Spear in hand. Check. Dagger (slung over shoulder). Check. Turban. Check. Flowing white tunic. Check ... this is Uttrang Kaur Khalsa or, at least, that is the name she goes by in India where she lives in an ashram (spiritual hermitage) and begins each day at sunrise.
We know her, of course, by a rather different name and reputation. Behind the ‘warrior chic’ uniform is former It Girl Alexandra Aitken. Complete with a bag of bananas.
It was only last year that news emerged that Miss Aitken, 32, daughter of former Tory jailbird Jonathan Aitken, had married a Sikh warrior and was converting to Sikhism.
Not surprisingly, the revelations were greeted with bemusement and scepticism in society circles.
Apart from anything else, Miss Aitken’s nuptials were announced in Hello! magazine, hardly in keeping with Sikh traditions.
Nor, more pertinently, was Miss Aitken’s former lifestyle which consisted mainly of falling out of nightclubs in revealing dresses and, on one memorable occasion, posing naked in GQ magazine.
Could there be a more unlikely transformation? Miss Aitken, photographed striding along an Indian country road, is staying with a sect of yoga Sikhs in the Punjab village of Bani.
The Sikh customs she has adopted could not be further removed from her old life. Miss Aitken is no longer allowed even to cut her hair and uses only a wooden comb.
The woman often seen in the company of royalty at polo matches now spends much of her time in prayer, apparently, often helping to scrub the temple floors with holy water at the end of each day.
She is also, by all accounts, learning Punjabi and studying Sikh religious history.
Why the spear and dagger? Well, her husband, Inderjot Singh, is a so-called ‘warrior’ Sikh (or Nihang Sikh).
However, few Sikh women carry ceremonial weapons, still less own an iPod (in the photograph, headphones can be clearly seen tucked beneath Miss Aitken’s white-and-purple turban), which has left many in the village puzzled.
It is not the only source of intrigue.
Miss Aitken, it seems, has not be seen with Mr Singh of late and locals say he is no longer with her at the ashram. Neither did Miss Aitken attend the recent funeral of Mr Singh’s father, leading some to wonder if the couple might have split up.
Cross-cultural marriages, after all, bring their own particular strains and difficulties.
They met at the Golden Temple of Amritsar in 2009 when Miss Aitken was on a trip to India.
Speaking about that moment in an interview last year, she recalled: ‘I was sitting on the roof of the Golden Temple at about 3am, and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my whole life walked in. He seemed 100 per cent man, gentle and intuitive and poetic and sensitive, but also extraordinarily strong and manly. And you don’t see many of these around. So I was like: “Oh wow!”’
Miss Aitken described falling for a devout man who spent his time helping to feed and clothe the poor.
She painted a picture of someone so religious that, when the two were married the following year, in the temple where they had first fallen in love, dozens of holy men left their caves to attend the wedding ... Or did they?
Flashback: Alexandra Aitken before her transformation, pictured with her father, former politician, Jonathan Aitken
The truth, as ever, is more complicated. For some of Mr Singh’s friends and family have cast doubt over his religious credentials and his involvement in the devout Nihang sect.
It seems that, in fact, until his mid-20s Mr Singh used to enjoy the party lifestyle, drinking, smoking and flirting with girls.
His upbringing in the industrial city of Ludhiana was quite conventional, born to a civil servant father and a mother who was a clerk with the local electricity board. Apparently, he found religion after a trip to — of all places — Australia, where he went to college for a year.
‘When he was there he met a saint and became very religious,’ said an old friend. ‘Before that, yes, he was not so religious; he did like parties.’
Marriage: Alexandra Aitken on her wedding day when she married Inderjot Singh in India
So perhaps the former party lovers were kindred spirits in that regard? They certainly were quick to marry. Friends were informed of Miss Aitken’s new life by email, with the following subject line: ‘I am a happily married devoted mrs wife and new contact details!’
The accompanying message read: ‘Hi, heavenly friends. A very funny forgiving huge hearted saintly hero was adventurous enough to marry me! We’ll have celebrations in London and LA soon. Hope you’ll join us.’
In fact, the wedding was arranged with such haste that Miss Aitken’s parents were unable to attend, leaving them understandably upset.
They were not the only ones. While Mr Singh’s parents appear to have been happy with their son’s choice of bride, not everyone in the family shared their delight. Relatives believed Mr Singh had polluted their pure bloodline by marrying a British girl.
Either way, Alexandra Aitken’s story is an extraordinary one, even judged by the standards of her family’s colourful history. Her father, a former Cabinet minister, famously vowed in 1995 to use the ‘sword of truth’ against The Guardian when he sued the paper for libel in a row over his dealings with Saudi arms traders, but was later jailed for seven months for perjury.
At around the same time, the Aitken sisters Alexandra and her twin, Victoria, discovered that Petrina Khashoggi, supposedly the daughter of millionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, was their half-sibling. DNA tests established that she was conceived during an affair between Aitken and Soraya Khashoggi, the ex-wife of Mr Khashoggi.
Until their father’s trial — he was bankrupted by the legal costs of the libel case — the Aitken girls enjoyed the luxury of live-in staff at an imposing town house in Westminster and a home in Kent.
Their father’s fall from grace put an end to all that. Victoria embarked on a ‘career’ as a rap artist in the U.S. while Alexandra remained in London.
She attended parties, contributed to Tatler and became part of the early Noughties Sloaney set, which included Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. Aged 21, along with Petrina, she posed naked for that now famous GQ photoshoot.
Alexandra Aitken pictured at the The Times London Film Festival during her days as an It girl
Could she have imagined then that one day she would be scrubbing temple floors in the Punjab and wearing a turban?
That tortuous journey, it seems, began in 2002, with the first of her re-inventions. Miss Aitken earnestly insisted that she wanted to be a serious actress. Although she did appear in some short films, the career change failed to ignite.
Eventually, she left London, moving to Hollywood to offer psychic readings and teach yoga.
Along the way, she had dabbled in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Kabbalah.
Explaining her conversion to Sikhism in that newspaper interview last year, Miss Aitken said: ‘I don’t really think of Sikhism as a religion, more a path for anyone who is looking for something more spiritual.
‘We live in a computer age where life is increasingly stressful . . . people are desperately trying to find a way to relax, to escape from everything.
‘As I see it, you’ve got one of two options: you can either find a drug dealer, or you can find something that’s going to give you a natural high. Everyone is looking for something. I’ve found Sikhism.
‘But I didn’t just jump on the first bus going. I did my homework; I’ve read just about everything.’
However, she admitted: ‘Frankly, if someone had told me ten years ago, when I was living the party girl lifestyle in London, that a decade later I’d be a teetotal vegan [living in an ashram], I wouldn’t have believed them.’
