Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  “Hush,” she said.

  He took her hands in his large ones and kissed them. “You cannot be bashful with me; I will not allow it. Where is the woman who mocked me in the chaugan grounds and defeated me so soundly? Where is that bold woman who came in her shikara to take me with her down the canal and into the waters of the Dal, and insisted that I row? You did all of this when you barely knew me; now, when you are familiar with every thought in my head and know me to love you beyond every other being on this earth, you cannot turn your face away.”

  She glanced upon their linked hands and stole her fingers around his, feeling his warmth and his vitality come into her. “It all seems so long ago. I wonder . . . if I will have any courage again. My body has been beaten, Najabat. It feels as though my soul has . . . died.”

  He leaned over her and laid his face against the curve of her neck, an ache in his heart when he realized that she had grown emaciated in these past months, her collarbone jutting sharply against his cheek. He did not dare to gather her tightly into his arms as he wanted to but had to content himself with laying his hands around her slight figure so that she sensed his embrace even if she could not feel it. When he spoke, his voice was muffled. “You must get well, Jahan; you will get well. If I were allowed to be by your side always, then I would be here. The duty your father and Dara do for you—it is mine under the gaze of Allah, for I am your husband.”

  She felt his warm tears against her skin and was glad for that sensation, glad to feel anything at all. “You cry for me?”

  “Only because you are in pain and I can do so little about it.”

  “The hakims have prepared some miraculous ointments, and the pain is so faint now I hardly feel it.”

  “You lie,” he said. “Remember that I will always know if you lie.”

  She laughed at that, a shrill, unused laugh that cracked its way from her throat. She did not need to ask anymore, of herself or of Najabat, if he would find her desirable and attractive—she knew he would because he had defied all the rules of the zenana to find his way here.

  “Are we to thank Aurangzeb for this bounty?” she asked.

  “He brought me along,” Najabat said simply. “I was the prince’s to command; if he had chosen, I could have been left behind in the Deccan. I would still have fled to you, and perhaps Ishaq would have taken pity on me and allowed me to creep into your apartments for a brief look before the imperial army captured me.” He shrugged. “This is much better.”

  “Aurangzeb is a pretentious snob,” she said. “His ideas have not changed since he was twelve years old, and I sometimes think that he still speaks like a child—the same passion for his causes, the complete lack of forbearance for any other opinion.” She shook her head with a smile. “I must be better if I can muster the energy to be angry at him.”

  “He came all the way from the Deccan to see you, Jahan. I saw his suffering on the journey,” Najabat said.

  “So did Shuja and Murad.” She took a deep breath. “I am being intolerant myself, and I do not even know why.”

  Ishaq Beg brought in a bowl of steaming stew—flour dumplings cooked in chicken broth, flavored with cumin, chilli powder, and salt, sprinkled with a few leaves of coriander. He left it by her side and went out, winking at his mistress and keeping his gaze stoically away from the amir.

  “He has always disapproved, you know,” Jahanara said. “But I understand that he writes to you.”

  Najabat smiled. “His letters about you are almost as welcome as yours are. They tell me more, certainly, more than you care to reveal. I have taken some trouble to cultivate Ishaq, as you see, or he would not leave to me this most precious task of feeding you.”

  “I am not hungry.” Her eyebrows met in stubbornness in the center of her forehead.

  “Of course you are.” He lifted her head and fed her the stew, spoonful by spoonful, until she had finished almost the whole thing and the spoon clattered into the emptiness of the bowl. He wiped her mouth with the sleeve of his qaba and then bent his head to kiss her.

  “I brought someone along,” he said.

  Her voice was faint. “I have wished to see him for so many years . . .”

  Najabat went to the door, and Antarah stepped into the room. Jahanara felt her heart flood with love. She was already very tired from this meeting with Najabat, first apprehensive, then so immensely joyful that her heart had swelled to bursting within her. This, the extravagance of seeing her son up close for the first time, under such circumstances, was almost too much. But she welcomed it. He was a solemn little creature, she thought, already so much like the man he would become. The sturdiness she had seen from across the Yamuna River and the lean lines of his body at the archery grounds were apparent now in his nicely muscled arms and legs, slim waist, robust shoulders, clear skin, and bright eyes. He had gleaming black hair, smooth and long beyond his ears—the curls of childhood had vanished. He came forward fearlessly, though he must have been afraid, Jahanara thought, for it was the first time he was being introduced to her, and this very first time he had to see her thus—ravaged by a fire.

