Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  Jahanara peeled the wet chiffon veil from her face and wiped the rain off her forehead and her eyes. Dara had protested against coming to the funeral because he had been repelled by anything to do with death and dying, even though this was their mother. Murad had insisted against being here because he was a child. And Aurangzeb . . . he had protested against their—Jahanara’s and Roshanara’s—being at the funeral because they were women and not allowed to take part in so public a ritual. So also the imam felt now, his distaste evident, his eyes steadily upon the ground just a few inches around his feet so he would see where he stepped but no more. This man—like Aurangzeb, Jahanara thought with a sense of mirth—was as rigid and obstinate as an ass. He had been so cautious that he hadn’t even dared to look at Mumtaz’s covered body by the graveside, because she was a woman.

  Murad cried gruffly, great sobs ripping out of his little frame. Shivers shook him even in this heat, for all the rain had done was increase the cloying humidity. Murad put his arms around Jahanara’s waist and clung to her, burying his face in the damp folds of her ghagara. She kissed the top of his head and said, “Hush. Hush, little brother.”

  “He wouldn’t make such an indecent display if you were not here to comfort him,” Aurangzeb said.

  “Will you keep quiet, Aurangzeb?” Dara spoke for the first time since they had come across the pond in a convoy of boats to lay their mother to rest. He had stood on Aurangzeb’s other side all this while, his head bowed, his face somber. “You’ve said enough. You always speak more than you should. Words such as these are more of an indecent display than a child mourning for his mother . . . or his sister comforting him.”

  Standing at the first step to the top of the baradari, Aurangzeb flushed, in rage and in embarrassment, because all their retainers were ranged around them, and, even through the pounding of the rain—lessened now somewhat—Dara’s incisive words had been clearly audible. On various other boats bobbing gently in the pond were the ministers of state, seated and watching. Had they heard also?

  Dara moved to occupy the place left by Aurangzeb and patted the sobbing Murad on his shoulder.

  The prayers said, the Empress’s body was lowered into the rectangular grave, with her head pointing west, toward Mecca. The six of them climbed the steps and stood around the grave, looking down upon their mother’s shrouded figure—no coffin had been built for her, in keeping with the strictures. Then, one by one, they scooped up handfuls of the moist earth and flung it in. The mud splattered over the unsullied white of the cloth that sparkled with its hundreds of diamonds, and slowly, as they threw in more, the sparkle dimmed and then was extinguished.

  From the palaces in the fort across the Tapti, the man on the raised courtyard could not see this action—his children covering his wife’s grave with mud—because the rain had begun anew its strengthened pounding, all but blotting out the severe outer lines of the baradari. The man held a white umbrella over his head. Beyond the confines of the fort at Burhanpur, Shah Jahan’s authority flung out wide over the lands of Hindustan, and an entire Empire would have been willing to fall on its knees in gratitude had it been given a chance to perform this minor duty of shielding his august head from the rain.

  Emperor Shah Jahan was cold inside and out; his skin felt clammy, his heart fragmented into so many pieces that even breathing seemed torturous. He wondered if he would himself last many days more without Arjumand; it was unimaginable, a life without her. Would his children be performing the same duty for him in a few days? His tears fell. His ears were filled with the crashing of the rain on the white canvas of his umbrella; the folds of his white chudidar, scrunched up around his ankles, were soggy; the lower edges of his white coat, the nadiri, clung to the fabric of his chudidar. He would wear only white for the next few years. His shoulders stooped under the slender weight of the umbrella’s gold-encased stem, and he felt himself age. Something had died inside him also.

  Behind him, some thirty paces away, were two women who stood erect, their veils pulled over their faces, their backs firm. They were the Empresses who remained. One, the first woman Shah Jahan had married, was descended from kings herself; her lineage was impeccable—she was linked in blood to the Shah of Persia. The second woman, whom Shah Jahan had married after his marriage to Arjumand (making her his third wife), was the granddaughter of the man who had been Emperor Jahangir’s Khan-i-khanan, the Commander in Chief of the imperial forces, a powerful, well-respected man.

