Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  Standing at the center of the Taj Ganj, Roshanara imagined what the bazaars would be like in a few years—a sight she would never see, for if she visited the bazaar, it would be under guard, the shops closed, the streets emptied.

  There would be jewelers who worked in delicate pearls and gold, their wares lustrous in the morning sun, their shops surrounded by veiled women who would watch them with eyes filled with lust and envy. Copper and brass workers hammering away on cups, water vessels, spoons, and plates. Grocers laying out their produce in rows, fresh from the earth, harvested as the sun lifted its sizzling head over the horizon. Betel nut sellers hanging the heart-shaped leaves from jute strings around their stalls, enveloped in a jungle of shiny green. Cloth merchants swinging their fabrics from one end to another—shimmering silks the color of sunsets, chiffons flimsier than summer clouds, gleaming cottons in blues and grays. Flower merchants in corners, surrounded by freshly picked peonies, roses, marigolds, lilies, jasmine, and jacaranda, still heavy with dew, saturating the air with their fragrance.

  Everywhere in the Taj Ganj, this new city for repose and trade, would be the sounds of bustle and life. Jugglers and buffoons cavorting in the streets, a throng of women—some veiled, some not—their eyes brilliant with kohl, their skin browned by heat and grime, their arms strong from working in their houses. And behind them, down the southern gateway into the Jilaukhana, through the Great Gate, would lie the hushed tomb, with its luxuriant gardens, its fountains, its pearl dome, and the smooth-flowing Yamuna River beyond.

  Roshanara sighed. The Luminous Tomb was a massive undertaking, most of it already in place. The riverfront terrace and its buildings were completed, the Jilaukhana constructed, the work begun here in the Taj Ganj. In a few years, all the details—the dado panels in the tomb, the inlay work, the writing of the suras around the edges of the portals—would also be finished. And all this, she thought, for Mama. Had she been so precious to Bapa then? Yes . . . perhaps, but in the building of the tomb, Bapa had forgotten, overlooked, its initial purpose, thinking more of himself and his fame as the patron than of Mama, who lay here. Roshanara had suggested as much during the second ‘urs, and her father and Jahan had both been outraged. She rubbed her forehead. They had not appreciated her honesty then, or later, when she had informed Bapa of Jahan’s furtive alliance with Najabat Khan. She could not remember that abortive meeting at the Shalimar gardens without being outraged. How had he dared to speak to her thus? And the very next day, Jahan had visited him in his house . . . and spent the night.

  Now she was in Ajmer, ostensibly on a pilgrimage.

  “Shall we leave, your Highness?”

  “Not yet,” Roshanara snapped. Why did it surprise them all so much that she would want to oversee the building of Mama’s tomb? What else did she have to do here, with Bapa away, the court with him, half the zenana in the Deccan, the other half in Agra? It was laughable, the manner in which everyone had accepted Jahanara’s excuse of visiting the Shaikh’s tomb. What would she do with the child when she returned? Bring him into the zenana as a waif she had picked up, or send him away?

  “Your Highness.” The eunuch was insistent, his hand now on her elbow, nudging her out of the Taj Ganj. “We must leave.”

  This time Roshanara let him guide her steps. She took one last look around and felt a small bite of envy. This mausoleum, in all of its magnificent parts, would pin Bapa into history more firmly than the numerous official biographies he had commissioned, the children he would leave behind, the farmans he dictated to rule the Empire. And because of its beauty, posterity would think of Mama also as this most loved woman. What of her, Roshanara? Would anyone remember her? Jahan would have her child, one she could not acknowledge in public, true, but she would leave a little of herself in the world. Roshanara had nothing. No powerful lover at court, no opportunity to become a mother . . . perhaps even no tomb to tell future generations that she had once lived.

  Fretful and furious, she went back to her apartments to write again to Aurangzeb in the Deccan. He responded rarely, and then only in brief. She told him this time the actual reason Jahanara had gone to Ajmer and why she had not accompanied their father. A fact, Aurangzeb, she wrote. I would not speak of this if it were not true. You see how she has fallen low in my estimate and must now do so in yours also?

