Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  “They dislike it, your Majesty.”

  “As they did when Emperor Akbar insisted on having his way. Him they could not dismiss, but Dara . . . it’s always ‘but Dara.’ He’s become a fool, Jahanara; perhaps you should support Aurangzeb instead.”

  Jahanara’s upper lip curled. “The very idea is abhorrent to me, your Majesty.”

  “Oh? Well, maybe you are right. And keep an eye on Roshanara,” Mehrunnisa said slowly.

  “Why?”

  “Aurangzeb talked of an alliance with her. I wonder what the five of you are doing under your father’s lax gaze, but she seems to dislike you. Why?”

  “She wishes to marry Mirza Najabat Khan,” Jahanara said with distaste. “But that is impossible. Bapa says so. I say so.”

  From the far end of the room, Hoshiyar rose and came toward them. He bowed to Jahanara and said, “Your Highness, I beg pardon, but your visit has tired her Majesty. It is time for you to leave.”

  And she was tired, Mehrunnisa thought with some surprise. Excited by the conversation, the intrigue, the planning, and no longer willing to be a part of it. That portion of her life was over. For this child it was just beginning. Mehrunnisa bent her head in a little prayer that Jahanara Begam, who had taken the time to call on an all-but-forgotten Empress, would have the courage to see the fight through till the end and that, because she wished for it so much, Dara would be Emperor after his father.

  Jahanara performed the taslim again to Mehrunnisa and said, “Thank you, your Majesty.”

  “Only one last word, my dear,” Mehrunnisa said wearily. “If your Bapa will not allow you to have a legal alliance with Mirza Najabat Khan, you must find another way to do so. Guard your personal happiness carefully, Jahanara; no one else will be willing to do it for you.”

  • • •

  When Emperor Jahangir had died on the way back from Kashmir to Lahore, Mehrunnisa’s brother Abul, who had been with the royal entourage, had performed last rites for his brother-in-law in torrid haste. Then he had sent the body to Lahore along with his sister, under guard. Later, Abul would say that these had been Emperor Shah Jahan’s orders. But Shah Jahan was then still a prince in exile—it would take a full week for him to receive Abul’s message about his father’s death and come riding hard into Agra to lay claim to the treasury and the throne. By then, Emperor Jahangir had been interred in the Dilkusha garden. A report circulated for a few months, gaining no momentum, that Jahangir had wished to be buried in the place that he had called the garden of eternal spring—Kashmir. And Mehrunnisa, by her husband’s side for all of the sixteen years that they had been married, knew the truth of that rumor, for it had been in the cool and lush valleys of Kashmir that Emperor Jahangir had been most at peace.

  Five days after Jahanara’s visit, another royal procession set out from the fort to the village of Shahdara and the Dilkusha garden across the Ravi River. This time, messengers had come fleet-footed to Mehrunnisa’s mansion with notes from the nobles at court and cautions from lesser women in the zenana—the Emperor himself meant to visit his father’s mausoleum and oversee the progress, and she was not to show herself to him on pain of death.

  Mehrunnisa laughed, clad herself in a veil of white, still in mourning for Emperor Jahangir, and sat openly on a bench on one of the four stone pathways that bisected the garden to create the charbagh in front of the tomb. The construction was almost complete, and though the money for the building had come from the imperial treasury because Emperor Shah Jahan wanted to be the patron of his father’s final resting place, it was she who had talked with the architects over the past six years, inspected every piece of the pietra dura inlay of marble in red sandstone, stood back to view the tomb rise alongside the Ravi. So she waited early one morning for Shah Jahan to arrive at Dilkusha, Hoshiyar by her side, though sitting at her feet as a servant should.

  The garden was still concealed with thin ribbons of mist from the river when they heard the sounds in the forecourt, the Jilaukhana of the tomb. A colossal red sandstone gateway led in, with the four stone paths that culminated in the center in a square and blue pool of water, which reflected the tomb itself.

