Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  She stepped away from the bed and slipped out of the room, thinking all the while. As women, even as imperial women, Jahanara and Roshanara had only one precious possession—reputation. In that lay a woman’s entire worth. One report, well placed, could demolish it.

  When she returned to her apartments, Roshanara sent her eunuchs out into the city of Agra. They followed her orders faithfully, letting fall a word in conversations around fires, speaking casually to travelers and merchants who had come in for the wedding celebrations, dropping hints at the shopkeepers’ open windows as they passed by with a wink and a nod. And the next day, and in the days that followed, the rumors were reborn, blossomed, burgeoned that Emperor Shah Jahan had indeed left off mourning his dead wife because he had found another, in the person of the Begam Sahib of the Empire.

  • • •

  After attending to the decoration of Dara’s bridal chamber, Jahanara went to her Bapa’s apartments to see him to bed, as she had done every night since her mother died. Emperor Shah Jahan was waiting for her by the windows of the balcony. On the streets below, men shouted, women sang, drums were beaten in drunkenness.

  “They still enjoy themselves,” he said when Jahanara came to rest her head against her father’s shoulder and twine her arm in his. “It is so late.”

  “You are good to them, Bapa,” she said. “They have missed the raucousness of mindless celebration, and they enjoy it now with Dara’s wedding. Will you sleep?” She tugged at his arm and led him to the bed. The nights were still cool this early in the year, and coal braziers wrought in gold and silver filigree were dispersed around the bed, their warmth enough for Shah Jahan to require only a sheet to cover him. When Jahanara gestured toward the open doors and windows of the balcony, he shook his head.

  “I’ve ordered for them to be left open. Read to me, beta.”

  “From the Baburnama, Bapa?” She reached for a book beside him, covered in red leather embossed with gold leaf, ran her finger along the slit created by the jade bookmark, found the page, and opened it.

  When she had read for ten minutes, Emperor Shah Jahan leaned out from his bed and put a hand over the pages. “What a pity it is that I never learned Turki, in which Emperor Babur wrote this memoir, or that I never taught you. You and I, we have to read his words translated into Persian; I think he must be grieving at our ignorance. You see how learned he was, a warrior first, but a keen, observant one who detailed every bit of his life in these pages, studied the characters of his generals and his men, thundered in to take Hindustan for us.”

  “But he hated India, Bapa,” Jahanara said softly. “He loathed the heat, he did not understand the people—if there were empires to be conquered in cooler climes, he would have done so.”

  “And you, Jahan?”

  She shrugged, a graceful upward movement of her shoulders. “I am at peace where you are, Bapa.”

  The silk curtains covering the windows were a slip of a cloud, and the skies lit up as the late-night fireworks began. Now a cerulean blue, now a pale lime green, now a coral pink. The lights came on and disappeared without a sound, for these last festivities, unlike the evening fireworks, had been ordered to be noiseless. Itimad Khan moved around the room, extinguishing the lamps and torches one by one, and father and daughter were silhouetted against the glittering sky. They looked at each other in delight, seeing the shades of colors brighten each of their faces and dwindle into darkness.

  “It was a good wedding, Jahan. Dara is happy, and so am I in his choice of a bride. But weddings seem to beget weddings. I am thinking of another one now.”

  “Are you?” Jahanara asked, her heart pounding. She would be nineteen years old in April, and if Mama had been alive, perhaps she would have been married to Mirza Najabat Khan long ago. She searched her father’s face, but he was looking at the windows.

  “Sons must be married,” he said. “They have to beget heirs for the Empire, as many male children as they can.” He laughed, and it was a sound unheard for so long that Jahanara laughed along with him, just for the pleasure of being able to do so. “But even sons that lived have had an unfortunate predilection to alcohol and opium, leaving an Emperor originally possessed of a handful of heirs with one or two at the most in the end. As with my father, Emperor Jahangir. In his case, his being the only surviving son was a blessing; in mine . . .” His voice faded away, and they both thought of the trail of blood that had washed the path to his throne.