  When the letter was signed and sealed and on its way, Roshanara called for the musician’s son—the same man who had gone to pleasure her sister—for the night. She felt as though she was taking something away from Jahanara, since she couldn’t, after all, shake the love that her father, Najabat Khan, Dara, and even Aurangzeb had for her older sister.

  • • •

  When Mehrunnisa had built the little white, lavishly inlaid tomb for her father, she had packed the gardens with fruit trees—guavas, mangoes, pomegranates—to supply a continuous and perpetual income for the tomb. That money would go toward salaries for the tomb’s attendants and repairs on the structure itself when necessary. Emperor Shah Jahan had leveled the earth, rerouted the river, and raised a magnificent monument over his wife’s remains that cost him five million rupees when it was completed. A handful of fruit trees in the gardens would not provide enough of an income for the upkeep of the tomb. So he had built the Taj Ganj. From the rental of the rooms of its caravanserais—whose fame would spread all over the Empire and so would rarely lack occupants—and the taxes and rents on the shops in the bazaar streets came two-thirds of the funds required to maintain the tomb, provide alms to the poor on Mumtaz Mahal’s death anniversaries, and pay the imams who recited verses from the Quran on-site, as well as the caretakers. For the remaining third, Shah Jahan created an endowment of the annual revenues from thirty villages around Agra, and the total paid to the administrators of the tomb was three hundred thousand rupees a year.

  By the time Amanat Khan—the only man responsible for the construction of the Taj who, as calligrapher, was given this privilege—appended his last signature on the tomb’s complex, in 1647, on the north-facing portal of the Great Gate, Emperor Shah Jahan had turned his attention to the extensive capital he was building in the old city of Delhi. And by 1647, the tomb was complete in all of its parts—the white marble mausoleum; the Miham Khana and the mosque on the riverfront terrace; the mature trees and shrubs and the incandescent pools of the garden; the forecourt, with its dazzling Great Gate; the humming and thriving Taj Ganj with its merchants, its travelers, and its customers.

  A common visitor, or even an esteemed amir at court, entered and viewed the Taj Mahal thus, from the Taj Ganj, with its cacophony of sounds; to the Jilaukhana, snug with the heated reds of the sandstone in its smaller bazaar streets and its verandahs; up the stairs to the Great Gate, on which the inscriptions in Arabic called all believers to step into Paradise; immediately beyond into the tranquil shade and fragrance of the garden; and finally to the astounding white marble vision of that most Luminous Tomb.

  Twenty

  Another no less saintly but more tender comforter he had in his daughter Jahanara, whose loving care atoned for the cruelty of all his other offspring. This princess . . . practically led the life of a nun in the harem of Agra fort.

  —JADUNATH SARKAR, A Short History of Aurangzib, 1618–1707

  Ajmer

  Tuesday, May 15, 1635

  27 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1044

  Flamingos called out to one another across the breadth of Ana Sagar Lake. As Jahanara watched, they took flight and skimmed over the water, their bodies pewter gray, the darker tips of their wings and their beaks disappearing into the gloom beyond. She clasped her arms around a pillar in the baradari and rested her head against the soothing marble as a pain began again. The first one had come within ten minutes of her waters breaking, even as she stood in the courtyard of the tomb, wondering stupidly what was happening, though she knew every moment in a woman’s labor in intimate detail, having been present at many birthings—those of her mother and other women of the zenana, the numerous cousins a
nd aunts.

  Now she felt the tightening grip of an invisible hand around her tailbone, and at the same time, another seemed to constrict around her heart and lungs—it was not so much a pain as a discomfort, extreme and unflinching. The flight of the flamingos had stirred a breeze over the shimmering water, and it came spiraling around the baradari, laying its fingers along her flushed skin. She counted the seconds under her breath. Then the pain died, leaving her body beaten, her hands quivering. In the few moments of quiet, she lifted her gaze to the lake, thankful that she had ordered her slaves to bring her here to the pavilions her father had built along the Ana Sagar and not back to the fort, where the walls still retained the heat of the day and the air broiled inside her apartments.

  “Will you walk, your Highness?” Ishaq Beg asked, offering her his arm.

