Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  “Jahan,” Emperor Aurangzeb said in an injured voice, beating his fist lightly against the door. “You hurt me with such words. Do you think if Dara or Shuja or Murad were alive, they would allow me to be king? My head would have rolled in the courtyard—I have done nothing but protect my interests.”

  “You were always selfish,” Jahanara said bitterly, “always thinking about yourself.”

  “This Empire,” Aurangzeb said, “is rightfully mine. Bapa had allowed it to become rife with a rot, the singing, the dancing girls, the rivers of wine. People do not even heed the call for prayer, do you know? I stop whatever imperial activity I am engrossed in and kneel to pray; I intend to set an example for the citizens of the Empire by my actions. Allah has ordained that my head feel the weight of the crown, Jahan. If I were not convinced of this, I would have given up this battle a long time ago and retired from court life to meditate and pray.”

  Jahanara slid down the length of the door and sat on the floor, her hands clasped in front of her. It was the first time since that war of succession that she had deigned to talk with her brother—the only brother she had now, she thought sadly. Once they had been a splendid family. Dara, with his height and striking handsomeness; Shuja, with his habit of looking toward her for approval; Murad, with his serious intent—they had all been good men. Jahanara did not think she could say that of Aurangzeb.

  She was inside her apartments, ten inches of wood between her and Aurangzeb. He might be Emperor, she thought with tired irony, but he still could not command a meeting with her, even though she was his prisoner and had defied his orders and his demands by remaining by the side of their father, whom he seemed to detest. Where did that hatred come from? And then, because she was a reasonable woman, Jahanara remembered all of their persecutions of Aurangzeb. The major ones—his being stripped of his governorships more than once, and the petty ones, when she had refused to meet him, or not responded to his letters, or made fun of him.

  Ishaq Beg strode up and down the corridor, his gaze purposeful, his hand on a dagger tucked into his cummerbund, as if he expected his Emperor to come rushing through the door at any moment to take his mistress’s life. She shook her head and smiled at him. Then, since Aurangzeb doubtless listened still beyond the door, she said, “What are you going to do, Ishaq? He probably has the entire army waiting behind him. Well, he would not bring an army to subdue a mere woman, but a few guards at least. Aurangzeb has become fastidious; he was not that in his youth, but now he would not soil his hands by killing me himself. Someone will be delegated to do it.”

  “He will have to kill me first, your Highness,” Ishaq said, and Jahanara was touched by his devotion.

  “Come back to court life, Jahan. I beg this of you,” Aurangzeb said softly. “Let me at least see you and take you with me. Is it right that my sister must live thus?”

  “Your father does,” she replied in a harsh voice. “Have you no feelings for him?”

  Emperor Shah Jahan coughed from the Shah Burj of the Agra fort, where his bed had been laid out for him, and the sound of that cough traveled through the corridor to Jahanara’s ears. She rose from the door.

  “I have to go now, Aurangzeb, Bapa needs me.”

  His voice was muffled. “I need you too, Jahan.”

  “I think,” she said deliberately, “that you have never wanted or believed in anyone but yourself. I sometimes wonder how you could have turned out so differently from us. We had the same upbringing, and while I once could have said that there was something of the familiar in you . . . I can no longer. Go, Aurangzeb, I will not leave Bapa’s side for the rest of his life.”

  “Then,” he said, knocking against the wood one last time, “you must stay there until he dies.”

  Twenty-six

  Though Jahanara grieved overmuch inwardly at the gloom that enveloped the citadel, yet she did not permit the windy tempests of the heart to blow her about and uproot the moorings of her personality. . . . She had a woman’s body but a man’s mind. Though defeated, never did she own that the reverses had galled her.

  —MUNI LAL, Shah Jahan

  Agra

  Tuesday, March 20, 1663

  10 Sha’baan A.H. 1073

  An errant thunderstorm at twilight left smoky clouds and tangerine skies over Agra. Then darkness came to cover it all, and already-muted sounds dulled into silence. Lamps flickered here and there, uncertain and subdued, remnants of a capital city left to die. A few people walked the streets, aimless, wandering. For the last six years, Agra had been quiet, ever since Emperor Aurangzeb had moved his court to Delhi and the city of Shahjahanabad, which his father had built. The bazaars were empty, custom slow and hesitant. Even the Taj Ganj, with its magnificent sarais, which Shah Jahan had envisioned as a thrumming, thriving place, filled with people eager to see his wife’s tomb, was hushed.

