Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  She held the child to her, laid her lips upon his soft skin, drank in his fragrance, and when he began to wail because she would not bare her breast, she handed him to the waiting wet nurse. He howled for a while, already sensing different milk upon his tongue, and resisted as long as his little strength held out, but in the end, he grasped at that strange breast and drank the woman’s milk as he had his mother’s. Princess Jahanara spent the day with her face in her hands, dry of tears, her heart hardening within her. Antarah had never been hers; it was madness for her to have allowed him to suckle at her breast. For the next two days, her breasts swelled with milk and rubbed painfully against the silk of her cholis, and she had to undo the ties at her back to ease the ache. Her nipples leaked when she heard her son’s cries—real and imagined—but Jahanara doggedly stayed in her bed, not once asking for the child to be brought to her.

  • • •

  On the fourth day after his birth, they all returned to the zenana apartments at Taragarh fort, and, at twilight, Ishaq ushered in a veiled woman, who bowed to her princess and waited by the doorway for a summons to enter.

  “Why do you cover your face?” Jahanara asked sharply. “How am I to know that you are his wife?”

  The woman proffered a letter, which she laid on the carpets in front of Jahanara, and receded a few steps. In it was the hand of the man she loved, the man who had fathered her child, and he told her that this woman was one of his wives, childless herself, to whom he had given the responsibility of bringing up Jahanara’s child. She would look after him well and treasure him as she would her own.

  “Take off your veil.”

  “Your Highness,” the woman mumbled. “It is better this way. I will never harm your child . . . and never consider him mine; you must rest assured of that. But he is my husband’s son, and my lord has commanded me to be his nurse and his caretaker; I would do nothing to disobey his orders.”

  Ishaq brought the baby, swaddled in silk, one chubby hand over the top of the swaddling, his face blissful in repose. The woman craned her neck to look at the child, took one step forward, and then fell back. Her arms, which had risen involuntarily upon seeing Antarah, returned to her sides. Jahanara touched the baby on his forehead, on his nose and cheeks, and on his lips, she then brought that hand to her own mouth and motioned to Ishaq to lay the child in the woman’s arms. The baby settled deeply into the cradle she had made and turned his face to her with a small sigh.

  “Go,” Jahanara said, her voice threaded with ache. “An imperial guard will escort you back to Agra. Thank you.”

  The woman bowed again, silently, and let herself out.

  • • •

  Some three weeks later, Jahanara set out for Agra herself. She had memorized her son’s face, thinking that she would never see him again, but already, she had forgotten the perfume of his little body, the rounded curves of his cheeks, the fans of eyelashes against his skin as he slept. She was on her way to resume her duties as the Begam Sahib of her father’s harem, for he had written to say that both Aurangzeb and Murad were to be married, to two of the daughters of Shahnawaz Khan Safavi, a powerful amir at court, who could trace his lineage so closely to the Persian Empire that he still carried the name Safavi.

  Jahanara had to prepare the gifts, schedule the various events, play hostess to the two weddings. Murad was only fifteen years old, she thought, and he would already have a wife. She, who was the best loved of all of her father’s children, had just given up her only child because she would never marry. She worked all day long, every day, giving orders, overseeing arrangements, greeting visitors, reading to her father, who did not seem to want to let her out of his sight. It was when she collapsed in her bed that the tears came, filling her with an immeasurable ache, choking her throat. When she did sleep, it was to awaken still fatigued, her dreams crammed with thoughts of Antarah, of Najabat, of her brothers’ wives, who could openly carry children in their wombs, bear them in comfort, never send them away.

  While they celebrated the weddings at Agra, more good news filtered in from the northwestern frontier of the Empire regarding the reconquest of the trading outpost of Qandahar.

  • • •

  When Emperor Jahangir had lost Qandahar in 1622 to the Persian Shah, Emperor Shah Jahan—then Prince Khurram—had refused to come north from the safety of the Deccan to help. Instead, taking advantage of his father’s attention being focused elsewhere, he had thundered into Agra in the hope of capturing the treasury. Emperor Jahangir had left Lahore with a large army to meet the forces of his errant son, had vanquished him and sent him into exile. But Qandahar had fallen to Shah Abbas of Persia.

