Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  “You must stop this, Jahan. Think of your position as Padshah Begam, as the Begam Sahib of Bapa’s harem. He adores you, thinks that you can do no wrong, and he would be crushed to hear of your dalliances, if, that is, Bapa somehow got to know of them.”

  “Is that a warning, Roshan?” Jahanara asked softly. “Let me just say that Bapa knows of more than we think he does, his ear is always to the ground, and he is not a fool. How did he hear of your wanting to marry Mirza Najabat Khan?”

  When Princess Roshanara moved to confront her sister—and this was the first time since Roshanara had stepped to her side that they had actually faced each other—her mouth was pinched, and a sparkle of tears glittered in her eyes. Jahanara almost reached out to her, but she held back, thinking that there was no place for affection between them anymore, no real understanding at all. In some ways, they had all been brought up to think of themselves first, and others later, because they were royal, and invested with an immense sense of self. But over the last few years, Roshanara had schemed and shouted and whispered about her in all quarters of the zenana, mostly out of spite, and Jahanara had no feeling left for her sister.

  “I am going to send him a note,” Roshanara said. “And he will come. That, unfortunately, is all I have left now.”

  “He will not,” Jahanara said without inflection, but anger raged inside her. Suddenly, it was important for her to know why Najabat had stayed away from her summons and to see whether he would indeed respond to Roshanara’s. She had thought for many long hours about him and about the time they had spent together—this was all she had, all she had based her obsession upon. If he went to Roshan, he would never be hers; it was better to know that for sure than to harbor any desires that would not find their way to fulfillment.

  “Call for him then, Roshan,” she said wearily. “If he comes, you can have him.”

  Princess Roshanara Begam picked up the skirts of her ghagara to step over the doorway and into the room. She did not bid her sister farewell. They both knew that something had ruptured between them; if they had stayed quiet, it would have been hidden at the back of their minds, but now . . . they had little left. They were both inmates of Bapa’s zenana, both his children, both women to be cherished, treasured, and controlled, and neither had to see the other again if she did not want to—once the crown found its way onto the head of either Dara or Aurangzeb.

  Roshanara went to her rooms and began a letter to Najabat Khan, inviting him that night to the Shalimar gardens on the northeastern corner of the lake. As her hand trembled over the empty page, she wondered how to word this bold invitation. Or if Najabat would even come in response to it. It was Jahan who fascinated him, Jahan who had played chaugan with him in the light of a winter moon. Of her, Roshan, he knew little and had only heard her voice. Once. But if he came, if he saw her . . . surely, he would forget her sister. . . . Her mind made up, she wrote with care, unused to the handwriting she was trying to imitate. She did not sign her name at the end. When she was done, she dipped a seal in ink and deliberately pressed it on the paper so as not to smudge the edges of the imprint of the rose with its six unfurled petals—for the original seal was fashioned of silver, and this, a copy she had had made a year ago, was only of wax. It was an exquisite copy, though, and encircling the rose, these words showed up clearly: By the order of her imperial Highness, the Begam Sahib Jahanara.

  • • •

  As night descended, the muezzins’ voices rose, calling the faithful to the final salah of the day, the last of the five ritual prayers. Their melodies, echoing around the valley of Srinagar, were accompanied by the ringing of bells in the Hindu temples and the priests’ chanting of Sanskrit verses. The Muslims knelt where they were, facing Mecca, and the Hindus thronged in the incense-and-smoke-filled temples that were aglow with brilliant oil lamps.

