“They could not have celebrated Dara’s wedding so splendidly,” Jahanara said, more to herself than to her companion.
“No,” Satti answered, as though she had followed her ward’s train of thought all the way through, “but they are here to stay and will not leave when you do. And the gap formed from your absence, one of them is sure to fill.”
She stopped abruptly, and Princess Jahanara watched her think this time and saw a realization map her face. When Jahanara left to marry, one of her father’s wives would again be supreme in the imperial zenana, and in the tussle for domination, Satti might well be left without a role to play. Perhaps she should not advertise either her attachment to or her exhilaration in being the Begam Sahib’s servant so openly. Perhaps a little diplomacy, a division of affections, was advisable. Jahanara felt sudden pity for the woman, because she was herself privileged as no one else in the imperial zenana was, beloved of her father, possessed of a wealth unimaginable to any other woman, perhaps anywhere else in the world. As she stood in the midst of the shimmering stack of presents she was giving her brother on the occasion of his wedding, Jahanara knew that she was etching her name in history. One day, four or five hundred years from now, posterity would talk with amazement of her generosity, her open hand, her dominance over the glittering zenana. She had more money than Dara, the crown prince, the much-touted heir; all of this had cost her only about a tenth of her annual income.
“You have something else on your mind, Satti? Or do you wish to go?” Jahanara asked, wearied by the talk and her emotions. To think that the two of them—Nadira and Satti—so inconsequential themselves, would consider her so . . . just because she did not have the protection of a husband. Even more insulting was that they thought she would lose the protection of her father.
“I heard,” Satti said and then hesitated, “about Mirza Najabat Khan. The chaugan at midnight. It was inappropriate, Jahan, so unlike you to act on impulse. If you are . . . indeed . . . wanting a man, I would advise a marriage. I will talk with your Bapa if you wish; you know I am here in the place of your mother. Give me the opportunity to do this for you.”
“It was no impulse, Satti,” Jahanara replied, fighting to keep her voice firm, even reasonable. That there would be gossip, she had known, but for Satti Khanum to talk thus, in terms of her wanting just any man, and then assume Mama’s place in her heart; this was unthinkable and far beyond a servant’s duties. “And I will speak with Bapa when I consider it necessary.”
“You are young, my dear—”
“My Mama was married at nineteen, Satti, and she was betrothed to Bapa five years before that.”
“Jahan, if your Bapa should come to know of—”
“Is that a threat, Satti?”
“Of course not,” the older woman said hurriedly. “It is impossible that you would even think so. Am I nothing to you, Jahan? Remember that I have taught you since you were a child, been by your mother’s side, am still here now for you poor, motherless children.”
“I do know all of this, Satti,” Jahanara said quietly. “And now I must be alone.”
She would not apologize. If her Mama had still been alive, there would have been at least one woman who had some authority over her; Satti, for all of her sagacity and obvious interest in them, was not her mother. Jahanara thought that all of her immense power and wealth, both in the zenana and at court, had given her the merest smidgen of arrogance—but it was well deserved. And the Mughal kings and queens had learned the value of having this confidence in themselves, of heeding the advice of retainers and courtiers but paying attention to their own opinions both within and without the harem. Some years ago, Emperor Akbar had had to battle his regent, Bairam Khan, for ascendancy when he attained his majority, for the regent had come to think of the Empire left in his safekeeping as his own and, in the zenana, Akbar’s wet nurse, Maham Anagha, had assumed a place of eminence that had been more difficult for him to shake. Jahanara knew well all these stories from the past, had studied them carefully, and just as cautiously had chosen the women and the eunuchs who surrounded her, but she never let them think of themselves as being more than what they were—servants, retainers, and slaves.
Satti left, her step faltering, although she was already eager to pay a visit to Emperor Shah Jahan’s wives; perhaps she could say she had come to invite them personally for their stepson’s marriage.
