Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  Aurangzeb ate with relish, though he had decided that there were other matters more engaging to his mind and his body than food. He felt a comfort he had not sensed in a long while, ever since he had decided to be on a simple diet, but the food was delicious, and he promised himself that this would be the last time he would indulge himself so.

  At the end of the meal, Dara rose and said, “I must go see about the entertainment, if you will excuse me.”

  They all murmured assent, replete, content, lying back on their divans. When Dara departed, he shut the door, and Aurangzeb’s head jerked up. He realized that they were alone except for a handful of aged retainers, too old to do anything if there was danger. Here, in Dara’s cool underground room, the door had closed upon all the rivals his brother had for the throne. He jumped up and rushed to the door. It did not give immediately to his shoulder, and he heaved against it until it swung open, mocking him—it had not been locked after all. He sat panting on the doorstep, enraged at having allowed himself to be placed in such a vulnerable position.

  “What are you doing, Aurangzeb?” Emperor Shah Jahan asked, a slice of irritation in his voice.

  Aurangzeb bowed from the door. “Bapa, I prefer to sit here.”

  Dara returned and found him blocking the way. “Will you move? How will the musicians enter if you are here?”

  “Why was it necessary for you to go personally to see about the arrangements, Dara? Could you not have sent a slave?”

  Dara shrugged, gazing down at his brother. “You are a fool, Aurangzeb. This is my house, you are my guest, and you dare question my movements?”

  In the end, the entertainers had to maneuver around the seated prince to find their way inside. Aurangzeb refused to budge, listening to the music with half an ear, wishing himself anywhere but there. His father and his brothers drank steadily, wine brought in from the Abdar Khana in gold flasks set with emeralds and rubies. He had put a hand over his goblet when the wine was first served and tried to exhort the others to follow his example, but they had laughed.

  “Drink, Aurangzeb,” Murad said, smiling, “and perhaps it will loosen the stiffness of your countenance. How does your wife bear your glum face every day?”

  The melodic sound of the sitar grated on his ears—in his encampment he had put a halt to all such amusement; the food was the plainest, music had no place, and the camp was dry. If his amirs wished to indulge in liquor, they had to do it elsewhere. He leaned against the doorjamb and watched them get drunk, laugh, and make jokes he did not find in the least humorous, and his head began to ache. Down the stairs leading to this room came the faint song of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Allah u Allah u Akbar.

  He stood, tried to capture his father’s attention, failed to do so, and turned and ran up the stairs so that he could find an open space on the terrace to lay out his prayer rug, kneel toward Mecca, and pray. When he came back, he found the door shut and locked from the inside, two dour guards stationed outside. “You must return to your camp, your Highness,” one said diffidently. “His Majesty has so ordered.”

  That evening, Emperor Shah Jahan sent Aurangzeb a long and bitter letter about his lack of courtesy to his older brother and his inattentiveness as a guest, and said, Do not show your face to me again, Aurangzeb, until you have accounted for your strange behavior to my satisfaction.

  Four months later, Jahanara recovered fully and went back to Ajmer and Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti’s tomb to give thanks for her health. She remembered that Aurangzeb had come all the way from the Deccan to see her, and, given when he had arrived at Agra, he must have left Burhanpur very soon after receiving news of the fire. So she wrote to her estranged brother, telling him to stop sulking in his camp and come to court and beg their father’s pardon. He wrote back telling her that he did not trust Dara and mentioned finally his fear that they would all have been murdered that day in a room that could have been their tomb forever. This news gave Emperor Shah Jahan and Jahanara some pause, for though they did not believe it to be true, Aurangzeb had acted, in being distrustful of his brothers, as a royal prince should.

  Two months later, Shah Jahan gave Aurangzeb the governorship of Gujarat and told him to stop his aimless wanderings around the Empire and settle down to his duty.

  • • •

  The rift thus begun between Aurangzeb and his father never really healed. Here, then, was the beginning of the end.