  Emperor Shah Jahan and his courtiers, all dressed in white, moved slowly down the center path toward the tomb and stopped at the pool to wash their hands. As they proceeded on, Mehrunnisa leaned forward. But the group was too far away for her to see much of their expressions. They halted in front of the tomb, a low, one-story building in red sandstone, with nine pishtaqs on each of the four sides and four engaged towers on the four corners of the structure. Inside, she had created a series of corridors, one after the other, leading to the heart of the building—a white-marble-paved room set with exquisite pietra dura inlay of agates, sard, jade, and cornelian, gleaming marble walls, and a raised cenotaph in the center. On the flat rooftop was another cenotaph, this time covered only in white marble with a marble railing surrounding it. Jahangir had said to her once that he did not wish for a roof to cover his remains, but she had not had the heart to leave her husband in the open for eternity. The two cenotaphs—one in the inner chamber, and one on the roof—were meant to satisfy them both.

  Emperor Shah Jahan stayed inside the tomb for only a few minutes and came back outside with another man, who walked a few paces behind him. It was her brother Abul.

  “I wonder how he likes being father-in-law to the Emperor, Hoshiyar,” she said quietly.

  “There is talk of his being made Khan-i-khanan, your Majesty,” the eunuch replied.

  “Abul was always a little pompous, even when we were children. It did not suit him then, and”—her voice sharpened—“it does not suit him now.”

  Hoshiyar nodded. His mistress was still bitter about the way she had been treated, and rightfully so; she had been an Empress and this man’s sister. He spat on the ground next to him, a gesture that surprised even him—for it was such a common expression of revulsion, and Hoshiyar had always been a cultured, fastidious man. But, he thought, Abul Hasan deserved it. The small sound of him clearing his throat and spitting caused the Emperor and his father-in-law to falter for a moment.

  The light from the sun warmed the air and dissipated the wisps of mist in the garden. The two men turned to look down the pathway toward the lone woman seated on the bench and the eunuch by her side. A minute passed, and then two, stretching long into the silence. Then they turned and went along to the main gateway.

  Mehrunnisa did not budge until the garden had emptied of the amirs from court. Then, with a hand on Hoshiyar’s arm, she went inside to kneel beside her husband’s cenotaph, said a prayer, and walked out again over the stretch of garden and west to the little patch of land where she was building her own tomb. She knew that no one else would do this for her. Along the way, she laughed to herself. Shah Jahan was building a new city in Delhi, he had already rearranged some of the gardens she had herself supervised in Kashmir, he had refaced all the riverfront apartments in Agra fort, he had paid for the construction of his father’s tomb, he was building a Luminous Tomb for his wife. How ironic it would be if, busy scurrying around in this tremendous industriousness, he forgot to conceive or build a tomb for himself.

  With four sons hankering for the throne—well, two most obviously anyway—there was no guarantee that the son who eventually became Emperor would be grateful enough to raise a mausoleum over his dead father.

  Sixteen

  The whole kingdom wears the appearance of a fertile and highly cultivated garden. Villages and hamlets are frequently seen through the luxuriant foliage. . . . The whole ground is enameled with our European flowers . . . with our apple, pear, plum, apricot and walnut trees . . . full of melons, pateques or water melons, water parsnips, red beet, radishes, most of our potherbs, and others with which we are unacquainted.

  —ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE (ed.) AND IRVING BROCK (trans.), Travels in the Mogul Empire, by François Bernier A.D. 1656–1668

  Kashmir

  Wednesday, April 12, 1634

&n
bsp; 14 Shawwal A.H. 1043

  Perhaps if Emperor Babur had seen Kashmir, he would have found his newly acquired empire in Hindustan a little more tolerable and would not have complained quite as much in his memoirs about this harsh, arid land.

  Kashmir was the exclusive privilege of kings—a jewel in the crown of the Empire, pure and untouched. Jahanara took a deep breath of the thin and clean air. They were in Srinagar, some five thousand feet above sea level, and for the first few days after their arrival, even though their journey here had been of a slow rising and leisure, they had all been prostrate with shortness of breath and headaches.

