MONK PRINCESS

The tall, silky maiden of that photographic album so lovingly preserved by her mother was ethereally beautiful. I used to flip through the pages in wonderment: she was with high society here, posing in a bikini suit there; raising a toast here, being toasted by a set of glitterati there. She was a burgeoning actress in Hollywood then in the Marilyn Monroe mold but she had given it all up suddenly and inexplicably. As so often happens in life a call of a higher order had persuaded her to give up the life she revelled in.

Zina Rachevsky

Princess Harriet Straus Rachevsky was a widow in her sixties when she came to Nepal in search of her daughter pictured in those many poses in that photo album and also a grand-daughter she knew only from hearsay. She arrived in Kathmandu in the late sixties and found a place to rent in the estate of my father in Kiran Bhawan. Those were the days of the hippies, the precursors to the modern day backpackers who have famously made Nepal one of the top choice adventure holiday destinations in the world. She was an American Jewess by birth and a scion of the Straus banking family of Chicago before she secretly got married to a Russian titled nobility. She was of medium built, always seen around the house in slacks, matching blouse, a scarf tied around her neck and a large pair of glasses as fashionable then framing a face that was beginning to go craggy. She stood with both hands behind her lower back supporting her still upright frame, a common habit of hers, as she surveyed the many chores that needed to be completed that day, for that occasion.

Harriet Rachevsky in her youth

She was very excited that day. I was in my early teens and I too was anticipating eagerly the outcome. Princess Rachevsky's daughter was going to visit her mother; finally there was to be a re-union of mother and child after all those years. A taxi and some fellow monks presently brought her to our place. She was unrecognizable from her many photographs I had seen of her. The blond goddess of the photo album looked saintly wrapped in a maroon robe of a Tibetan Buddhist sect, her golden locks replaced by a bald pate, her sexy bikini looks transported to a serene visage of the truly blessed. Princess Zina Rashevsky had arrived to meet her mother.

Vladimir Rachevsky was the brother-in-law to the Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich Romanov, his sister Zenaida Rachevskaya having been initially a mistress of but later married to Boris (pic). A direct descendant of Czar Alexander II of Russia and a first cousin once removed to Czar Nicholas II, Boris had fled the Bolshevik Revolution to the Caucasus in today's Georgia with his life and his mistress in tow. It appears that Princess Harriet Rachevsky's husband Vladimir was not a direct blood relation of the Romanovs but, as it happened so often then, titles were freely exchanged in foreign soil to impress and by the time Harriet met her husband everyone was convinced he was a titled prince.

Grand Duke Boris and his wife

Harriet had married her prince in secret in Paris in 1929 as this match would not be approved by her family. Her father S. W. Straus was a pre-eminent Jewish banker and financier in Chicago and this relationship with a titled Russian Orthodox Christian but possibly a penniless emigre would not be looked upon kindly. Harriet's two sisters, Louise and Madeline had both married their own kind in America. Harriet gave birth to Zina in 1930. The Straus family would lose their considerable fortune in the coming Great Depression.

From that first meeting of the mother and daughter Harriet decided to make Nepal her home to enable her to bring up her grand-daughter Rhea properly but at the same time remain near her own daughter. Zina had made the Kopan Monastery near Bodhnath her spiritual abode, one of the first Western convert to be ordained a Lama, the high priestess of Tibetan Buddhism. We can only conjecture what had made Zina give up a possibly lucrative Hollywood career to venture into India. Was it a love affair gone awry? Or did she just join the Hippie movement and flowed with the tide, a lost flower child? An account has it that she was always a wild and independent minded person. She appeared in Darjeeling in 1967 and she was instructed in Tibetan Buddhism by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa, both incarnate Lamas.

Zina and Rhea

I remember Rhea as a shy seven or eight year old, an introvert possibly trying to cope with the new environment far from a Lamasery and a grandmother she had only heard of until then. She was in dirty and tattered Tibetan costume, unwashed and unkempt, when she first appeared in our place. Soon after she went to St. Mary's Girls High School nearby and the mischief and sparkle of childhood were seen slowly coming back. Princess Rachevsky was a doting grandmother. One often heard, "Rhea, Rhea....." reverberating around the house. Our handyman Ram Bahadur Majhi was already an accomplished chef under the supervision of the princess and many a time I looked forward to the yummy chocolate cookies coming out warm from the oven. Harriet was already in high gear as an American socialite in Kathmandu of the early seventies; dinner parties with the local high society, bridge sessions, Art Déco home furbishing. Sometime then I remember Harriet's sister Louise from New York visited her. We had a bridge session once with the sisters partnering each other and my father partnering me. Both my father and I were bemused to find that they quarreled like cats and dogs during the entire game, no doubt a throwback to an earlier sibling rivalry, each blaming the other for the unfolding debacle! Zina appeared on the scene once in a while.

That was until 1973 when we got the sad news that Zina had passed away suddenly. We heard that she had frozen herself to death while she was meditating in the Himalayas. Checking a few blogs on her life written by her contemporaries, peritonitis is cited as the cause of her death. Whatever might have been the case, there was no longer any reason for Harriet to continue living in Nepal. She soon decided to pack her bags and leave with her grand-daughter. I often wonder what became of Rhea. The last I heard of Harriet was when my father, while serving as Nepalese ambassador in Britain, told me that she had written to him from America, that was back in 1976 or so.

Zina the monk in 1970

As a post-script I found a U.S. Social Security website that certifies Harriet Rachevsky's death in May 1993 in Los Angeles; she was nearly ninety years old! Another thing I learned searching for Zina was that she had a son too that we did not know about, one older than her daughter Rhea named Alex from her union with Conrad Rooks who directed the 1972 film Siddhartha based on the world famous novel by Hermann Hesse. Zina had trodden the path of the earlier Siddhartha, perhaps she was destined to be an incarnate Lama after all.