  A year later, when the imperial party was again on a summer visit to Kashmir, Nazar Muhammad Khan, the governor of Balkh, attempted to capture the city of Kabul. He did not succeed. Shah Jahan was enraged at the presumption of this petty governor in making an assault on the mighty Mughal Empire and sent the imperial forces out to capture Balkh in retaliation. The Emperor used this excuse—and it would have done as well as any other—for he had long wanted to annex Balkh and Badakhshan. He sent Prince Murad at the head of the army under the guardianship of Ali Mardan Khan, the Amir-ul-umra, and equipped him with a mighty force—fifty thousand cavalry, ten thousand infantry all loaded with guns, muskets, and cannons. Balkh crumbled even before the imperials came within sight, and Murad was ordered to stay on and solidify his hold. But then, winter set in, the land was harsh, the cold severe, the air dry, the mountains forbidding, and dissent set into the imperial camp. Murad was a weak leader, unable to control his men, and they looted the countryside, wreaked havoc in the villages, laid desolation wherever they went, and he begged his father to allow him to return to Hindustan.

  While this was happening, another branch of the army conquered Badakhshan, routed out the ruler, killed him, and took possession of the land and its famed ruby mines. Eventually, disgusted with Murad’s lack of spine, Emperor Shah Jahan divested Aurangzeb of the Gujarat governorship and gave him Balkh and Badakhshan instead.

  The whole operation was a mistake from the beginning, for Aurangzeb was outfitted with an army only twenty-five thousand strong, cavalry and infantry, and, even before he arrived to take possession, his force was whittled down severely, raided in surprise attacks by the Uzbegs. In the meantime, the dispossessed governor of Balkh, Nazar Muhammad Khan, the man who had dared to attack Kabul, had been secretly amassing forces of his own to take back his lands. When Aurangzeb arrived in Balkh, he barely had the time to gather the wealth of the treasury, load it on horseback, elephants, and camels, and flee back to Hindustan via the Arbang pass in the Hindukush mountains. They came home in deep winter again through a pass heavily laden with snow, pursued by enemy forces who decimated large chunks of their rearguard. Five thousand men died, along with thousands of pack animals, some slipping and falling in the ice, buried under the snow before the break of dawn.

  Immensely weary, with a racking cough in his chest, Aurangzeb wandered back to Lahore with his attenuated army, half the treasure he had started with interred in the layers of ice in the mountains, to rest there for all eternity. While Murad had merited a mere slap on his wrist for his abortive attempt at holding Balkh, Shah Jahan complained indignantly about Aurangzeb for his part in losing it and the paucity of the booty he had dragged back with him. He sent Aurangzeb to Multan as governor, telling him that this was his last chance to prove his loyalty to his father.

  A month later, Shah Abbas II of Persia sacked Qandahar, overthrew the imperial forces, and established his own mighty army to wait for Mughal retaliation. And so, as it had in most of the history of the Mughal kings in India, Qandahar passed from the hands of the Mughals to the Persians.

  It was an insult, and one Emperor Shah Jahan was quick to respond to, for he was aware that he had been lax in the security of Qandahar, having pulled out all but the minimum of forces for the futile conquest of Balkh. He sent a stern letter to Prince Aurangzeb—recognizing that, of all his sons, the one he disliked most was the most likely to be a strong commander—and sent along with him this time an impressive host of grandees of the Empire, the Grand Vizier Sadullah Khan, Raja Jai Singh, Ali Mardan Khan, Rustum Khan, and Raja Bithaldas, a
nd a massive army.

  “Is this wise, Bapa?” Jahanara asked as she glanced at the imperial farman her father had brought to her for affixing the royal seal.

  “Qandahar must be part of the Empire again, beta,” Shah Jahan replied. “It is rightfully ours.”

  “True,” Jahanara said. Though the Persians did not think so; that much was evident. They had a history with Qandahar and dated their aggression to a promise, now long forgotten, by Emperor Humayun to the Shah of Persia. The Shah had provided Humayun with forces to retake India with an understanding that, since Qandahar had to be conquered first (on the way into Hindustan), Humayun would relinquish it to the Persians after his mission had been completed. The Mughal kings, of course, did not give Qandahar to the Persians . . . so they took it, and lost it, and now had taken it again.