  Jahanara kissed her father’s hand and noticed that it was trembling. Bapa had never regretted sending his brothers to their deaths when he became Emperor; it was a necessity. If he had forgiven their lives, he could have well forfeited his own—this was the unwritten law of the Empire. Did he worry about his own four sons? Think that Dara’s place as Emperor after him was not so assured after all? But who else was there? Who else could there be?

  “I grow old, Jahan,” he said quietly, “in thinking thoughts such as these. And now that Dara is married, another one of you must be also.”

  “Who, Bapa?” she asked. “Which man have you chosen?”

  His look of astonishment stunned her, and then his words did too. “Not you, surely, my dear. They have a saying here in Hindustan that parents are but temporary guardians of their daughters, until they marry. But you are my very life, you cannot want . . . surely?”

  “No, of course not. I meant”—she groped for words—“I meant Roshan. I thought that perhaps you were thinking of her.”

  Emperor Shah Jahan lay back on his bed and crossed his arms over his stomach. “I hear Roshan has lost her heart to an amir at court. If she wishes to marry him, she may.”

  “She has? How do you know, Bapa? She could not have been so bold as to talk with you.”

  “Beta, I may have been in mourning for your Mama, but my ears still work, and my spies do also. His name is Mirza Najabat Khan.”

  Jahanara did not respond, but a weight descended upon her, her shoulders bowed. If Bapa knew this, then it must be true. He must know then also of her meeting with Najabat Khan in the polo fields. Was that why he had said this to her? That Roshan, whom he loved less, would be welcome to marry Najabat Khan, but she, so much dearer to him, must keep her place by his side?

  “I am not of a mind, however,” Emperor Shah Jahan said, “to let either of my daughters marry.”

  He slept then, and she sat by his side, crushed. The fireworks ended, and the sharp smoke of spent gunpowder came coiling into the apartments. The skies darkened again, and Jahanara saw that a thin, cold moon had risen, hidden until now by the brilliance of the fireworks. Mist ascended from the river to shroud the trees and blot the moon, and she rose, finally, to return to her rooms. When she left, the Kashmiri women guards outside Emperor Shah Jahan’s apartments saluted her and murmured to each other about the lateness of the hour. It was these whispers that Princess Roshanara relied upon when she sent her eunuchs out into the night to spread a vile rumor about her father and her sister, and Jahanara did not stop to think that, for such talk to have travelled abroad, it must have originated within the walls of the imperial zenana.

  • • •

  When Princess Jahanara Begam heard the gossip, brought to her by Satti Khanum, she paid little heed to it, not caring how it had started or how it had spread. In doing so, she made her first mistake. For Najabat Khan was a fastidious man, and, as enchanted as he was by his princess, something in him balked at such talk. He remembered how she had come to his tent in the encampment, boldly and without fear, and he remembered that magical moonlit night in the chaugan fields when he had to stop often to look at her, to see in her that woman from the previous meeting. He barely knew her—as indeed he had known little about his first two wives, but they were now established in his zenana and did not have omnipotent fathers or powerful brothers who could call for his head to be parted from his neck by sundown and would be obeyed without question. An alliance with the imperial family was advantageous, but fraught with danger all the same—for e
ven a hundred years after Emperor Babur had established the Mughal Empire, the imperial family’s quicksand fortunes made their legacy shakable, and they held on to the crown only by might and cunning, the former directly linked to money, and more specifically to possession of the vast treasury at Agra.

  For the second woman, seen in the blue light of the moon, Najabat Khan would have risked the peril, though not for the first. But he thought they were the same.

  Prince Shah Shuja, the second of Emperor Shah Jahan’s sons, was married twenty days later, on February 23, 1633, and this was what preoccupied Jahanara soon after Dara’s wedding, why she gave such little consideration to the rumors. Sons must be married, Emperor Shah Jahan had said, and so he said again to Jahanara; Shuja was of age—he would be seventeen that year, to Dara’s eighteen, and would his beloved Jahan see to it?