  The first wife glanced thoughtfully at her husband. She was thirty-eight years old herself, but her last child, her first and only one, had been born some twenty years ago—in 1612, the year Shah Jahan had married Mumtaz. Since, having performed this perfunctory duty in giving her a child, albeit a girl child, he had not come to her bed again. What had been Mumtaz’s charms? A pretty face? She herself had had one. Grace and elegance? Here also she could not be faulted. Noble blood? Mumtaz was the granddaughter of a Persian immigrant, a nobleman, true, but one who had been hounded out of his country. She could claim no ties to the Shah, no hint of royalty, and yet . . . she had been so ridiculously adored that the first wife was nothing, and the third wife—who also had been given the opportunity to produce a royal offspring after the marriage—was also nothing. The first Empress inclined her head to the third wife. She had borne him a son, but the child died when he was two years old, so she literally had nothing anymore.

  But now—and here the first wife smiled to herself—now Mumtaz Mahal was dead. And their husband would return to them, for where else could he go? He would grieve for the dead Empress, to be sure, but would find his happiness and content among the living. The first wife began to sketch out plans in her mind—which apartments to occupy here in Burhanpur and later in the capital city of Agra; which servants to retain and which to let go; which eunuch to create as Chief of the Harem; how to pension off Mumtaz’s seven children; when to begin negotiations for the marriage of her twenty-year-old daughter. And then she remembered that she had not been consulted on the funeral arrangements, as a Padshah Begam of the harem ought to be. That her messages of condolence sent to the Empress’s apartments had been ignored. That Satti Khanum, who officially bore the title Matron of the Harem but in reality had been Mumtaz’s chief lady-in-waiting, had not come to pay her respects to the newly powerful woman in the zenana. That, instead, that child Jahanara had taken over all the duties she, the first Empress, should have performed for her lord in his time of need. How could a daughter take the place of a wife?

  The first wife shifted on her feet, moved involuntarily out from the sheltering protection of the umbrella, and was drenched. She cursed under her breath, not daring to raise her voice. Even in death, Mumtaz Mahal cast a long shadow over the women who had been such pitiful rivals for her husband’s heart.

  But at least, the first wife thought, grasping at something, anything, Mumtaz was being buried here in Burhanpur, and here she would remain. In a small and indistinct baradari on the outer rim of the Empire, in a city that could well be captured by the Deccani kingdoms that raged south of them. Then, no one would remember her, no one would take her name in their mouths, nothing would be said by posterity of this fierce and unreasonable love that her husband (and her husband, the first wife thought viciously) had had for her.

  When Emperor Shah Jahan turned and stumbled back into the fort, she slipped her arm through his. He let her, left now with no strength even to protest.

  She did not know how wrong she was. Mumtaz Mahal had died in Burhanpur, but she would live for posterity in the brilliant tomb that Emperor Shah Jahan would build for her in Agra, four hundred and thirty miles away—the Taj Mahal.

  rauza-i-munavvara

  The Luminous Tomb

  As there was a tract of land (zamini) of great eminence and pleasantness towards the south of that large city, on which there was before this the mansion (manzil) of . . . Raja Jai Singh, it was selected for the burial place (madfan) of that tenant of Paradise . . . a lofty mansion
from the crown estates (khalisa-sharifa) was granted to him in exchange (‘iwad).

  —From the Padshah Nama of Abdal-Hamid Lahauri, in W. E. BEGLEY AND Z. A. DESAI, Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb

  Agra

  Wednesday, June 17, 1631

  17 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1040

  A thicket of sparrows launched itself from the branches of the tamarind on the banks of the Yamuna. The birds flew in a rush, first in one direction and then neatly in another, as though scrambling to make sense of what had disturbed them just as dawn laid open the horizon in Agra.

  The man below listed his head and followed the path of the birds until they disappeared and their confused twittering faded. Mirza Raja Jai Singh bent to sit in the lotus position on the mat his servants had laid out.

  It was still night, but the darkness had begun to shake away. Through the mat, Jai Singh could feel the coolness of the damp earth. He was clad in little this early in the day—his chest was bare, he had dropped his chappals on the sandstone terrace of his mansion before descending the steps and the slope to the water; all he wore was a white silk dhoti tied around his waist, its edges decorated with a thin lining of silver zari.

  “Huzoor.”

