Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  The fakir had also curiously said that when Shah Jahan was going to die, his hands would smell of apples—it was a fruit he never ate after that day, even though his wife did not lose her love or fascination for it.

  When it came to his daughters, Shah Jahan thought only of one; the others hardly mattered to him. And in Jahanara, Shah Jahan saw all the qualities her brothers lacked . . . but she was a mere woman.

  He stepped onto the terrace and joined her along the balustrade, where they stood in silence, their fingers linked, looking out at the Luminous Tomb’s white marble dome.

  “When do you leave, my dear?” he asked.

  “You give me permission then, Bapa?”

  He put his arm around her and kissed her forehead. “I have decided to take the court with me to the south to sample some of the fine hunting Aurangzeb boasts about.” Her eyes widened in relief—she had been dreading that he would want to join her, he knew—and he continued, “It will also give me a chance to oversee the campaign there. You will go safely?”

  She nodded, watching her hands.

  “And return to me safely?”

  She held his gaze. “I have nowhere else to go, Bapa. My place is with you.”

  “Go then, prepare for your travels. I will miss you, my love.”

  They parted as he gently nudged her toward her apartments in the zenana, leaving him to go to his alone. Her steps were hurried. Emperor Shah Jahan knew that he sent his heart with his oldest child, and if she were to die, as his wife had, in childbirth—this time he would no longer have the capacity to rule, and the Empire would fall into Dara’s hands even if he had not yet proved himself capable.

  • • •

  The next three months passed in a daze for Jahanara, alone at the Taragarh fort at Ajmer with her ladies-in-waiting and Ishaq Beg. Her stop at Delhi on the way here had been brief—she had visited her great-great-grandfather Emperor Humayun’s tomb and meditated at the dargah of Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya, a Sufi saint of the Chisti order who had died in the early part of the fourteenth century. She had not known what she was praying for as she knelt by the saint’s grave, then rose to her feet clumsily, for even that little effort had caused a shortness of breath. She had thought that she would stay here for a while, but Ishaq had insisted that they continue their journey, fearful that the child would come too soon if she exerted herself.

  And so they had found their way to Ajmer and the hill fort of Taragarh, a meager five hundred feet above sea level, meager only compared to the mighty Himalayas she had left behind some six months ago. Ajmer was on the southern lip of the great Thar Desert, which laid itself out in bands of brown sand over the northwestern edge of the Empire. Here, there was the hint of desolation in the orange and red hills of the Aravalli Range, which curved and humpbacked like mystical animals in repose, their sides dotted with faded green shrubs and the occasional tree that defied the sun, the heat, the aridity to provide a scant shade under its desiccated branches. The fort itself had been built in the fourteenth century, the stronghold and residence of the Chauhan kings, who had bowed to Emperor Akbar’s suzerainty. The building inside climbed up the hillside, sharply vertical, the heavy stone bleached to a whiteness, perforated with arches, topped with ornate chattris, with curved eaves over the windows that mimicked the arcs of the verandah arches. The stone, quarried from the womb of the Aravalli, was unyielding to the chisel and the hammer, and, consequently, the walls of the palaces, both inside and out, were uncarved. Instead, on her first visit to the fort, Jahanara found painted walls in her apartments and in all the public spaces—lushly brushed with indigos, greens, reds, oranges, yellows, turquoise, each painting a story from Hindu mythology, panel after panel lit by the western sun as it flooded the plains on its way to rest.

  Here, in these decorated halls of the zenana, Jahanara spent many an hour, tracing her hand over the warm stone, marveling at the forever unknown artists—merely men for hire—who had left their marks in color and fable. The city of Ajmer, mostly composed of the mansions of the nobles who had accompanied the Mughal Emperors here on their own pilgrimages to the dargah of Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti, another Sufi saint, spread out below the crenellated walls of the fort near and around the saint’s tomb. And this was why Jahanara had made the journey to Ajmer also. Her interest in Sufism had been fueled by Dara, who had given her books to read, allowed her to sit behind a curtain when the holy men came to visit him and discuss their philosophies, read poetry with her. In the early days after discovering herself to be with child, Jahanara had felt bereft, not knowing to whom to turn for help, if indeed help was available to her. She had been deeply fearful of Bapa’s reaction to the news, not that she intended to talk with him about it, but . . . he would be disappointed. Najabat Khan had stayed back in Srinagar, and she had written to him, knowing he would be happy, as she was, happy and afraid. His response had been for her to fly to him, find sanctuary in his haveli in Srinagar, and give birth to their child under his protection—as things ought to be. For a while, a few weeks, Jahanara had cherished this thought also, until her Bapa had fallen ill with a fever that left him shivering in the torrid heat of Agra, and, exhausted herself, she had nursed him back to health.