  She did, without as much preparation as she had for Dara. Shuja married the daughter of Mirza Rustum Safavid, a grandson of Shah Ismail of Persia, who had come to Hindustan some forty years ago to become a courtier to Emperor Akbar. Rustum was an old man, sixty-some years old, but the girl Shuja married was born of one of his younger wives. Quite apart from their royal antecedents and their link in blood to the Shah of Persia, Rustum’s family had a history of connections with the Mughal imperial family. Emperor Shah Jahan’s first wife, languishing behind the walls of the imperial zenana, was Rustum’s niece. And so, when Shuja married Rustum’s daughter, he married his stepmother’s cousin.

  When the wedding had been celebrated, the bustle in the streets of Agra waned into its everyday regularity. In the lull, exhausted and filled with a hunger, Princess Jahanara Begam sent another restrained summons to Najabat Khan; this time it was to meet her in the zenana gardens, midafternoon, when most of the women would be indoors at siesta.

  She waited for him. But he did not come.

  rauza-i-munavvara

  The Luminous Tomb

  The Kinge is now building a Sepulchre for his late deceased Queen Taje Moholl . . . whome hee dearely affected. . . . He intends it shall excel all other. . . . There is already about her Tombe a raile of gold. The building is begun.

  —R. C. TEMPLE (ed.), The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, by Peter Mundy 1608–1667

  Agra

  Thursday, May 26, 1633

  17 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1042

  The heated, parched air was woven with the tuneful murmur of thousands of voices in prayer, reciting verses from the Quran. The first ‘urs for Empress Mumtaz Mahal had been held in the Jilaukhana, the forecourt to the tomb, but this, the second ‘urs, was held within, because by this time, a scant year later, the massive sandstone terrace fronting the Yamuna was already complete.

  On this terrace would stand the Luminous Tomb, in the very center, flanked on the left by a mosque and on the right by the Miham Khana, an assembly hall. The terrace was designed to occupy the entire breadth of the gardens for the tomb and was some nine hundred and eighty-five feet long. Its two ends, east and west (its northern end faced the river), were curved around octagonal towers that would mark the northeastern and northwestern edges of the tomb’s complex. From the Great Gate, the terrace would eventually be barely discernible—not only because of the magnificent structures it bore, but also because it was only four feet high in front, higher at the back, some thirty feet, built thus because the land sloped downward to the river.

  Emperor Shah Jahan’s engineers had studied the sandy and silt-filled ground at the verge of the river, which had been routed earlier to curve alongside the building site. The foundations of this riverfront terrace, the very basis for the Luminous Tomb, would have to be solid and substantial. They spent hours in consultation, poring over the architect’s plans, taking measurements on-site, excavating and filling mud in cavities, which they then submerged for days to simulate the Yamuna in flood in a year of munificent rains. Every test crumbled under the onslaught of the water, and this was their biggest problem. If his Majesty had decided instead to house the tomb in the center of the gardens, and so landward, with merely a compound wall at the riverfront, all their calculations would have been accurate. But in his infinite wisdom, Emperor Shah Jahan had determined that the main buildings were to be at the north end of the gardens, at the water’s edge, and the engineers then scrambled to make their sovereign’s wishes into fact.

  Finally, one day in December of 1632, one experiment withstood every simulated natural disaster. And so, they marked out numerous circles five feet in diameter, sank wooden shafts, and dug out all the soil until they hit the bedrock below. Into this opening they packed rocks and chunks of iron—eventually the wood would rot and disintegrate, but this pillar of rock and iron would claw firmly into the ground and hold up above the weight of the terrace at the river, the platform for the tomb, the tomb itself, the mosque, and the assembly hall.