  At the end of his prayer, a man on the banks of Dal Lake covered his eyes with his hands briefly and then rose to his feet. He looked up into the cold and dry night sky, embedded with a thousand stars, whose light this high on earth seemed to be brighter and more radiant than it was in the thickly dusty plains of Hindustan. Around the lake, the many golden lamps illuminating the havelis of the amirs cast their speckled reflections on the calm water, the light flowing into darkness in the arms of the mountains and turning silver-blue in the stars of the sky. Najabat Khan stood at the very edge of his property, on the wooden pier jutting out into the waters, stamping his feet occasionally to keep the chill away from his ankles and toes. His hands were now in the fur pockets of his coat, its collar pulled up about his face so that only his nose and his eyes showed. He searched in the right-hand pocket and found the slip of paper he had been looking for. He did not need to read it again; every word was known to him as though it had come from his own hand, but his fingers curled around the paper, holding it tight. He remembered her very well from that night, the flush on her face, naked and boldly presented to his gaze, the strength in her arms as she swung the chaugan stick, that laughter. The yearning that had beset him that night had never really waned. And then, a few months later, still in his state of happy delirium, the repugnance he had felt when he had heard the rumors of her . . . connection with her father that was so unnatural as to make him flinch. It must have been true, he had thought, for there was never talk that abhorrent that could not find its inception in a little crumb of truth. When Princess Jahanara had written again, he had crumpled the letter in his palm and set fire to it with a burning chunk of coal from his hookah, without reading it. In a few months, he had begun to doubt what he had heard, for with those rumors came the gossip of the Emperor’s fancy straying once more to the women of his zenana—slave girls and concubines—and also the wives of the nobles at court. Again, there was truth to all of these reports, for there was nothing secret in the Empire from the Emperor himself or from the amirs at court. One of Najabat’s wives had visited Jafar Khan’s wife and found her adorned in a splendid emerald and diamond necklace which could only have come from the treasury’s coffers. So then, Najabat Khan had realized that all of his previous surmises, rushed into being because of his fascination for the Emperor’s oldest child, were mistaken, since the one could not exist while the other did. He had also been misguided into believing something other than what he knew to be true of Emperor Shah Jahan’s character.

  Now this command from her. A eunuch unknown to him had brought the letter in the afternoon and slipped away into the sunshine before he could open or read it.

  Najabat Khan snapped his fingers in the cold, and the boatman of his shikara nudged his craft closer to the pier until it bumped against the wooden planks. He steadied the shikara as his master climbed in and then used his oar to push away into the water.

  “Shalimar Bagh,” Najabat said, and settled down against the cushions, a woolen rug about his knees, as they glided through the still waters of the Dal, east and north to the slim canal that led to, and was the only entrance to, the gardens Emperor Jahangir had built for his beloved wife Mehrunnisa and on which Emperor Shah Jahan had recently constructed a series of pavilions for work and for pleasure.

  By the time they reached the entrance to the Bagh, some forty minutes later, clouds had blanketed the sky and the blue light of the stars had been extinguished by a pall of grays. The air had turned more crisp, more biting, and a thin wind swept through the length of the canal, rocking the shikara from side to side. Najabat Khan shivered, wrapped his arms around himself as he stood in the glow of diyas that flickered on the first, public terrace of Shalimar Bagh.

  The gardens were built in a series of three terraces, one above the other, each more than the height of a man from the ground so that, standing on one level looking up at the next, a person would see only a carved stone wall inset with niches and, in the middle of the wall, the fluid drop of water from the upper level to the one below. The first terrace was the Emperor’s Diwan-i-am, not so much the Hall of Public Audience as in the forts at Agra and Lahore but the only place w
here the amirs of the court could assemble when they came to a durbar session. It was long and flat, cut through the center with the charbagh, and its main pathway was cleaved with a long pool of water that flowed into the canal below. Against the land end of the first terrace, Emperor Shah Jahan had commissioned a black stone throne set in a square pool, and here he had sat a day before in audience, the nobles crowded around the edges of the pool, fountains playing softly in the waters, the Emperor himself, unreachable, across the expanse of blue.

  The second terrace, unseen from here, was the Diwan-i-khas, again not the Hall of Private Audience as such but a garden for Shah Jahan to meet with a few privileged nobles. A eunuch came forward from the shadows of the large aspens along the pathways and motioned to Najabat Khan to climb to the second level of the bagh. Najabat followed behind at a distance. Najabat, who had not yet been invited to the Diwan-i-khas, looked around him as he came to stand on the border of the garden after climbing the stairs. The garden was still bare, slender tree trunks, uncovered branches, the brown lawns jeweled with early crocuses in white, which glowed like pearls in the darkening night. There was a small pavilion here also, a meeting place for the amirs, and water in the main long pool, its fountains silent in the cold. To his right, along the path, there were oil diyas in terra-cotta shades, lighting the way upward to the final terrace, where no man not connected to the imperial family had ever been allowed—for this last and highest piece of land in the Shalimar Bagh was the zenana garden.