  That dream had shriveled. She had taken the bold step of accepting Najabat Khan as her husband without the sanction of a marriage; now she would have to carry and have their child by herself—this was the path she had chosen. Over the next five months, she had continued her duties in the zenana and at court as always, thinking and planning for the future, and, most surprisingly, the suggestion to visit the dargahs of the Sufi saints had come from Dara by way of Nadira. They knew, they all knew, Jahanara thought, and accepted their discreetness gratefully, for she could not have borne a public proclamation of her plight. The only person who had genuinely been unaware had been Aurangzeb, his ears buzzing with rumors of a possible alliance with Najabat Khan; he had not grasped how far matters had come. But Aurangzeb had always been this self-centered, stifling her with his supposed love but unwilling to think of her—what she wanted and needed.

  One evening, as the sun waned in the skies over Ajmer, Jahanara ordered her palanquin to be made ready for another visit to Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti’s grave at the foothill of Taragarh. It was the month of May, and the heat of the desert had built up to sweltering proportions; even as the sun yanked its last golden rays beyond the horizon, the air broiled. Ishaq Beg accompanied her, and she heard him pant as he ran down the steep ramp that led from the fort to its principal entrance, the Hathian Pol, with its two carved elephants adorning the front. The streets were quiet at this time of day, and, through the sheer curtains of the palanquin, Jahanara saw the quick flames of cooking fires inside the houses, women bent over smoking chulas, bareheaded, their brows beaded with sweat. She had grown big now, her belly ballooning in front of her, her toes no longer visible unless she put them up on a cushion, and this she did very little, not wanting to see the swollen skin around her ankles and the sharp green of the veins in her feet. Every movement was an agony, although the four men who carried her palanquin jogged on soft feet, the poles of her conveyance resting on wads of cloth upon their shoulders.

  A mile from the dargah’s entrance, she stopped the palanquin and got out arduously, using her hands to hoist herself to a standing position, her legs trembling as they bore her weight.

  “I will walk,” she said firmly to Ishaq Beg, who opened his mouth to protest and then shut it, recognizing from the rigid way she held herself that she was not going to argue about this. She slipped her chappals from her feet, and this time he did demur, but she would not listen. Her grandfather, her great-grandfather, her father—they had all approached Muinuddin Chisti’s tomb on foot, barefoot in homage to the saint, to whom they had gone to pray in times of need and, when their prayers were answered, in times of rejoicing.

  Descended from the Prophet Muhammad, Muinuddin Chisti was born in Persia in the twelfth century and spent part of his life in Samarkand and Bu
khara in search of spiritual instruction. Although he had not left a book of his teachings, his disciples talked of his having had a vision from the Prophet himself telling him to go to Hindustan, and so he did. Here he found an acceptance of his beliefs, a range of followers from both the Hindu and Muslim faiths, but he refused the patronage of the kings, preferring to remain apolitical. He had finally come to stay at Ajmer, in the very heart of a kingdom whose ruler was Hindu, and here he had remained, buried under a simple slab of local stone. His disciples had spread his teachings, and Nizamuddin Auliya, the saint whose grave Jahanara had visited in Delhi, was also a disciple of his, three generations removed.

  When Jahanara began to walk down the bazaar street that led to the first of the gateways to the dargah, she noticed that the imperial guards had already warned the people of her presence. The long street was empty, the shops had drapes over their fronts, and behind them, lit by oil diyas, she saw the shadowed figures of the shopkeepers and their assistants, motionless and listening to her footsteps as she passed by. She had time to think during that walk, the stones on the path biting into her feet, her heaviness dragging upon her, her breath coming in gasps, the heat closing in.