  Antarah bowed in the chahar taslim, rising from it with his right hand on his forehead. “Your Highness, this is a pleasure indeed.”

  “How correctly he speaks, Najabat,” Jahanara said. “Did you teach him?”

  Najabat nodded, watching their son with a smile.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  The boy bit his lower lip and rushed to kneel by her side. He cried manfully, trying to hide his tears on the sheet covering her, ending by wiping his eyes and laying a small kiss on the edge of the sheet. “Will you become well again, your Highness?”

  She caressed his head, exhausted by the day’s events. “I will now, Antarah,” she said. “Being able to see you . . . is one of many blessings in my life from Allah. Go, my love, I tire now. Go, and remember me with affection if you can.”

  Najabat and Antarah rose to leave, but from the door Najabat returned for a brief moment. He set his lips against her forehead and watched her slip into sleep again. Before she did so fully, he said, “Call for me again, Jahan, when you are well. I will wait, no matter how long it takes.”

  • • •

  A few days later, Jahanara suffered a relapse—her burns became infected, her breathing slowed almost to nothing, and when she opened her eyes she did not recognize anyone in the room. Prince Aurangzeb sent his father a purse of five hundred gold rupees every day, begging him to slip it under his sister’s pillow for the night and to distribute it among the poor in the morning. Emperor Shah Jahan did so himself, adding to the purse to bring the amount to a thousand rupees. Hakims traveled long distances to reach Agra with their potions and prophecies, each hoping to be the one who would effect a cure and gain renown as the savior of the princess. The Emperor listened tirelessly to each of them, afraid that if he dismissed any one too summarily he might indeed be taking away his beloved child’s right to live. The days passed thus until a fakir in the streets spoke softly through song of being the one who would bring about a treatment, and word of him filtered into the imperial palaces. Remembering the first fakir, who had so fortuitously given him two apples for his wife in the midst of a broiling summer, Shah Jahan summoned this man into the zenana and ordered him to make good on his promises.

  The man brought a variety of herbs from the filthy sack he carried on his back—the thick, broad leaves of aloe vera, the stems and bark of witch hazel, the skin of a young plantain. He fanned these out on the marble floor of a courtyard in the Anguri Bagh in front of his Emperor, who sat on the steps leading to the pavilions that looked over the Yamuna and watched him. He asked for milk, honey, and an egg, and servants scurried to do his bidding. Buffaloes attached to the imperial kitchens were freshly milked, and the milk, still frothing and warm, was poured into a gold jar, its neck tied with a clean piece of muslin. Eunuchs rooted for the newest egg they could find, one that had just dropped from the hen, and cradled it
in silk cloth as they brought it to the courtyard. The honey came from the imperial apiaries, golden, liquid, and fragrant with the jasmines that had created the nectar. With a lot of grunting and some chanting, the fakir broke the egg, carefully decanted the yellow from the white, and used the latter in his concoction along with the rest of the ingredients.

  When he was done, he held up a small bowl of cool, whitish paste in both his hands as an offering to his sovereign. “It will not work unless I make it myself, your Majesty.”

  Shah Jahan rose to grab the vessel from his begrimed hands. “If it works, you will make it yourself every day, and when the princess recovers, you will own a mansion on the banks of the Yamuna, any one you choose, even one currently occupied.”

  He ran to his daughter’s apartments and smeared the salve on her himself, praying all the while. Her burns seemed to wane upon first contact, but he continued praying, hoping that he was seeing not what he wanted to see but what actually was. But no, an hour later, she fell into a profound sleep and stopped moving restlessly on the bed. Two days later, the wounds dried up. A month later, they had almost completely healed, and she slept more soundly and woke refreshed and laughing.

  This second fakir was heaped with riches, and Emperor Shah Jahan could not help but think that perhaps the first one had also spoken the truth all those years ago.