  She nodded and leaned gratefully against him as they took slow steps along the waterfront. Somewhere behind them in the baradari, her servants and ladies-in-waiting had set up a bed with silken coverings, stools for the midwives, who were gathered just beyond in the gardens, carpets on the ground for them to sit on. When Jahanara had arrived at the lake’s pavilions, thick curtains streamed from every archway, blocking the slight wind, enclosing all the air inside. She had ordered the curtains to be torn down to open the baradari to a view of the waters, as was intended under any other circumstance. The women had balked. A royal princess laid out in childbirth for the whole world to see? Who would see her? Jahanara had demanded. A tight cordon of soldiers guarded all the entrances to the lake; the baradari sat atop an eminence, its occupants hardly visible to anyone on the banks, and if the lanterns were extinguished, they would all be one with the light of the moon—or shadows in the shade of the arches. If any man dared to raise his eyes to the baradari and was discovered, he would not see the sun rise the next morning; if he dared to and was not caught, he could still not say that he had seen anything at all.

  “Does he know, Ishaq?” she asked softly, feeling her legs ease with the exercise.

  “A message is on its way, your Highness.” He paused and looked down at her. “I have written to Mirza Najabat Khan every day since our arrival here; he insisted upon news.”

  “More often than I have,” she said. “I could not bring myself to write, even”—she laid her other hand on the rise of her belly—“to the father of this child.”

  “I have seen many women, your Highness, in such a state as yours, and they have all been obsessed with the life within them, living as though in a dream, unwilling to heed everyday matters. Perhaps especially with the first one.”

  “I do not know that I will experience this again,” she said simply, even as her eyebrows drew together in the first spasms of another labor pain. She laid her head on his shoulder as a whiteness bore down upon her eyes, as her breath caught in her throat. She was determined not to cry out, and so shut her teeth on her lip until a little streak of blood dribbled down her chin. When she looked up at the end, it was to present a pale face with a ribbon of red from her lip to her neck.

  “I am tired,” she said. “How much longer, Ishaq?”

  “I do not know, your Highness. Perhaps one of the women would . . . if only you will let them attend to you.”

  She laughed, a thin and faint laugh belying her fatigue. There had been a time, early in the pregnancy, when she could not have borne to be touched, her skin throbbing with sensitivity at every place, the baths with the slave girls a torture until she had commanded them away, the gentle hand of her father on her shoulder a torment. It had been during this time that Aurangzeb had come to bid her farewell. She knew that he wanted to embrace her, to lay a kiss upon her cheek, but she had turned away, loath almost to share of herself anymore with anyone. The child inside was everything; he had consumed her, drawn upon all of her vast energy, eaten up her tolerance. All that had remained unchanged until today, when the labor began. Even in the warm air of Ajmer, Ishaq’s grasp had been comforting, his shoulder a blessing . . . but the women who waited, midwives and servants, they were strangers, and yet when the time came for the child to be born, it would be their fingers that would caress her womb, their hands that would pull him out, clean him up, prepare and apply the poultices that would heal her.

  Another pain came, taking her so much by surprise that she doubled up and fell to her knees. This time it blinded her, drew every thought out of her head, and she did not protest when the women came to lift her and carry her to the bed. They were the ones who smoothed the sweat-matted hair on her brow, who wiped her face with cool towels dipped in rosewater, who massaged her distended belly with their capable and soft hands. At some point during the next few hours—she could no longer tell how time had passed—she heard a midwife say, “Bear down, your Highness; the child’s head has crowned.”

  Ishaq was by her side, on his knees, one of his hands clutching hers, her fingernails leaving slashes of red upon his palm. She had never listened to an order from a menial, rarely even from her father or her brothers. But she did now, with an enormous effort, forcing the child from her body and out into the world.

  Silence followed. Jahanara’s heart contracted with fear. “Is he all right? Say something.”