  Mirza Raja Jai Singh inclined his head.

  “The mistress—”

  “Which one?”

  “I beg pardon, sire, the first lady requests your presence when you have the time.” The eunuch hesitated. “As soon as you have the time. In fact, forgive me, Mirza Sahib, without fail and the sooner the better.”

  The eunuch stopped and waited. Raja Jai Singh could hear big intakes of air, a slow leaking out with a tuneless whistle. So his first wife had commanded him to her presence, as she usually did, demanding and not always diplomatic. And this eunuch who was her servant, he did not know how to knead her orders into more palatable words; the stupid fool trembled and shook, and even drooled in his fear. Raja Jai Singh turned back to the water and took a deep breath of the freshly moist air. Here was the hint of the monsoon rains; they would come soon, and every morning when he rose to walk to the tamarind tree, the grass would lie soft and spongy under his bare feet, the thirsty earth would sing, trees would flourish a joyful green.

  He put up a hand. “I heard you; go now. And do not return. This is the last time, you understand?”

  The eunuch bowed, intelligent enough not to speak another word. Caught as he was between his master and his mistress—one sent him away, the other filled his ears with tales of neglect—he had no choice but to obey both of them. His master was obsessed with his mistress, who was a houri, an enchantress, and she in turn would rise every morning to disturb his master’s time before sunrise . . . only because she could and because she wanted to. It was a game they played.

  As the man backed up the slope, Raja Jai Singh heard him bump into someone, another servant perhaps, and say in a low voice, “The Mirza does not wish to be disturbed.”

  Mirza, Jai Singh thought wryly; he had been born a mere noble and would die a mere noble, despite his title of “Raja” and his “kingdom” of Amber.

  Jai Singh had inherited his family fortunes and his title from his grandfather Raja Man Singh upon the latter’s death in 1615. Man Singh, also a vassal to the Mughal Empire, had nonetheless managed to live with the extravagance of a king, with sixteen hundred wives populating his zenana, a veritable swarm of children, so many sons he could not remember all of their names. In the end, all of them had preceded Man Singh in death, except for the man who was Jai Singh’s father. And so, despite that many wives, that many children—that many ways to split Man Singh’s extensive properties in Amber and here in Agra into thin and equal shards to be absolutely fair to the numerous male offspring—all the property, the lands, the palaces, the immense bounty of gold and silver jewels, and this lovely mansion at Agra had fallen into the hands of Jai Singh.

  He was a fortunate man, he thought. Even the fact that he had been allowed to retain his grandfather’s property almost entirely unmolested was due to—among other things—the mercy of his being Hindu and of the Emperors being Muslim. In the Mughal Empire, the Emperor was the sole and only custodian of wealth, which he distributed to the nobles of his court at his discretion—this wealth was a gift, a privilege, a reward for faithful service. When a noble died, according to the law of escheat, so also died his right to his estates—his heirs could not inherit anything; it all reverted to the state, to their Emperor. This was so in theory; in fact, the Emperor usually passed a cursory glance over the property and a more than cursory glance over the heirs and their loyalty to his crown, and handed the estates back to the next generation almost intact. For some unspoken reason—a reason Jai Singh did not question—Hindu Rajas were exempt from this rule of escheat, and deaths in their families were not automatically accompanied by the arrival of the Emperor’s bailiffs.

  A pale pink brushed the skies in front of Raja Jai Singh. From where he sat, without stretching his neck too far, he could see the red sandstone walls of the Agra fort pick up the blush of dawn. He mused over his fortunes again, over his luck at having this magnificent haveli on the banks of the Yamuna River at Agra—a piece of land coveted by many of the nobles at court, which had come to him from his grandfather. Amirs newer to court, or even those with lineages as extensive as thoroughbred horses, turned jealous eyes upon the lush copse of trees that surrounded the mansion, the sweet air that floated up from the river, the glimpse of the fort, why even the proximity to the fort, which allowed Jai Singh to present himself to his Emperor in response to a summons before most amirs even had the time to call for their cummerbunds. But all of this—the land, the title, the wealth—had been well earned. For Raja Jai Singh came from a family that could trace its service to the Mughal Emperors and to the Empire from the time of Emperor Akbar. But his family had not just been servants—they had some much-cherished imperial ties also. Jai Singh’s great-grandaunt, an Amber princess, had been Akbar’s wife and Emperor Jahangir’s mother. His grandaunt had been Jahangir’s wife. The son born of this latter union, Prince Khusrau, had been unfortunately killed by his brother Emperor Shah Jahan on his way to the throne. If Khusrau had lived . . . if he had become Emperor, perhaps Jai Singh would have been more powerful at court, inheriting this power instead of having to work for it.