  • • •

  Remembering that first fakir, Shah Jahan studied the letters he had received from disgruntled commanders of the imperial army in the Deccan—all condemning in a veiled manner Aurangzeb’s conduct in the various sorties the army had led into the Deccani kingdoms. Elephants captured from one foray had not been sent to the imperial stables, or the jewelry from one stormed fort now adorned the ladies of the prince’s zenana, or something even as simple as the prince not allowing the foraging parties to stray too far, afraid of their being ambushed, and so the campaign had to be abandoned in a few short weeks because of a lack of fuel and water. Taken by itself, each accusation was spiteful, and Shah Jahan would not have paid heed to them. But he was troubled about Jahanara, how slowly she was recovering, and felt how weak his heart had become from this constant battering of uncertainty—and he took it out on the son he did not like. Prince Dara Shikoh, reading the missives over his father’s shoulder, added his protests also.

  At the end of May 1644, Shah Jahan wrote a curt letter to Aurangzeb, still encamped outside Agra waiting out his sister’s illness, and told him that, because of the reports that had reached him about Aurangzeb’s misconduct, he was now dismissed from the viceroyalty of the Deccan and could not return to Burhanpur.

  As a final insult to his son, the Emperor sent Saif Khan, one of his brothers-in-law, to take over the now-vacant governorship. Aurangzeb had assiduously cultivated all of his powerful relations, but he had neglected Saif Khan, who was married to his mother’s sister Mallika Banu. Now he smoldered with envy that Saif would go to Burhanpur, live in the palaces he had remodeled himself, take over an easily managed army that Aurangzeb had trained.

  The prince had lost yet another supporter recently, his grandfather Abul Hasan—Mumtaz Mahal’s father, who was buried at Lahore in 1641 in a fine tomb with blue tile work across from the crypt of Emperor Jahangir. Both men had been fathers of royalty—Abul’s daughter was Empress Mumtaz Mahal, and Jahangir’s son was Emperor Shah Jahan. The difference was, of course, that Jahangir himself had been Emperor, so his mausoleum was grander. And though Abul’s sister Mehrunnisa had been Empress and wife of Jahangir, space for her final resting place was allotted farther away.

  It was—Aurangzeb thought disconsolately when he received his father’s missive—a lesson in kingship. Better to die a monarch than a deposed one or an unwanted one—his status at death would determine the shape, size, and structure of the tomb that would house his remains. And the grander it was—Aurangzeb had just visited the Luminous Tomb and marveled, unwillingly, at the elegance of his father’s inspired design—the more likely posterity would be to remember him.

  He wondered what he would do now and waited daily for some news from his father. What came was a condescending invitation from Dara to visit the splendid mansion he had lately built on the banks of the Yamuna near the fort, with all the copious monies their father had bestowed upon him.

  Twenty-four

  As it was the summer season, an underground room had been constructed close to the river, and mirrors from Aleppo . . . had been hung. . . . Dara conducted Shah Jahan and his brothers to see how the room looked. Muhammad Aurangzib sat down close to the door leading in and out of the room. Dara . . . winked at the Emperor, as if to say, “See where he is sitting.”

  —JADUNATH SARKAR, Anecdotes of Aurangzib

  Agra

  Thursday, June 2, 1644

  26 Rabi’ al-awwal A.H. 1054

  The mansion—really more of a palace to rival the ones inside the fort at Agra—was massive, stretching its length along the Yamuna River and its breadth landward into a grove of mango and guava trees that cast their dense shade on the beaten earth and were filled with the bright green of a thousand parrots. The birds dropped half-eaten fruit on the ground, greedily consuming all they could find, unmindful of the waste. Mammoth pink and blue snakes, fashioned out of fragrant sandalwood, nestled in the branches of the trees, realistic even to their forked tongues raised into the air, but the parrots were undeterred. They cried out to one another in their raucous language, swarmed in and out of the leaves, flying so low that the imperial malis, who took care of the garden, had to duck at times. They squabbled over pieces of guava, scolded the humans from their perches, serene in the knowledge that they could not be caught.

  Dara came running to the colossal wood-and-metal studded doors of his palace, pushing the slaves aside, laughing as he ushered his father and his brothers in. “The birds are unmanageable.”

  “Why don’t you take a musket and shoot them?” Aurangzeb asked coolly.

  Dara shuddered. “Kill them, you mean? You were always violent, Aurangzeb. There is little harm in the parrots; they create an inconvenience, that is all. But come in and see my marvelous house. What do you think of it, Bapa?”

