The Relationship Continues and Pierre Finds Out

"Dear heart, I do not want to endanger your life, you must always be well guarded from the day I leave here and when I arrive on the other side, you must not see me…for I am sure my brothers will have detectives trying to find me."38

This was the last message Ora sent to Inayat before her escape to Europe to join him. While the tone is loving and tender, it conveys a very serious warning for Inayat in an effort, as Ora said, to protect his life from Pierre and other unnamed family members who seemed to support him. But how had it come to this point?

By the time Inayat had arrived in America, some states had anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited whites and nonwhites from marrying. While California had such laws too, they did not specify "Hindus" as one of the groups with which marriage was prohibited. However, lawmakers assumed that the prohibition on "Mongolians" marrying whites included South Asians as well.39 Thus, an official marriage between Ora and Inayat would not have been acceptable where they originally met, legally. But there were other barriers to their love besides racist laws.

When Ora and Inayat had been introduced to each other in (most likely) 1910, Pierre had been the one to suggest that Ora could take vina lessons from Inayat. The arrangement allowed the pair to get to know each other more deeply over the next few weeks and confirm that it was indeed love they felt. It seemed that Pierre suspected so, for David Harper mentions that Pierre forbade contact between the two. Regardless of Pierre’s efforts, Ora’s and Inayat’s strong feelings for each other persisted, as they kept close contact through letters and the telephone, and met secretly whenever possible, before Inayat and his brothers departed for Europe.40

But this relationship could not be kept secret forever. Ora recounted in a long letter to Inayat, lovingly referred to as "Daya", exactly how Pierre found out about their courtship, starting when Pierre invited Ora to tell him whether she was in love with anyone:

"I thought the only thing to do was to tell him that I love you and want to marry you, and so I did after about nine hours constant talk, or until I thought, after all he told me, that he really had sympathy for me…Well, he changed immediately, and said that your blood would never mix with his and oh my Daya, I cannot tell you what all happened but he said you could not live, and when those words were spoken, I felt myself going backward in a faint, but I held to consciousness as best I could, thinking he might go over and kill you…and so that night…I would not go to bed…"41

Verbal death threats were not the only way in which Pierre showed his violent disapproval of Ora and Inayat’s relationship. Ora mentions in the letter that Pierre had "sent for several people" upon hearing the news and that "the whole house was in an uproar." In addition to this, Pierre destroyed the clothes that Ora had worn when seeing Inayat and Ora mentions without detail other things that Pierre did. Ora concluded her letter with the words "…love and a thousand kisses from the saddest girl in the world."42