  Even some fifteen years after the event, Emperor Shah Jahan could not shake off the impression that he had been solely responsible for the loss of Qandahar. From the very first year of his reign, he had given orders to Said Khan, the governor of Kabul, to send out diplomatic missions to the Persian governor of Qandahar, Ali Mardan Khan, in the hope that he could be convinced to betray his Shah. And so it had happened. Without a single shot fired, or a single life lost, Qandahar became Mughal territory again. When Princess Jahanara heard the news, she suggested to her father that Ali Mardan Khan should offer his allegiance in person. That way, the governorship of the newly acquired Qandahar could be given to Said Khan himself. It was a brilliant diplomatic move—for Said Khan was firmly on the Mughal side and could not be swayed into releasing Qandahar again to the Persians without a fight.

  When he came to Agra, Ali Mardan Khan was feted and given a large mansab at court, while Jahanara watched him carefully from behind the zenana screen in the imperial durbar.

  A month later, she said that he was an able general and a warrior, court life would not befit him, but the governorship of Kashmir would. So Ali Mardan Khan, who had just begun to chafe at the rituals and duties at court, went gladly to the Himalayan kingdom of Kashmir—what had started for him as a wise maneuver to enter the service of Emperor Shah Jahan by giving up Qandahar had culminated in his becoming one of the most trusted generals at court. Before the year ended, his Emperor had rewarded his loyalty by making him the Amir-ul-umra.

  With the majority of the work completed on the Luminous Tomb, Ustad Ahmad Lahori and his Emperor shifted their attention to Delhi and the new city of Shahjahanabad. An auspicious date was determined by the court astrologers, and on Friday, the twenty-ninth of April, 1639, workers began leveling ground on the banks of the Yamuna River. Stonecutters, ornamental sculptors, masons, and carpenters left Agra for Delhi, and, just as they had near the Taj Mahal, they set up their shacks and shanties to settle in for a few years of toil.

  And so Jahanara returned to her place in the imperial zenana and her tasks as though nothing much had happened in the months she had been gone. But she had left a part of herself in the child she had borne, and she came back carrying a huge, painful void within her. Bapa had not noticed anything amiss, she had thought when she watched him at Aurangzeb’s and Murad’s weddings—the laughing and joyful father of the grooms, a patronizing hand on their father-in-law’s shoulder, which the man accepted gratefully as a token of his Emperor’s esteem. There was color and light around her from the celebrations and a small pinpoint of darkness where Antarah lay in her memories. Roshanara commented once upon how emaciated she had become during her pilgrimage, how the flesh had wasted from her bones. “Quite swiftly, is it not, Jahan?” she had asked in front of Aurangzeb and his wife Dilras Begam.

  The prince, intent on his meal, had lifted his head at the statement and gazed long and thoughtfully upon Jahanara, and she had met his eyes unflinchingly. A shadow crossed his face, something akin to disgust, and Jahanara felt a wave of hatred wash over her. For she had heard another story about this brother of hers, whom she was being forced to fete on the occasion of his marriage—that he had dissuaded their father from thinking of a marriage between Jahanara and Najabat Khan. She knew, in her heart she knew that Bapa had come to that decision himself . . . and her fathe
r she could not fault, but Aurangzeb had no business interfering in anything to do with her. The story also went that Aurangzeb had been clever enough not to talk with Shah Jahan himself but had persuaded their uncle Shaista Khan—a man to whom the Emperor was more likely to pay heed—to do so. Now, when she ached for her child every day, when she turned her face away from the children in the zenana because none of them was hers, she fantasized about a marriage to Najabat, Antarah with them always. . . . It was because of Aurangzeb, she thought bitterly, that Antarah lived in Najabat Khan’s haveli on the other bank of the Yamuna River. Perhaps not more than a mile away, but she could not see her child, touch him, breathe his essence, and he could just as well have been on the far corner of the world.