But the two women in the verandah had left something unsaid and hanging in the air between them. Without the persuasive influence of Empress Mumtaz Mahal, was it possible that Emperor Shah Jahan—having just lost one beloved woman in his life—would allow the other, his daughter, to marry and carry her affections away from the imperial zenana to the harem of another man?
• • •
A week later, on February 1, 1633, Jahanara sent henna to Nadira’s mother’s house on the banks of the Yamuna River, and along with it the sachaq, the official wedding gift to the bride. Two hundred servants went on foot in a procession, bearing upon their heads, hands, and shoulders round silver and gold platters heaped with brocades from Gujarat and Banaras and jewels from Satagaon and Surat. In front of the men, Ishaq Beg carried a plate with fifteen solid-gold cups, in the depths of which lay pungent-smelling henna paste, made from the crushed central veins, the petioles, of the henna leaves. To fill the cups to their brims, thousands of henna leaves had been harvested when they had just unfurled at the break of dawn, dewdrops still glittering like crystals on the young green. The leaves themselves would work well enough for dyeing hands and legs and hair with brilliant orange—but for Dara’s hinabandi ceremony, Jahanara had ordered each tiny leaf to be stripped of its petiole, where the concentration of the dye was at its highest, and these slender veins were then powdered in marble mortars, mixed with water from the Ganges, and set to rest in their gold cups.
At Nadira’s house, the women waited eagerly for the gifts and the henna, and the whole day was spent in singing, dancing, and decorating all the women’s hands and legs in lush designs. Jahanara and Roshanara did not attend the ceremony, and they were not to attend the wedding itself—their role, as Dara’s sisters, was to wait in the imperial palaces to welcome Dara home with his bride the next day. Dara went to Nadira’s house late in the afternoon and was ushered into the women’s quarters so that one of Nadira’s sisters could adorn the skin of his hands and his feet with little dots of henna.
The next day, Emperor Shah Jahan went to his oldest son’s apartments in the Agra fort just as he had finished dressing and fastened the wedding sehra across his forehead. It was a crown that tied at the back; for the common man, the sehra was made of fresh flowers woven into strings—Dara’s sehra, a gift from his father, was a thick band of gold embedded with diamonds, which ended in velvet ropes at the back of his head, and in the front there were twenty strings of pearls, each eight inches long and each corded with perfectly matched pink pearls the size of cherrystones. The strings ended in a ruby apiece, lavishly faceted and glowing with fire.
Shah Jahan then took a farman from a pocket of his brocade qaba and handed it to Dara.
“What is it, Bapa?” Dara asked, weighing the rolled sheet of paper in his hands.
“A gift. Your sister has given you so much; your father can do no less.”
Prince Dara Shikoh unrolled the scroll and read its contents. As a wedding present, he had been given the city of Lahore, all the buildings contained within, the taxes from its bazaars, the people who lived there, the duties from its customhouses. He felt a rush of tears behind his eyelids and blinked them away. Lahore was one of the seats of the Mughal Emperor, as much a capital city as Agra and Delhi—when his father came to stay, he would from now on come as his son’s guest. In the handing over of the farman, Emperor Shah Jahan had made his oldest son very wealthy, almost on par with his oldest daughter. The revenues would be Dara’s to do with as he pleased, to reinvest, to spend in constructing gardens or sarais or mansions anywhere in the Empire.
He bent to perform the konish to his father, and Shah Jahan stopped his hand as it rose to his head in the salutation.
“You are my son, Dara, from you I do not expect servitude,” he said, smiling.
“Bapa, thank you. I do not know how to express my gratitude; you have given to me one of the jewels of your Empire, and I will guard it jealously.”
“As you will, eventually, the Empire itself, Dara,” Shah Jahan said almost inaudibly, speaking to himself, but Dara heard him, and this first concrete indication of his father’s wishes sent a thrill through him. He was superstitious, so he attributed this good fortune to the woman he was about to marry—Nadira had brought all this to him. He stepped back and let the pearl strings of the sehra fall about his face again. Dara, the bridegroom, was also to be veiled during the ceremony; only later, in their bedchamber, according to custom, would the bride and groom lift the coverings on their faces and see each other for the first time.