  They had departed from Lahore a month ago, once news was brought to the court that the mountain passes of the Pir Panjals were cleared of snow and there was no more precipitation to be expected. Their caravan this time, unlike on the trip from Agra to Lahore, had been attenuated into a more manageable number of amirs, their families, the army, and the accompanying merchants. In the beginning, around the time of the conquest of Kashmir by Emperor Akbar in 1585, a smaller court had resided in Srinagar for the summer months with the Emperor, and the reason then was that it was immensely difficult and expensive to journey north for a mere few months and every trip accumulated losses of livestock and human life. But soon, when the bounties of the vale of Kashmir in Srinagar were lauded in the blistering Indo-Gangetic plains, nobles and merchants began crowding into the city with the Emperor, spilling out into the fields, mucking the waters of the lakes, augmenting the rate of crime which the overworked havaldars could not keep track of. So a bailiff was posted at the mouth of the Pir Panjal pass, and every man entering the mountains to journey up into Srinagar had to have a special permission farman granted by the court. The numbers were so tightly controlled that the bailiff would tick off the amir’s name against a sheet of paper he had been given ahead of time and make sure that the person carrying the farman was indeed the person to whom it had been issued.

  This was Jahanara’s first visit to Kashmir, for the simple reason that, though her grandfather, Emperor Jahangir, had come here, summer and winter, six times from 1620 until his death in 1627, by the time of the first of his six visits, Jahanara’s father was already in disfavor with the court and in exile in the Deccan. She gazed down at the smooth, unruffled surface of Dal Lake. If Shah Jahan had not become Emperor, her brothers, sisters, and she would never have tasted the enchantment of this land.

  And delightful it was. Early spring, and even with the cutting chill in the air, the poplars and cypresses had begun to unfurl new, pale green leaves, the meadows overflowed with tiny white daisies, the streams were breathtakingly cold and clear with snowmelt, the very air gave allowance for repose. They had passed all the gardens her grandfather had laid out with Mehrunnisa—Anantnag, Verinag, and Achabal—and at each place, Jahanara had stopped to remember and send a little message to the Empress in Lahore, who now spent her days in prayer by her dead husband’s tomb, whose time of power and glory was ended but who still retained the fire in her eyes and the wisdom of her experiences. Jahanara did not expect a reply from her, but she knew, even without a response, that Mehrunnisa would be grateful for the bits of news—the plastered walls of the pavilion at Verinag have a patina of warm yellow in the spring twilight, your Majesty, or the fish at Anantnag still bear the gold rings that you had ordered put through their noses, or the mountains still rise in peace and tranquillity, their peaks brushed with the late snows. Mehrunnisa, who could not journey to Agra to see the tomb she had built over her father’s remains, would have no opportunity to see Kashmir again in her lifetime because she was no longer welcome anywhere in the Empire—though it was her hand that had drawn bold strokes on paper to mark out the shape and sizes of the baradaris in the gardens, her vision that had planted a row of chenar trees on the road so that they would travel in an avenue of russet golds in autumn.

  And then, three days ago, they had arrived at Srinagar, crossing over the Jhelum River into the broad and flat cup of the valley, with its horizontal land and its thick, linked mountains encircling every horizon. The lake spread out wide in this bowl of land, shimmering and serene, the mountains reflected on its surface. The landscape even now bore the tan hues of the departing winter—the hills were bare, the trees stretched naked limbs to the skies, the lotus and lily pads on the water were still tinged with their heavy winter greens. The tops of the mountains, floating above the mist in the mornings, were yet clad in snow, and they were immense, higher than any Jahanara had seen before. If there was indeed Paradise on earth, it was here in this tranquil land.

  The Hari Parbat fort, where they had ended their journey, was perched on a small hillock west of Dal Lake, its crenellated walls mapping the hill’s top. Emperor Akbar had built the fort here when he first arrived in the Srinagar valley for its views—the lake below, the mountains around, the sparkling air. Mehrunnisa had constructed a garden within the fort, the Nur Afza garden, “Light Increasing,” or so Emperor Jahangir had named it when she completed refacing the pavilion with blue stone slabs, dug out a blue pool filled with cold water from the lake, created a broad and open terrace on which to sit in the early mornings and view the spectacular sunrise. Emperor Shah Jahan had given Jahanara the apartments overlooking the garden, and it was here, on a balcony looking down, that she stood that morning.