  “Why the worry?” Shah Jahan asked, noting the lines on her forehead.

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just that so many of the big amirs are to be on this campaign, under Aurangzeb’s command. And, Bapa, he has a fluent tongue.”

  “But they are my generals, beta.”

  “Even so.” She pressed the Uzuk on the farman and waited for the imprint to dry. Perhaps Bapa was right and she fretted too much over too little. But she had heard whispers about her brother’s influence over the nobles, his unexpected friendships with them, even of their . . . support—no, that was not the right word, but their liking for him. Najabat Khan was with him, as was Antarah. They had both journeyed with Aurangzeb to Balkh, and during all the months of waiting—when the only news that filtered through the dense winter passes was upsetting at best—Jahanara had prayed for the safety of the man she loved and the son she had borne. When they met at Lahore, Najabat had said that Prince Aurangzeb had insisted upon Antarah riding beside him.

  “He looked after our boy, Jahan,” Najabat Khan had told her.

  Jahanara had not responded. So perhaps Aurangzeb had; what of it? It was his duty as a commander to bring his men back safely. On the one hand, he still berated her in letters for the sin she had committed; on the other, he kept watch over Najabat and Antarah. Now they were all to travel to Qandahar, and it would be a short campaign, sweet and swift. Surely.

  In the end, the sixteen-year-old boy king Shah Abbas II of Persia was more canny and powerful than the Mughal armies expected. They laid siege to Qandahar for three months, surrounding the fort and keeping water, grains, and fodder from going in, but the fort held out. Aurangzeb was recalled, and Dara was sent in his place, because Jahanara insisted that he ought also to have a command. Dara went better equipped than Aurangzeb in men, horses, cannons, muskets, battering rams, and guns, and spent five fruitless months trying to pummel his way into the fort. He did not succeed either.

  A dispirited, weary Aurangzeb fled to the Deccan and to Burhanpur after his father stripped him of his provinces—Kabul and Multan—and gave them to the favored Dara instead. And there, in the place where his mother had died, he gave Jahanara more cause for fury.

  At the age of thirty-five, Prince Aurangzeb fell in love for the first time in his life.

  Twenty-five

  When the throne of kingship of this country became adorned with the accession of the king of heavenly dignity, Muhammad Aurangzeb Bahadur ‘Alamgir Padshah Ghazi, His Majesty [Shah Jahan], in accordance with the expediency of Fate, was forced into involuntary seclusion inside the fort of Akbarabad.

  —From the Amal-i-Salih of Muhammad Salih Kambo, in W. E. BEGLEY AND Z. A. DESAI, Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb

  Delhi

  Thursday, September 13, 1657

  5 Zi’l-Hijja A.H. 1067

  Bapa!”

  Jahanara woke to the sound of her own voice. But no one stirred around her; the slave girls in her apartments still slept, and outside in the verandah she could hear Ishaq Beg’s soft snores.

  She rose noiselessly, pushed aside the sheet that covered her, and put her feet on the cloth carpet, waiting for the flaming pain along her right side to subside. This was the legacy of her burning all those years ago; sometimes, mostly in the middle of the night, she would wake to a searing burn, relive those bewildering moments when she saw her legs on fire, her chiffon skirts wisp into nothing, feel the agony again in excruciating detail. Now it seemed to her that the unpleasant stink of her burning flesh hung about the rooms, stifling her breath. And then she remembered hearing her father call out to her.

  Jahanara gathered her ghagara around her knees and went to the door leading into the gardens. Once in the verandah, she descended the marble steps of the Rang Mahal and fled down the pathway leading to the Khas Mahal at Delhi fort—the private apartments of her father.