• • •
The wedding was held in the Shah Burj at Agra fort—and here, they deviated from established custom that it take place in the bride’s house. The house that Nadira’s mother had rented was small, inconsequential, and unsuitable for the wedding of the heir to the Mughal Empire.
Upon his accession, Emperor Shah Jahan had begun to build in earnest, laying foundations in stone, marble, and semiprecious inlay, for he knew that he would die eventually, his bones would crumble to dust, his imperial farmans shrivel in the mouths of white ants, but stone would survive and stand to proclaim to the people of Hindustan how powerful and wealthy their Emperor had been. The first place he had turned his architect’s gaze upon was the fort at Agra, built originally by his grandfather Emperor Akbar and added on to by his father, Jahangir. He had demolished, without a scruple, the buildings fronting the Yamuna River within the walls of the fort and made plans for them to be replaced by faultless white marble in a series of halls, both public and private, and zenana apartments. One of these was the Shah Burj. It was situated where the walls of the fort curved sharply inward, and here the Shah Burj stood, an octagonal tower topped with a beaten copper dome that had already taken on a gold-green sheen. The tower had a flat roof below the dome with thick and jutting chajjas, eaves that rinsed rainwater away from the building and provided an impenetrable shade even when the sun was aslant. Five of its eight sides faced the Yamuna, each held up by elaborately carved marble pillars. The walls were slabs of marble inlaid with jewels in reds, golds, greens, and blues. The entrance to the Shah Burj, on the western side, away from the river, was an open chamber with a lotus pond carved entirely in marble placed in the center of the floor. The “pond” was shallow, not even six inches deep, set with a single flute of water to form a fountain fed from an underground pipe, and when the water ran, it bubbled out of its source and rippled down the sides of the basin, barely breathing over the carved stone.
There were seven people at the wedding ceremony—officially, that is—a qazi to officiate, the Emperor, his sons, and the bride. The qazi said a short prayer and then asked, as was expected, about the mehr, the settlement from the groom’s father. Emperor Shah Jahan replied that he gave his daughter-in-law five hundred thousand rupees, which was hers to keep and use, no matter whether the marriage survived or not. The qazi gestured to ask for one of Dara’s hands and one of Nadira’s. He did not touch either his prince or the bride but brought them together anyhow—and in the joining of their hands, the marriage contract had been accepted and signed by both of them, and they were married.
Jahanara and Roshanara stood hidden behind the pillars leading into the Shah Burj, their heads covered, listening but not leaning out to see. Jahanara heard the tinkle of the gold bangles on Nadira’s arms—twenty-five on each—as she clasped Dara’s, heard also the rustle of the thickly embroidered chiffon veil as Nadira moved closer to her brother. The qazi melted away, passing the two women outside noiselessly, and Roshanara moved into the room to add her congratulations. Only Princess Jahanara Begam stayed where she was, feeling the cool of the marble seep through her clothing as she leaned against the pillar. One part of her mind was on the arrangements for the festivities—the alms to be distributed, the feast prepared for the night, the entertainment—and another part of her was beset by an unexpected yearning.
She glanced at her Bapa, who stood with a smile on his face, a contentment rarely seen since Mama’s death. Would he look at her thus one day, when he gave her away in marriage to Najabat Khan? Or would he flinch at having to part from his daughter?
In the far distance, along a bend in the river, a fog of dust from the Luminous Tomb’s worksite clogged the horizon. Jahanara went into the Shah Burj to kiss and hug her brother and his new wife, to hold her father’s hand, to watch her other brothers glowing with joy.
She did not know that one day this octagonal room would become intensely familiar to her with its unchanging view of the Taj Mahal. Because her father would die here, bedridden for nine long years after one of his sons would snatch his crown and rule in his stead. And those nine years in the future would be the final shadow cast upon her, upon a life that held such promise today.