  In the fort, the corridors were deserted, dust lying over the many windows, the gardens untended, flowers wilting for lack of water. Princess Jahanara stood in her apartments, looking out at the languid Yamuna below. These were the rooms her Bapa had constructed for her in the Anguri Bagh, with their smoothly curved Bangala roofs, their vast verandahs filled with marble latticework screens that filtered coolness from the waters of the river and swept it into every corner.

  March already, she thought, of another year . . . how many since they came to Agra after Bapa’s illness? Some five and a half. If she had been told that her life would have been thus, shut away in the palaces, a handful of attendants to minister to them and guard them, she would not have believed it. Even now, it was difficult to comprehend. That Aurangzeb had indeed been Emperor for so long, that Bapa had struggled to live . . . and had lived for so long, cursing the son who had brought this about. Tomorrow, they would celebrate Nauroz, the New Year, at the beginning of spring.

  She pressed her forehead against the screen and closed her eyes. Remembering. All she had now were her thoughts that stretched into long days and desolate nights. The Nauroz festival was a time of rebirth, of happiness, music in the hallways and at court, amirs with cheerful faces, the giving of gifts, the receiving of them. Food in plenty. Wine in the fountains. Jahanara had heard that Aurangzeb’s court was more austere. In Delhi, the Nauroz would be celebrated with a mere gesture—no elaborate meals, no laughter, certainly no alcohol. If the amirs wished to drink, they did so in their homes, in the safety of their zenanas—even the public houses had been shut. The Emperor’s bounty in these stark times was measured by cloth caps that he stitched himself. Even with the pall over her, Jahanara could not help grinning. Bapa had given his nobles grants of land, jagirs and estates, higher ranks, more money, jewels from the treasury, positions of repute. Aurangzeb, the fool, gave them caps. He had said that he had too much time on his hands after matters of state had been attended to, so he kept busy with his scissors, his length of dreary cloth, his needle and his cotton thread.

  She wondered what the amirs thought of this, what they dared to think of the man whom they had put on the throne of the Empire. The man who had imprisoned his father and his sister and had killed all of his brothers. Remorse? Had they finally realized their stupidity? She was to find out from one of them at least.

  “Jahan.”

  Jahanara’s heart began a mad thumping, and she forgot everything she wanted to ask; every bit of bitterness fled. She turned, saw Najabat, and put her hands over her face, overcome with love.

  He came to her side with quick steps and enfolded her in his arms. He was trembling, much as she was. It had been some six years since he had held her thus, and yet, there was nothing unfamiliar. The scent of his skin, the strength of his grasp, the rub of his beard on the top of her head. He pulled away to look at her. He had aged, she thought, his eyebrows fully white, his hair thinning on the top. But his fingers were warm on her skin, his mouth . . . She leaned into him and laid her lips on his. She did not speak when he lifted her effortlessly and carried her to the divan, undoing her choli and her ghagara,
laying her out in front of his gaze. His hands went across her body, flitting gently over the scars from the burning on her stomach, back, and thighs, rising to cup her breasts. She began to cry, and he wiped her tears away, kissing the sounds from her mouth. A lone jackal howled below at the waterfront, but Jahanara and Najabat did not hear it as they hungrily reached for each other, as they kissed and loved in the heated night.

  When they were done, she lay on the divan on her side, Najabat’s head buried in the curve of her shoulder, their breaths easing.

  “I have missed you.”

  “I thought,” he said, “that I would never see you again, my love. Thank you for summoning me to your side.”

  A long pause. “What do you think we will do now, my lord?”

  He turned her over and put his palms on her face. “Come to my house, Jahan, leave this fort. Live in my zenana; let me look after you as I ought to.”

  She pulled his hands away, all the anger she had felt rising in her again. “And what of my Bapa? Who will take care of him? You don’t think—Aurangzeb and you don’t stop to consider that he is a broken, beaten man. What will he do if I am not here?”

  He rested his head on the pillow, pain drawing lines on his brow. “I’m sorry. Things . . . could have gone differently. If Prince Dara, indeed the other princes also, had only paid heed to his Majesty’s claim on the throne, they would still be alive. My hands”—he lifted them up and they shook—“are stained with their blood. I have no right to ask anything of you, Jahan. I am not your husband, merely the father of your child.”

