fate, whether through karma or descent. Both were the objects of adulation, sometimes hostility, as their observers projected on to them their own biases. Goddess and queen, what were they really like? With the Queen, at least, there were the occasional remarks, a laugh here or a frown there, which give brief hints of a private life away from the unrelenting gaze of the public.
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