  “Jahan.” She turned to see Roshanara at the door.

  “Come,” she said, surprised. They were rivals now, of a sort, pecking at each other in petty matters, suspicious and wary, holding each other at bay. But ever since Jahanara had heard of Roshanara’s unlikely affections for Najabat Khan—a man, she thought drily, that neither of them could marry—their squabbles had become serious, every jeer filled with meaning, every snipe traced with disgust. And this over a man. In the times that she thought about this, if she thought at all that Najabat Khan was a mere man, Jahanara was saddened. Perhaps something more tangible lay behind their inability to truly love each other, something in the shape of the brothers they favored. It had been easy for them to have their own lives even within the confines of the harem. Jahanara had her duties, her own apartments, her income to manage, and Roshanara—though with less to do—managed to occupy herself elsewhere. There was no need for her to be where Jahanara was, except on state occasions, when they were both required to be present. So they had not talked . . . about Najabat Khan or anything else; in any case, what was there to say about him? With all the restrictions and regulations that hemmed them into an inner, sacrosanct world, they had each still managed on a slight acquaintance to fall in love with the same man. He had no real choice between them, and they had none either, for it had been decided that they were not to marry.

  But, Jahanara thought, reflecting on Mehrunnisa’s last words to her, there must be some way for her to find and keep her happiness—if not publicly, then in private.

  She forced herself to be polite, even welcoming. “It is a wonder that we have not been able to come here before. Look, Roshan”—she gestured outside the balcony—“have you ever seen the sun rise in such glory?”

  “My apartments are at the back of the fort,” Roshanara said shortly as she came to lean against the parapet.

  “Then you will see the sun set,” Jahanara said, dreading what was to come, for she knew just from that one curt sentence.

  “Why does Bapa always give you the best rooms?” Roshanara asked. “It is unfair to treat you better than me.”

  “And you ask me that? What do you expect I will say? Take my apartments?”

  “Will you?” Roshanara Begam turned to her sister, her eyes alight with curiosity and eagerness.

  “No.”

  Roshanara grunted, her fingers moving on the fabric of her cloak. “I did not expect you to,” she said, “but thought I would ask anyhow. I . . . how does one say this, Jahan? You are more favored and get the best of everything. I am Bapa’s daughter also, but from the very beginning, he has shown his preference for you. You received most of Mama’s income
when she died; the rest was to be distributed among us. Why?”

  “It’s impossible for me to respond to this. Why now?” Jahanara said, feeling the weight of all that was unsaid between them come to rest upon her.

  Behind them, the slave girls and eunuchs moved around on soft, padded feet, straightening the sheets, dusting the little tables, sweeping the carpets that extended from wall to wall. They heard the rattle of rocks of spent coal as the braziers were emptied, filled again, and lit. Thick smoke surged out to the balcony, and in the cool morning air, both the princesses shivered, drawing their fox fur cloaks around them closely.

  “I heard about your meeting with Mirza Najabat Khan in the chaugan grounds,” Roshan said quietly.

  “I know.”

  “I went to see him; did you know that also?”

  Jahanara felt a tightening about her chest. “No. What . . . did he say to you?”

  “Enough to make me think that he was interested.” Roshanara clicked her tongue in exasperation. “We, princesses of the blood, are reduced to encounters with a lover in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness, like some common woman straying from her husband’s bed. It is shameful, Jahan, you must realize this.”

  “When?” Jahanara asked, not paying heed to the rest of the rant, for it was self-serving. Roshanara’s disgust was more for her, Jahanara, than for herself, though she had doubtless met Najabat Khan on a dark night also. But Jahanara had heard the word lover from Roshanara’s mouth, and she cringed to think that her sister would consider Najabat Khan so . . . also.