  They wandered through all the rooms as breezes from the Yamuna dried the sweat on their brows and cooled their heated skins. It was a strange procession, Prince Aurangzeb thought as he lingered behind his father and his brothers. They had always been feted and entertained on Bapa’s bounty, or Jahan had played hostess to them in the zenana, offering dinners and nautch girls, but here was Dara assuming the role of patron. He could not bring himself to consider this invitation as a mere pleasure for them all—they were grown men, scattered around the Empire; opportunities, such as this one, to gather in one place, to break bread together, to mull over the problems of their inheritance were rare. He saw it instead as a show of might by Dara. A magnificent mansion with no expense spared—gold and enamel-inlaid censers in every room, silk curtains from Bengal, marble floors from the Rajput kingdoms, ivory figurines from Africa, the best sandstone from Fatehpur-Sikri. Everywhere the eye went, it met with plenty, an open hand for purchases, with, it seemed to say, the vast coffers of the imperial treasury behind it. Aurangzeb had seen Dara’s chair in the Diwan-i-am, one he had refused to occupy for the month that Aurangzeb had been in Agra, saying that he would consider himself blessed to sit in his father’s presence when Jahanara was finally recovered. It was she who had exhorted the four brothers to meet—this luncheon was her idea.

  Overwhelmed by the quiet opulence of Dara’s house, Aurangzeb followed the party to an underground room whittled into the banks of the river. It was long, with a high ceiling carved out in red sandstone, lit brilliantly by hundreds of oil diyas in niches along the walls. The wisping smoke from the diyas flung a glaze over Aurangzeb’s eyes and made them water. Dara had commissioned a new carpet for the room, thirty feet long, twenty feet wide, in blue with a white border. It had taken the weavers two years to make. The pile was thick and lush, and their bare fee
t sank into its embrace. Luxurious as Aurangzeb’s camp in Agra was, there was a real gratification in being able to stand upon a finished floor, feel the solidity of walls enclosing him and a ceiling over his head. He had come to loathe the encampment, for it meant he was in temporary circumstances here—no longer the head of a state, with no place to call his own, no people to govern. In the same breath that Shah Jahan had dismissed Aurangzeb from the Deccan governorship he had lauded Murad for . . . something; Aurangzeb could no longer remember what it had been. But it had warranted a public audience at court, a khilat and a gold dagger, a nod of approval in front of the nobles in the Diwan-i-am.

  They sat down to eat. Eunuchs filed in with a large red tablecloth, which they laid on the carpet in front of the divans. And then they brought in the food from the kitchens of the mansion. Aurangzeb noted that the dishes, in gold and silver, were each tied with white and red muslin, with a paper tag attached to the top knot on which the Khansamah, the superintendent of the kitchens, had written the name of the dish and its ingredients and placed his seal upon the knot but a few minutes ago. The dishes were untied, and a royal taster, his face covered with a cotton mask, his hands gloved in white cotton, dipped a spoon into each preparation and took the spoon to his mouth, lifting the cloth over his face. His nose and mouth were normally covered when not engaged in the actual operation of tasting so that his breath or saliva would not defile the food. Then every dish was laid out, and Aurangzeb took a deep breath, his mouth watering.

  There were smoky brown curries of lamb and goat, still bubbling in their rich gravies, and piles of warm naans, creamy and perfectly baked, peeled from the walls of the underground ovens, their undersides crisp. A whole roasted chicken, warm and moist, steamed on a silver platter, cooked with a spice rub of garlic and coriander seeds, marinated overnight in yogurt. The rice came from the foothills of the Himalayas, aromatic on its own but seasoned further with strands of golden saffron and garnished with cashews, raisins, and anise fried in ghee. There were fifteen plates of cooked vegetables, potatoes, new peas, spinach swirled with cream, plump beans, stuffed brinjals—each spiced differently, subtly, so that Aurangzeb had to taste every morsel on his plate and ponder upon the recipe. The cucumbers and the carrots in the salad had been picked from the imperial vegetable gardens that morning, still scattered with dew, and they were crunchy and melted in the mouth with their spare dressing of lime juice, salt, pepper, and some sesame oil.