  The steps were steep here, almost at thigh level, but Najabat ran up them quickly and stood panting at the very top, unable to believe what he saw. The cold of the night was dispelled by a hundred coal braziers in the open air, smoking gently with the warm perfume of aloewood. There was light everywhere, along every pathway, set atop the broad and unusual eaves of the pavilion at the far end, scattered along the polished marble floor inside the pavilion like the night sky come to rest upon the earth in all of its brilliance. Here, the water flowed in a cold rush over the walls, and inset in the walls behind the water were niches filled with the glimmer of more diyas—turning the whole cascade of water into a sheet of gold. The woman stood in one of the central arches of the baradari, her back to him. Najabat waited until the pounding of his heart from running up the stairs had subsided, laid a hand on his chest, and ran lightly up the pathways, skipping over the diyas strewn in his way until he reached the bottom of the three small steps leading up. He stood there waiting for her to turn and acknowledge him, for she must have heard the sound of his footsteps. A moment passed, and then another, and the fine sheen of sweat on his brow cooled and froze on his skin.

  “Your Highness,” he said.

  “So you have come.”

  At the sound of her voice, he felt a flutter of discomfort. It had been many months since he had heard her speak, but the music of her laughter and her words had been seared into his brain. This was not the same woman, he thought, then dismissed that notion as soon as it came, for who else could she be?

  “Will you turn to look at me?” he said, greatly daring, “or have I offended you? I flatter myself that you would not have honored me with this summons if I had. It was an error on my part, one I am greatly ashamed of, one I should not have given credulity to.”

  “What have you heard, Mirza Najabat Khan?”

  This time he had to lean forward to hear her. “Nothing I can talk about, your Highness. It was women’s talk.” He laughed. “I mean that it came to me from my zenana, and stupid as it was, I believed it. But I know you . . . in that short space of time we spent together I came to know you better than I know my wives. If I say that they mean nothing to me, and you . . . everything, would you believe it? That which we set in motion on the night we played chaugan together will not be stopped again, by any person’s doing.”

  She took a deep breath, and he watched her shoulders straighten and collapse under the quivering furs on her back. “And what of my Bapa?” she asked.

  “I respect his Majesty,” he said, “but I do not agree with his injunctions that you must not marry. If it is to be so, and we are bound to obey his wishes, this must suffice for us, your Highness.”

  The woman swung around then, the furs of her cloak whispering on the floor. Najabat moved toward her, up one step, his right arm out to clasp her hand. His fingers fell upon her sleeve, and he felt the softness of the velvet band around it just as he looked into her face. The light of the baradari glowed upon her skin and the dark frame of hair shimmering with pearls. Something, even in her moving to meet him, had struck him as unusual, but when he saw her he found himself looking at a strange woman, not the one who had dwelt in his thoughts for all these days. He stepped back, almost slipping and falling in his attempt to get away from her.

  “Did you expect my sister?” she said. “Why, though, Mirza Najabat? You were amenable enough when we met in your tent on the way to Agra.”

  “Your Highness,” he said, bowing in the taslim, his hand falling to the ground and up again four times almost automatically. “I was mistaken, forgive me.” Thoughts jostled in his mind, her words finally coming to rest in clarity. She was the first woman he had seen, Princess Roshanara Begam; the second one, who had splendidly trounced him in chaugan, was Jahanara. The rumors were about Jahanara, and when he glanced up again at the spite drawing up her eyebrows and at the sneer around her lush mouth, he recognized clearly that Roshanara had created the gossip about Princess Jahanara. He felt helpless standing there, his arms hanging loosely by his sides, thinking only of her deceit in calling him to Shalimar Bagh on the pretext of being her sister. He could barely remember what he had said to her, how he had begged to be forgiven, how he had shown his love for Jahanara to this woman. He felt a little cold touch on his cheek and looked up to see a few snowflakes mist gently into the gardens.