  She bade farewell to Aurangzeb and Dilras when they went back to the Deccan, where he was governor, and turned away almost at once, so she did not see him look back time and again and did not see jealousy map his wife’s young and pretty face. When he wrote, Jahanara did not reply. Antarah was brought up as Najabat Khan’s son; who his mother was, no one cared about or asked, since every amir in the Empire assumed that he was born of some woman—wife or concubine—in Najabat’s zenana. It was his father’s name that was important. And that was why Princess Jahanara stayed away from Antarah, and her siblings followed her lead. Dara, at court by her side, never mentioned her absence or the fine lines of pain drawn upon her forehead. Shuja and Murad were away ruling their own provinces. Roshanara smiled and raged alternately, unable to do anything to her quietly powerful sister.

  In the end, it was Aurangzeb, with his rigid views on propriety and decency, who reached out a hand to his sister’s son, a boy she would never acknowledge in public.

  Twenty-one

  Begum-Saheb formed [an] attachment . . . for . . . a young nobleman remarkable for grace and mental accomplishments, full of spirit and ambition . . . [but her father] had indeed already entertained some suspicion of an improper intercourse between the favoured Nobelman and the Princess.

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

  Agra

  Saturday, July 25, 1643

  27 Jumada al-awwal A.H. 1053

  For months, they had all watched the heavens with anxious eyes, the fields lying fallow, the rice crop shriveling under the sun’s blazing gaze, the skies a pale blue without even the glimmer of a cloud. The rains had come in June, and again a few weeks later, but splattering so weakly onto the parched earth as to barely settle the dust. Winds raged and howled around Agra, white-hot, blowing dirt, searing skins, and clogging noses.

  The boys, ranging in age from six to eight, gathered together in the archery maidan outside the fort’s walls—in an open field of beaten mud ringed by a grove of tamarind trees. In the very center was the target in the shape of a man, ten feet tall, clad in the armor and mail of the Mughal armies. The target was made of stuffed cotton and wood chips, its arms akimbo, a helmet of steel thrust on its head. Ten boys were mounted on stocky Turki horses in a silent circle around the target. It was high noon, the end of the second pahr of the day, and the sun rode overhead, leaching their shadows tightly into the ground. Each boy held his head cocked, listening for the archery master’s signal, his concentration absolute even as the heated wind curved around the maidan raising a vortex of dust.

  “Which one is yours, Mirza Najabat Khan?”

  Najabat turned swiftly at the sound of that voice and bent in the taslim when he saw Prince Aurangzeb. When he had completed his salutation, he moved two steps back so that he was behind his prince and said, “The fourth from our right, your Highness. The boy in white.”

  Aurangzeb gazed at Antarah, stroking his beard thoughtfully. He saw a lean boy who seemed more mature than eight years old, his expression intent and serious. Antarah glanced at them and raised his hand to his father with a quick smile that lit up his face. “Muhammad Sultan is here also.”

  “Your son, your Highness?” Najabat asked in surprise. “Forgive me; I did not know the royal princes were at this lesson. Antarah . . . did not tell me.”

  “So she named him Antarah, after the poet,” Aurangzeb murmured, more to himself than to his companion. Najabat bowed his head and did not respond. The two men stood under one of the tamarind trees, in the deep gloom of its shade, and beyond them the maidan glowed in the stark light of the sun. “A good name,” Aurangzeb said. “And he is a fine-looking boy. You must be pleased with him, Najabat.” Then, turning toward him, “Are you?”

  The amir met his prince’s gaze evenly. “He is my only son, your Highness, and he makes me proud . . . always.”

  Aurangzeb nodded. “And his mother?” he asked carelessly. “Is she equally so?”

  A silence followed while Najabat pondered upon this question. Men of royalty, of nobility, were not given to talking of the women of their harems—if a woman was mentioned at all, her name was bandied about with ease. But Najabat knew that Aurangzeb was asking him about Princess Jahanara, and this was not a casual encounter, for the prince had found his way to his side, approached him, and inquired directly about his son . . . and the prince’s sister’s son. What was he to say, though? Jahanara disliked this brother of hers, for reasons Najabat could not well fathom, and so they were sure not to have talked about Najabat or Antarah. If she had confided in anyone at all, Najabat thought. It was only with him that she was open and enchanting, words spilling out of her mouth; in the zenana she always had a burdensome role to play—a daughter, the Begam Sahib, a sister—and the weight of all her responsibilities kept her mute about her personal life. This immeasurable strength of character was what had attracted him to her and was the aspect of her personality he least understood.