  A full moon glowed in the sky above, painting the gardens she passed with bright silver and deep shadows. The evergreens lining the path seemed to take on the guise of men, and she heard the eunuchs stiffen when they heard her footsteps and then bow when they recognized their Begam Sahib. At the baithak of the Khas Mahal, the sitting room with its cusped arches, a shaft of moonlight came to strike the floor and lend radiance to the ceiling of white marble inlaid with precious stones that were blue, green, and red in the day, now a dark indigo—like a painting captured in black and white. The stocky Kashmiri ladies who guarded the Emperor’s inner sanctum stepped forward and then back again in one motion, bending their heads in salute, and Jahanara went into the central chamber, where her father lay on his bed.

  A lone diya cast its thin light around the room made fully of marble—the walls, the ceiling, the floor, all embellished in the same pietra dura inlay that the outside baithak boasted. But here, the sound of her feet was softened in the deep nap of Persian carpets, and, despite the blistering September night, coal braziers burned faintly, heating the air. Jahanara stood looking down at her father, the skin on her back breaking out into a sweat.

  “What is it, Jahan?”

  She sat down next to him. “I thought I heard you call out to me.”

  He turned bleary eyes toward her. “I did. I did not expect you to have heard me. It was nothing . . . a dream . . . a nightmare.”

  She caught one of his hands and held it to her cheek, thinking that it was very warm. He had a fever again, and his forehead was sketched with lines of pain. Emperor Shah Jahan had fallen ill some ten days ago of strangury. His stomach was distended, his legs had swollen to twice their size, and he could no longer hold himself upright, let alone take any steps. The court physicians had come with their plethora of cures—poultices to reduce the swelling, potions to restore the health of his urinary tract. It was an old complaint that came and went as it wished, and he was an aged man, as he often said, sixty-five years old this year. But with each coming, the illness stayed longer, affected him more, left him further weakened, and it took him more time to recover.

  Jahanara clapped her hands lightly, and, when a eunuch bowed his way in, she said, “A basin of cool water and a towel. Immediately.”

  “Yes, your Highness.” He retreated, returned in a few minutes as bidden, and set the basin at her side, the clean, white towel draped over the bowl.

  Shah Jahan shivered. “Make sure the water is not too chill, beta. I could not bear the cold—this heat from the braziers, it keeps my blood running and calms the trembles in my limbs, even gives me some relief from the ache.” His words were slurred and slow but lucid enough.

  “You have a fever, Bapa,” she said firmly, dipping the towel into the water and wringing it to damp, not dry. Then she folded it lengthwise and placed it on his heated forehead. The cloth warmed alarmingly soon, and Jahanara realized, after a moment of panic, that the temperature in the room was as much to blame as the fever ravaging her father’s body. Twenty minutes later, the Emperor’s breathing slowed and he fell asleep, his hand on his daughter’s shoulder so that she could not move without waking him again.

  She leaned back against his bed, as she had done for so many nights, whether he was well or not, and closed her eyes also, her heart heavy with forebod
ing. When Shah Jahan had fallen ill—almost from the next day, when he had been forced to cancel all of his public appearances—the Empire had begun to hum with dissatisfaction. Though she was confined to the sickroom nursing her father, these comments had reached even her ears, fractured, splintered bits of words and phrases of information. The Emperor was dying. The throne would be vacant. Who would be the next king? In the twenty-nine years that Emperor Shah Jahan had ruled, he had only once missed jharoka appearances or not presented himself at court—and that time had been because of a death, his wife’s. Even during the previous attacks of strangury, with an uncertain carriage, pain that bent him double, a whitening around the corners of his mouth and at his temples, Bapa had stood before the people in the morning jharoka, dragging himself to bed afterward and sleeping the day away. But this time he had refused, and it had been a long ten days that there had been no sign of Emperor Shah Jahan at the Shah Burj of the Delhi fort.

  Jahanara watched the Kashmiri guards change shifts sometime during the third pahr of the night, exchanging muted talk that did not reach her ears, and their weapons—spears, daggers, shields.

  Word had also come to her that Aurangzeb had gathered his army in the Deccan and was making his way north in response to his father’s poor health. What did he mean by this? And Aurangzeb had been made powerful by them—all of them—recently. Inadvertently perhaps, but still . . .