  She heard the midwife slap the child across his buttocks, and he opened his mouth in a huge, reedy wail that echoed off the pillars of the baradari and swept into the brilliance of the lake beyond. Jahanara, who had not cried when she discovered that she was pregnant, never shed a tear when her fatigue, both emotional and physical, was great, found tears welling in her eyes and flowing down her cheeks. Ishaq cried also, quietly, his tears dampening his mistress’s hand.

  “Give him to me,” she commanded. “Now.”

  A midwife brought the child. He was so slight, hardly even a weight in her arms. They were still in the shadows, silver moonlight beyond the arches of the baradari, and they carried her bed to the edge so that she could look upon his face.

  “Hush,” she said, her voice breaking, when his cries broke out again. “Hush, my little king, now you are safe with your mother.” She talked on, words of nonsense, of endearment, not even knowing where they came from. He quieted again, his eyes riveted on her face. She touched the black eyebrows that winged thickly above his eyes, already meeting in the middle, the lush head of still damp hair, the perfectly curved ears, the rosebud of a mouth. He turned his face and nuzzled against her breast, and an ache began to build inside her.

  “Your Highness,” Ishaq said at her shoulder. “It is better not to . . . it will form too much of an attachment. The wet nurse waits; hand the baby to her.”

  If it had been any other royal princess, or a noblewoman, in the normal course of events the baby’s mouth would have sought the wet nurse’s breast so that the new mother did not have to spoil her figure—a woman’s perfect body, immaculate even after childbirth, was much prized. But whom did she have to please? Jahanara thought, overwhelmed by an unexpected desire. The baby began to cry again, his face turning crimson, his fists balled as though ready for a fight.

  “Just one time, Ishaq,” she said, pleading, her fingers struggling with the ties of her choli.

  “I do not understand—” he said, but he helped her loosen the strings that held her bodice together at the back and watched as she offered her breast to the child.

  The baby rooted around until he found the nipple and began to suckle. Jahanara leaned back against the pillow, her body melting, her limbs liquefied. This was love, she thought, such love as she had never had before, as she would never again experience. For the rest of the night, she lay with her son in her arms, thinking of the name she had chosen for him, as the moon waned in the sky, to be replaced by the glow on the eastern horizon that heralded dawn. She was invigorated, alive, not anymore in need of sleep. When the child woke, she kissed him on his lips, gave him her breast at regular intervals, forgetting the promise she had made to her eunuch. The slaves came to take him from her briefly, to change his wet clothing and dry him. She sat up and w
atched until they brought him back to her.

  She would have to give him up, but with force of will she forbade her mind to think of the parting, focusing only on the present.

  As the morning flung its skeins of red and gold on the still-dark sky, she propped herself up on an elbow, the child snuggled against her, and wrote to Najabat Khan. At the very top of the page, she wrote All is well by the grace of Allah, so that he knew this letter brought him nothing but good news.

  You have a son at last, my lord, and it is I who have given him to you. He sleeps by my side, his fist curled against his exquisite face, my milk still fragrant upon his lips. You see, I could not resist, though I know that from now on he will belong only to you . . . never, you must promise me this, to the women of your zenana. There must be only one woman in his life, the mother he will never know, but you must talk to him of me, tell him that his coming has shown me why I live. Keep him with you, on your travels and on your campaigns; I know you will cherish him because he is mine also.

  I want to call him Antarah, after the Arab poet, for it is his work I have been reading, his poetry that has lulled me to sleep on many a difficult night. I must go, my son stirs, and soon he will open his mouth in hunger.

  She laid down the quill and sprinkled sand on the writing to blot the ink before she folded and sealed it with her own seal—a single rose with six unfurled petals, a multifaceted diamond in the center that left its perfect imprint upon the wax, and tiny script upon one of the petals—reversed in the seal, righted upon the stamp—which read By the order of her imperial Highness, the Begam Sahib Jahanara.

  Later in the afternoon, when she had woken from a deep sleep, which had wrung all the fatigue from her limbs and left her clear eyed and bright, Ishaq Beg handed her a letter from Emperor Shah Jahan. It was written upon paper woven with gold and sealed with the imperial seal, which he had taken with him but which normally reposed with her in the zenana. In it were only two lines. I hear you are well again, beta, and have completed your pilgrimage. When will you be returning home?