  “His mother,” Najabat said, choosing his words carefully, “has blessed my life in more ways than one, your Highness. We are both proud and happy that Antarah is our son—there is no reason to be otherwise.”

  Again that shrewd look from under lowered brows. “You think so? There is a correct way of living . . . and a wrong one. I wish sometimes that I could convince my sisters of it.” Aurangzeb lifted his shoulders in an eloquent gesture of defeat. “But they are not members of my zenana; if they were, things would be different. However, we are here to talk of your son.”

  “And yours, your Highness,” Najabat said, determined not to answer all the veiled inferences. He too had heard of Aurangzeb’s interference in the supposed matter of an alliance between Jahanara and him, but, unlike the princess, he held no grudges. Because the Emperor would never have agreed himself, and Prince Dara would not have either, although he had told Jahanara that he would allow her to marry when he wore the crown—that was nonsense, Najabat thought; there were far too many obstacles in their way, and if they had waited, Antarah would not be here. The past eight years had gladdened Najabat’s heart beyond measure, and though he cherished the stolen moments with Jahanara when he came down to Agra, the boy was always in his home to remind him of his mother in his actions and his mannerisms. When Jahanara and he met, as they had the previous night, they passed half their time in talking of Antarah, some in their love for each other, and the rest as Najabat watched her sleep in his arms, at peace as she never was in the imperial zenana.

  A shot reverberated over the dusty maidan as the archery master lifted his musket and fired into the air. The horses whinnied and skittered about on their hooves, and then, one by one, in a well-orchestrated dance, the ten boys nudged the animals’ flanks with their stirrups and began to ride around the target. None of the boys was holding his reins; instead these were tucked into the saddles of their horses, so they gripped their mounts only with their legs and feet. The boys held composite bows—short, curved, and immensely strong bows made of mango wood, deer horn, and buffalo sinew, covered with lacquered enamel and leather. The strings of the bows were made of a thin and tough animal hide, and they had quivers filled with sixty arrows each slung over their backs. Every boy had a
different colored arrow—red, blue, green, purple, yellow, black, or gold, as Najabat saw in the prince’s quiver. The fletchings of the arrows were made of crane feathers, and, in Prince Muhammad Sultan’s quiver, the fletchings were of eagle feathers, as befitted a royal prince.

  “Who do you think will win, Mirza Najabat Khan?” Prince Aurangzeb asked, covering his mouth and nose as the dust from the riding churned its way toward them.

  Najabat only had eyes for his son, steadily upright in the saddle, his bow held aloft in his left hand, his right trembling in the vicinity of his quiver. “Antarah, your Highness,” he said softly. “I beg pardon for saying this, but the prince is two years younger than my son, who has more experience and is the master’s favorite in this sport.”

  To his surprise, Aurangzeb laughed aloud. It was a sound so rarely heard at court—where the prince had a reputation for being a morose and sullen man, unlike his brilliant brother Dara—that Najabat tore his gaze away from his son and glanced at him.

  “Well said, Mirza Najabat Khan,” Aurangzeb said. “I do not wager; I dislike such diversions excessively, but if your son wins, you must come and serve under my command in the Deccan. That will be your reward.”

  The riders had been steadily gaining speed around the target, their horses moving smoothly in a rhythm, each horse’s nose a few feet away from the preceding one’s tail. The master fired another shot. The boys dipped into their quivers in a fluid motion, fit their arrows into their bows, and let loose the arrows across the maidan. A mélange of colors flashed under the bright sun, and all the arrows found their marks in the target from all sides as the boys rode around. But Najabat watched only Antarah’s slight figure as he thundered past his father again and again, his heart in his mouth, praying that every arrow would find its way to the target and not beyond, to hit his son. All the young boys were experts at their craft, and they had been specially chosen for this most dangerous of all archery sports because they were superb riders, able to guide their horses with little prods from their knees, capable of keeping their seats, and adept at hitting the target every time they took aim. The question was which one would empty his quiver before the ending shot rang out.