  He waited for the wink of the sun’s rays before he turned east and touched his palms together in the first movement of the surya namaskar—the salutation to the sun. Even as he performed the motions of his exercise, some four hundred miles away, Empress Mumtaz Mahal went to meet her death. Raja Jai Singh dreamed desultorily of a small chattri to cover his ashes when he died, here by the banks of the river, the jalis of the chattri filtering the cool breezes from the Yamuna. But it was not to be, for his Emperor wanted his land and his mansion for a loftier purpose—to house the remains of his beloved wife at Agra.

  Jai Singh did not know then that his haveli would be demolished before the year was out, and in its place would rise a Luminous Tomb.

  Three

  Even though the Incomparable Giver had conferred on us such great bounty, more than which cannot be imagined, through His grace and generosity, yet the person with whom we wanted to enjoy it has gone.

  —From the Padshah Nama of Amina Qazwini, in W. E. BEGLEY AND Z. A. DESAI, Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb

  Burhanpur

  Tuesday, June 23, 1631

  24 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1040

  The days wasted themselves in Burhanpur, in a daze, slowly moving into night and returning again. The town heard the gurgle of the ghariyalis’ vessels filling with water to measure time, heard the men strike the brass disk hanging above their heads to announce the ends of the watches, saw light turn into darkness, but it was for all of them with a sense of unreality.

  The shops in the main bazaar street were open, awnings held up on vertical poles to shelter from the sun, but business was not as usual. If money changed hands at all—for flour and rice, vegetables, copper pots, gold
and silver—it was with a reluctance, as one hand hesitated in handing over the coins, the other grabbed a little too greedily at the first income of the past week. Even after their purchases, customers tarried outside the shops, trying to make conversation that did not sound stilted. They talked of the weather (it was hot, fiercely so), about the lack of dependable rain (and again about the weather), about the Emperor’s presence here at Burhanpur (such a blessing to them all). But of the death of Mumtaz Mahal they could not speak, struck dumb. The men in the streets, the few veiled women of a higher class who strayed for goods, the more common women who wandered with their heads bare to the gazes of all; they had none of them seen their Empress, but news from the fort palace that loomed over the bazaar seeped into every corner. And what they heard most of was their Emperor’s grief at this lady’s death. A day after she had died, after she had been buried on that small island in Zainabad Bagh, in the center of the Bagh’s pond, they heard that their Emperor had died also.

  At that news, the shopkeepers pulled wooden shutters over their storefronts, locked them securely, and crept into their houses behind the shops as a mob of young men racketed through the street, shouting profanities and wrecking anything they could find. Three hours later, the dust settled only when the Ahadis, the Emperor’s personal bodyguards, thundered through the street on their horses, swords drawn to slice down a head here, an arm there. The rebellion—if it could be called that—of the miscreants ended then, as abruptly as it had begun. Burhanpur settled into a state of long-drawn-out waiting accompanied by a hush, a silence, a burgeoning fear.

  Outside the fort at Burhanpur, the highest amirs of the Empire waited also, day and night. It was customary for the nobles to take turns of a week or more in guarding their sovereign—they would arrange themselves and their retinues in the courtyard just beyond the guard of the Ahadis, set up their sleeping and cooking tents, array their men in semicircular bands around the palaces and on the banks of the Tapti. But since Mumtaz had died, all the nobles in Burhanpur, most of them normally present at court, found themselves crowded in the courtyard. When night fell, small fires sprang to life, over which meats were roasted, water boiled, wine warmed. Their voices were subdued. A thickness hung around them. When one of them moved, on the sixth day after the Empress’s death, they all turned to him with some hope. He could do something. He was the Khan-i-khanan.