  The tomb would be raised on a platform of brick and sandstone, its sides faced with white marble slabs, simply carved in blank arches that curved to a point on top. When the second ‘urs was celebrated, the terrace was finished, and so also was the tomb’s white platform. During the first ‘urs there had been nothing much to see—the tents were pitched on dirt—but now the graceful and mammoth lines of the terrace and the platform gave some shape to the tomb itself. The Empress’s body had been unearthed from its temporary rest and brought into the underground chamber below the terrace; her cenotaph had been marked in stone on the platform; a gold screen, real and heavy gold, surrounded this marking. Eventually, the tomb would rise over the cenotaph. On this day, though, the tents for the ceremony were pitched on the terrace and the platform, around the screen.

  As the ghariyalis struck the noon hour, an imperial barge docked on the river side of the terrace and a cry went out, “Avert your eyes!” passed on from guard to guard. This second ‘urs was to be a private celebration for the Emperor and the ladies of his zenana, and panels of Masulipatnam chintz shielded the royal party not just at the pier but above on the terrace. Shah Jahan walked down the length of the pier, holding Jahanara’s and Roshanara’s hands. A wedge of steps had been cut into this side of the terrace, leading to cool verandahs. On the landward side, the terrace was a scant four feet in height, but here it was almost three stories high, an uninterrupted stretch of amber sandstone inlaid with graceful lines in white marble. In its walls were set a series of rooms facing the water, with red sandstone pillars fluting into arches to hold up the ceilings. This was the Tahkhana.

  “You are quiet, Bapa,” Jahanara said when they were seated. The Yamuna flowed in sluggish tranquillity, and a warm breeze stirred through the room, the ceiling of which was lofty and airy, the stone screens punctured by light. Here they would wait until the afternoon sun had spent its viciousness, then go up to the marble platform to take part in the ceremonies and the chanting.

  Shah Jahan clasped his hands in front of him, thinking of the woman for whom he was building all of this. When he looked up at his daughters, he found them watchful, noting his every movement, their heads slanted to one side. Jahan had grown into a beautiful woman, slender, her face planed in angles—a sharp jut to her chin, thin cheeks, strong bones around her eyes. Her mouth curved upward when his glance fell upon her, as though she knew what his scrutiny was about. Roshan had blossomed also in these past two years into womanhood, but she was softer than her sister—her eyes had a glow to them, her actions were more unhurried, and recently he had noticed fine lines of discontent on her smooth forehead. They were two sides of his wife, each imbued with different characteristics, and he found in them Mumtaz Mahal’s varied moods. At times she had been strong, at times arrogant and demanding, at times welcoming. Himself he saw only in Jahanara, and perhaps only because he loved her so much, because she, more than any of her siblings, had found the time to be by his side when he wanted her, listened with an interest he found lacking in the others, counseled him with a sagacity beyond her age.

  “I find,” he said finally, “that I miss your Mama les
s now . . . than before.” And when he had spoken, his words surprised even him. Was it true? But it was. The ache of Arjumand’s loss had dulled and retreated into a corner of his heart, and he could summon it only by will. It did not swamp him as it had in the early days, render him unable to function. His every day was filled with routine, and there was so little time left to think of her now. He woke at four o’clock in the morning to dress for the early jharoka, slept for an hour afterward, sat at the public audience in the Diwan-i-am, presented himself at the afternoon jharoka before retiring to the zenana for his lunch and his duties to the ladies. Here, as his father and grandfather had done, he discussed their problems, found ways to solve them, gave orders on budgets and allowances. In the late afternoon, there was yet another public audience, and a sunset jharoka, and then a meeting with selected amirs at the Diwan-i-khas. News of every incident in his Empire came to him through these varied sessions, brought by spies and runners from the outer reaches—even things as inconsequential as what governors had misused the funds from their territorial treasuries by heaping gifts on a serving maid or a dancing girl. Everything was written down, secreted in the archive vaults under Agra fort.

  At night, he returned to his chambers in the harem for his meal, but his door, figuratively, was always open for reports of an immediate nature, and he was stirred from his dinner or his conversations with Jahanara or Dara to the antechamber outside the zenana, where he received the men not allowed in. He went to sleep at midnight, and, in those few minutes before he closed his eyes, he thought of Arjumand.