  The Mughal kings had a long history with the Chisti Sufi saints; Emperor Akbar had always revered Muinuddin Chisti, but it was another Sufi saint of the same order—Shaikh Salim Chisti—whom he had considered to have blessed his Empire. For it was to Salim Chisti that Akbar—twenty-six years old and married for more than ten years—had gone in prayer and pilgrimage, begging for an heir to his Empire. Salim Chisti had lived in a cave near the village of Sikri, a few miles from Agra, and he had promised the Emperor three fine sons. When they were born, the first of them had been named after the Sufi saint. That Prince Salim became Jahanara’s grandfather Emperor Jahangir.

  The man who had brought Chisti Sufism into Hindustan, however, the man from whom all these disciples were descended and who had rendered help and succor to the Mughal kings when they faced hardships, was Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti at Ajmer. Emperor Humayun had built a dome over his grave; Emperor Akbar had erected a massive gateway to the tomb and a mosque inside its main courtyard. At some point, a Hindu Raja had paved that courtyard with slabs of white marble, chill to the touch even in the peak of summer, shimmering in the light of the sun. Jahanara’s father had built another mosque in the compound, and yet another gateway leading in, and it was this gate that Jahanara now entered, pausing to rest below the portal.

  The dargah had been cleared of loiterers and worshippers so that she could come here. In front of her were two stone platforms, each with carved steps leading to the top, where mammoth cauldrons had been sunk into the mortar. They were both of brass, aged to blackness, widemouthed and shallow, and used for cooking a sweet concoction of rice, milk, sugarcane juice, raisins, almonds, and pistachios to feed the poor and the pilgrims. The bigger one had been given to the dargah by her great-grandfather, the smaller one by Emperor Jahangir—he had knelt at one of the four openings in the steps and lit the first fire that burned under this cauldron himself, and when the fire had begun to take life and the kichri had begun to bubble, he had stirred it with his own hands.

  She skirted around the cauldrons and went up the steps to the Khwaja’s tomb, halting at the doorway to pray. The Khadims, the caretakers of the tomb, lurked somewhere in the shadows, their faces angled away from her. They did not know who she was, or why she occupied the fortress of Taragarh, but they doubtless guessed that she had some imperial connections, for she had been coming to the grave three times a week in the past few months, and every time they were asked either to leave or to glue their eyes to the ground for fear of looking at her. They were getting tired of her, she thought as she heard their quiet mutterings echoing in the hush of the tomb. In the bazaar, even with everyone kept indoors so that she could walk unmolested by the gazes of the common men, there had been the noise of horses neighing, cows lowing, women chattering, the tinkle of the coppersmiths’ hammers, the rustle of hay, the barks of dogs. Here, there was a complete absence of sound. Even in death, the Muinuddin Chisti brought tranquillity around himself. There was an indefinable aroma in the air, a combination of the attar of roses, the incense of myrrh, of jasmine, of the cool of the marble, of the heat of a desert baked over many centuries.

  Jahanara leaned against one of the walls in silence until her feet ached, and then she left the tomb and walked around it. A yellow moon floated in the sky, its light so thin that she had to watch the diyas flickering around the tomb to find her way. The marble was smooth under her feet, its mortar lines barely felt. She joyfully placed a hand over her belly as the child kicked hard against her pelvis. He had been quiet all day, and Jahanara had remembered the women of the zenana saying that a child’s moving inside meant good health, so she had come here, forcing her tired limbs to take her down the bazaar streets and into the saint’s tomb to pray for her child.

  And now her son was telling her that he was all right, that he had been, perhaps, asleep, lazy, slothful, unmindful of his mother’s concern. She patted her belly again, and he knocked against that spot. She stopped, paling in the feeble light of the newly risen moon. For a gush of something warm had flooded between her legs.

  rauza-i-munavvara

  The Luminous Tomb

  Of all the tombs at Agra, that of the wife of Shahjahan is the most splendid. He purposely made it near the Tasimacan. . . . The Tasimacan is a large bazaar, consisting of six large courts all surrounded with porticoes, under which are chambers for the use of merchants, and an enormous quantity of cottons is sold there. The tomb of this Begam, or sultan queen, is at the east end of the town by the side of the river.