Eleven
The first daughter whom he had was Begom Saeb (Begam Sahib), the eldest of all, whom her father loved to an extraordinary degree . . . and this has given occasion to Monsieur Bernier to write many things about this princess, founded entirely on the talk of low people. Therefore it is incumbent on me . . . to say that what he writes is untrue.
—WILLIAM IRVINE (trans.) Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, by Niccolao Manucci 1653–1708
Agra
Wednesday, February 2, 1633
22 Rajab A.H. 1042
Later that night, after the eunuchs had left, Princess Roshanara Begam rested against the door on the inside of the bedchamber prepared for Dara. The aroma of roses in heated bloom filled the room, mixed with the scent of frankincense from the censers. Pink rose petals shimmered on the deep carpets. The bed, made of soft cotton stuffing, was in the center, and four teak bedposts were festooned with garlands of roses, which hung in plush swathes, closely knitted to form a curtain of fragrance around the bed. The sheets were of fine cotton muslin, embroidered in delicate patterns of flowers in gold zari, so carefully done as to merely caress Dara and Nadira as they lay on the bed. Perfumed oil lamps glowed in the corners, casting domes of light upon the marble-embellished ceiling and shadows everywhere else.
Roshanara took a breath and exhaled gently. She was afraid to move from the door, for fear of crushing the rose petals underfoot—that privilege was to be Dara’s and Nadira’s when they came in. But she had a sudden craving to feel the smoothness of the sheets, to lay her head upon the feathered pillows, to look up into a lover’s gaze. A breeze came in from the waters of the Yamuna below the apartment, billowed the chiffon curtains, and sent light skittering around Roshanara. And so, Dara was married to the woman he loved, she thought. What would they do here tonight? Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. She knew what they would do, as they all did, living in the imperial zenana, where every woman’s thoughts went to love, to the caress of silks, to the pearling of sweat on skin. There was no mystery in that, but this, the first night of love, held a special magic, a togetherness; it was a private moment never to be captured again.
She picked up the heavy skirts of her silk ghagara and nudged a rose petal with her toe. It felt cool, and she shivered. Once she had thought it possible for her to have a night such as this . . . with Mirza Najabat Khan. But since last December, when the eunuch had bent to her ear with his tale of Jahanara’s nocturnal meeting with Najabat Khan in the chaugan fields, she had become afraid and bitter. What Jahanara wanted, she usually got, because she was Bapa’s favorite daughter, the one who had his affections, the one who had hosted Dara’s wedding. So it had been before Mama died, so it was now. Roshanara settled herself against the door more comfortably and listened to the sounds of celebrations around the fort. The Naubat Khana, the imperial orchestra, was sti
ll playing this late into the night. The kettledrums boomed, the shenai let loose its wail, men’s voices clamored in song in the darkness. It was the first time in almost two years that Bapa had allowed music in the capital, and Dara’s wedding had become for all of them a time to celebrate not just his joining with Nadira but the official end of mourning for Mama.
And one day she would have all of this too—the music, the lights, the rich presents, a man whose home she would be supreme in, as she was not here in the zenana. But which man?
Roshanara raised her ghagara again and went to the bed, uncaring now that the rose petals lay scattered in her wake. She sat on the mattress and leaned back on her hands, looking up at the ceiling. She had not been allowed, no, invited to perform even this little duty for Dara and Nadira, preparing their chamber for the night. Jahan had been here, shouting orders, snapping her fingers in disgust when she found one wilted rose in a long garland and sent the eunuchs scurrying in search of fresh roses and a seamstress to stitch another one together to hang in its place. She had been harried, restless, perhaps thinking herself of a room in which to spend a night such as this . . . with Najabat Khan. Roshanara knew with a certainty that came from long association with her sister that Jahanara was in love with the courtier, or she would not have risked scandal in meeting him under the cover of darkness, she would not write to him as often as she did. And yet, when she, Roshanara, had sneaked into his tent to take his measure, he had seemed almost welcoming. She sat up. Were his affections still not fixed then? Was that possible?
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