  “This is not a game, your Highness,” he said, intensely furious. “You have deliberately lied to me. The letter came in Jahanara Begam’s name, and—”

  “Not in her name, Mirza Najabat Khan.” Her voice was sharp. “If you had only stopped to read it carefully, you would have seen that it was not signed.”

  “But it was her seal.”

  “Would you have come if I had written?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “For you I would not have come. You committed a folly in visiting me in my tent, put my reputation in jeopardy, knowing that, if we were caught, it would be my head loosened from my neck and not yours.”

  “And what did the Begam Sahib do later?”

  “That was different, your Highness. I could not dare to think of you in such . . . terms; my affections lie with your sister.”

  She waved a hand in his direction, a slew of gold bangles tinkling with the movement. “Go, Mirza Najabat Khan. I have heard enough of your insults. But remember,” she said as he turned and began walking down the pathway, “that I will recall your words for the rest of my life.”

  “If I have insulted you, your Highness,” he said, stopping once to look back, “then you have deserved every word.”

  “I will tell Bapa,” Roshanara said in an undertone, and so he did not hear her. Even if he had, he would not have cared; he just wanted to get away.

  Najabat fled down the terrace and the stairs to the middle level and the bottom one, where his shikara waited for him. He was deeply distressed and did not notice that the first few flurries of snow had thickened as they talked, and the flakes were now pouring down upon him, coating his bare head and his shoulders even as he ran. He came to rest at the pier, winded, shaking with rage. His shikara was nowhere to be seen, and the copious falling snow had killed all noise; even the sound of his harsh breathing seemed to be somewhere in the distance. The light of the night sky had almost turned into day with the snow a sheer blue, and he could see down the canal, the trees on its banks canting over in black streaks. And then he noticed the shikara pulled up along the edge of the pier, its trappings of gold and gilt dusted with snow. A woman sat under the she
lter of the gold-tasseled awning, clad in white, a hand on the boat’s rim, snow laid over her exposed skin. She had long fingers, fine and shapely, and Najabat saw the glint of diamonds on her rings.

  Her unremitting gaze was upon him, her eyes dark, lips purple in the cold. She was shivering. He crossed his arms and watched her—snow piling upon his eyebrows and his eyelashes, whitening his beard—waiting for the smallest movement from Princess Jahanara Begam that he could take as an invitation to leap to her side.

  Seventeen

  The princess should be married to the chief general at the court, whose name was Nezabet Can (Najabat Khan), a man descended from the royal family of Balq (Balkh). He was brave and well-proportioned; but Shaista Khan, brother-in-law of Shahjahan . . . said to him (Shahjahan) that it was not advisable to make such a marriage, because when married to the said princess the husband would necessarily have to be placed in the same rank as any other prince.

  —WILLIAM IRVINE (trans.) Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, by Niccolao Manucci 1653–1708

  Kashmir

  Thursday, April 13, 1634

  15 Shawwal A.H. 1043

  Until the end of his life, Najabat Khan would never recall how he had boarded the shikara on the pier outside Shalimar Bagh—whether the princess had beckoned to him in the still blue luminescence created by the softly falling snow, or if he had made the first move. He did remember that a eunuch had steadied the boat as he climbed in and handed him a pair of oars. The eunuch had actually let the oars clatter to the floor of the shikara, but neither Najabat nor Jahanara paid heed to his temper. It must have been Ishaq Beg, Najabat thought later; no other man who considered his neck precious would dare to display his displeasure in front of an amir of the court and a royal princess.

  Najabat thrust the shikara from the dock and turned the craft around, his back to the lake as they went down the canal. He sensed, rather than saw, four other boats detach themselves from the bank around the Bagh and follow them, and as he rowed, four more materialized in front. Eunuchs filled the guard boats, seated with their backs to Jahanara and Najabat, spears held aloft, daggers folded into their cummerbunds.