  —WILLIAM CROOKE (ed.) AND V. BALL (trans.), Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier

  Agra

  Wednesday, May 2, 1635

  14 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1044

  And this will be the Taj Ganj?” At the sound of a large crash, Roshanara ducked involuntarily, and the eunuchs guarding her gathered in a tight circle, their arms stretched out. The man standing behind her ran toward the wooden pathway, held up on stilts, which had just collapsed, raising a thin fog of dust. Men shouted; hands disappeared into the rubble as workers were raised out of it, dusted off. The man scuttled around the periphery of the accident and then came running back to stand behind the princess again.

  “I beg pardon, your Highness,” Ustad Ahmad Lahori said. “A minor incident; no one is hurt. The men will have the planks up again in no time at all.” When he realized that she was not listening, he went on, “His Majesty had decided that this will be called the Taj Ganj or the Taj Makan. The bazaar streets will be here, along with the four caravanserais. This part of the rauza’s complex will be as large as the gardens of the tomb.” He stopped and waited for her response. It was a long time in coming, and Lahori dared a quick look at her back. Why was she here? Why the interest now, so many years into the tomb’s making? Other royals, even the Begam Sahib, had come by often, wandering through the dirt, picking their way between the workers and the foremen, curious about this monument their father was constructing for their mother. It was Lahori’s job, as architect, to accompany them when they came, and he resented even that little time taken away from his true work. But it had been pleasant, and at times beneficial, for a few days after Princess Jahanara’s visit, his wives had been invited to spend a week within the walls of the imperial zenana, and they had returned happy, flushed by the honor shown to them. But this princess, the Emperor’s second daughter, had never yet shown any curiosity about the Luminous Tomb and had come here before only for the ‘urs ceremonies.

  “Splendid,” Roshanara said eventually. “You have done well, Ustad Lahori.” She waved in a vague dismissal.

  Lahori bowed and backed away slowly. Of course it was splendid, he thought, and he didn’t need this girl, this woman, to tell him so. Why was she here? Simply bored? The Emperor was himself in the Deccan, the Begam Sahib in Ajmer, it was said, and Princess
Roshanara had chosen to remain here at Agra.

  Roshanara took a deep breath and coughed, the red sandstone dust clogging her nostrils. Her eyes watered, her skin was coated with the dust, and she was hot even under the shade of the white umbrellas held up by her attendants. Around her there was the sound of metal on stone, the thick mixing of mortar, the subdued murmurs of the men and women working on the site. When she left, they would talk and shout, she knew—all this quiet was in deference to her being here.

  The Taj Ganj, she thought, looking at the walls being erected. In most tombs, the Jilaukhana also contained the sarai area—a place of rest for the pilgrims, the travelers, the curious, and the tourists. But Bapa had specified that there would be a third area altogether for this purpose, and the Jilaukhana, the forecourt, would house only another bazaar and quarters for the Khadims, the tomb attendants. This, the Ganj, was south of the Jilaukhana, accessed through the southern gateway of the forecourt.

  It was a simple square, a compound wall enclosing its four sides. Within, there were two streets, one north-south, the other east-west, and these two streets, which sliced the Taj Ganj into its own charbagh shape with four quadrants, were the main access roads within the walls. Every quadrant was then further closed off with high walls, and the square courtyards formed inside had verandahs on all four sides and rooms beyond—a hundred and thirty-six rooms per quadrant. The sarais were self-contained units, each with its outhouses, kitchens, hammams, storerooms, and guards.

  At the point where the two streets met in the center of the Taj Ganj, the corners of the four sarai walls would have chamfered edges, cut out enough to accommodate a gateway in each corner that would lead into the sarai and be shut at night to keep out thieves and bandits. Along the entire outer walls of the sarais, fronting the streets, were a series of verandahs with little rooms beyond, and here was the marketplace of the Taj Ganj. The bazaars, when they came into being, would be lushly stocked with every item of trade available in the Empire, no matter how distant its origin or how dear its price.