Raja spoken tenderly, crowns without governing. There need be no kingdom, no revenue, not even a particularly solvent afternoon. The beloved is promoted by affection; the treasury will manage somehow. Raja. A man whom life has evidently received without asking for identification. The syllables may contain admiration, amusement, or that delicate species of envy which prefers to introduce itself as a joke. Raja: the gentleman whose preferences have acquired constitutional importance. His tea must be hot, his room quiet, his arrangements arranged. Someone has been inconvenienced, or suspects that inconvenience ought to be distributed more democratically.
There is also the more ambiguous coronation: the suggestion that fortune has not merely favored a man but spared him. The distinction is fine and consequential. To have received something is one matter; to have understood nothing of deprivation is another. Between them, an insinuation can cross almost soundlessly, carrying no luggage that might be searched. A fortunate man becomes a sheltered man; a sheltered man becomes a pampered man; and presently an entire biography has been written by someone who has only brought the bill.
For raja does not, by itself, confess.
Its meaning lives in the neighboring sentence, the preceding inconvenience, the ease or stiffness of the exchange. Most of all, it lives in that elusive inflection by which language manages to keep its dictionary innocent. A crown may be offered lovingly, balanced mischievously, or lowered over the eyes. And sometimes it is only a crown of paper, passed across the table by someone who likes the face beneath it.