  Jahanara rose to draw a peshwaz over herself and sat down again, cross-legged. “If Antarah deserted you when you most needed him, Najabat. If—”

  When he said nothing, she continued, “It was not necessary to have killed the princes.” But she knew, all too well, that it had been. That Najabat had been following Aurangzeb’s orders when he hounded Dara over the Empire, when he sent Murad to the prison at Gwalior, when he stood by as Shuja was killed. But she recalled that moment when Dara’s head had come to them in a silver box, his eyes closed, an almost foolish expression on his face. She had known then just how powerless they had all become, how difficult it would have been to stop Aurangzeb once he had begun this war of succession. And he had succeeded, much as Bapa had all those years ago when the throne became his.

  In the gardens beyond, the cicadas had begun their incessant chirping. A woman’s voice, lustrous in song, floated in the warm night air from the banks of the river. Najabat put a hand on Jahanara’s thigh, daringly, and she let it lie, thinking of another night so many years ago—thirty or so—when she had listened to a woman singing while waiting for a lover. Since Najabat and she had come together in Kashmir, there had been no necessity for any other man. He had been everything to her. She bent to kiss his hand, held it in hers, sketched lines over the back and in his warm palm.

  “Why did you call for me, Jahan?”

  “I missed you,” she said again, looking at him, her eyes fixed on his face. She had missed him. So much. Perhaps—and she was being honest with herself—more than she had before, when she had been busy in the zenana, at court, by her Bapa’s side. But as much as she loved her father, he was an inadequate companion—ill most of the time, querulous and demanding at others—and she was tired of being in pain all the time. So . . . this little interlude.

  “And nothing else?” he asked.

  She looked away. “There can be nothing else. I do not stay with Bapa because it is my duty . . . though it is. I adore my father, and when he dies, Najabat, it will be my hand that will close his eyes, my image he will take with him on his final journey.”

  “So he told me also,” Najabat said in a low voice.

  “Who?”

  “Your son. He said that I must not come between you, that this must be your decision, that you must do as you please, because you are no mere woman.”

  Antarah had said that to Najabat. Princess Jahanara Begam leaned over and kissed her lover again, buried her mouth in his neck and cried. She had not seen her son in many years either, and there was no easy way to beckon him to her side, not as she had done his father. He was more or less a stranger to her, a gift from Allah to be cherished in brief moments, and each time she saw him, she marveled at how he had grown, what a fine young man he had become, how endearing, how beloved. Antarah was twenty-eight years old, a father himself, with his own zenana, and the title of Shah Alam from his Emperor—Aurangzeb’s sly way of acknowledging her lover and her son. As if she cared, Jahanara thought. But she did care, in some part of her heart, that her child should be so lauded at court, that his achievements should be recognized, that his father should be proud of him. Only the fact that Aurangzeb’s hand had signed the imperial farman granting Antarah his new title was troubling.

  “Is he a good Emperor?” she asked, her voice muffled.

  Najabat did not reply for a while, his breathing even. “Perhaps,” he said finally. “It’s too early to tell yet.”

  So Najabat was disappointed too. In the past few years, Jahanara had been thinking about kingship and empires also. Dara would have been little better, this she saw now, because the Empire needed a king with a warrior’s heart and his had been that of a poet. Shuja and Murad would have been too precipitous in their decisions, too raw. Aurangzeb she had always considered would have been a bad sovereign, and he was proving himself thus. An ache came over her. Was this then the end of the Mughals? Who would rule after Aurangzeb? Did he think all of his numerous sons would forget the lessons he had demonstrated for them in grabbing the throne? Just as he doubtless was waiting for his father’s death, so were his sons awaiting their grandfather’s death, because he had taught them this. With no respect, no consideration, no pity, no sympathy . . . no real feeling, how could the Empire survive?

  “You should go now, my lord,” she said.

  Najabat dressed slowly, deliberately stretching out the minutes in Jahanara’s apartments. He did not take his gaze from her face. “Will I see you again, Jahan?”

  She shook her head.

  “We don’t have much time left. I am fifty-six years old this year, my love. What if I were to die?” He said this with a little smile on his face.

  “And I will be fifty next year, Najabat,” she said, coming into his arms one last time. “But my place is here with Bapa. If Allah wills it, when Bapa dies, I will come out of the fort. Aurangzeb still wants me in his zenana.” She grimaced. “He has promised me the title of Padshah Begam. Roshan, I hear, is merely Shah Begam; he still waits for me, you see.”

  “You see how much you are loved on the outside?”

  “And on the inside, here, by my father.” She stepped back and raised her hand in farewell.

  • • •

  “How long, beta?” Emperor Shah Jahan asked. His hair had whitened after his wife’s death, thirty-two years ago, but now it had taken on the sickly, yellowed sheen of a beaten man who had been lying in his bed for a long while.

  “Nine years,” Jahanara said slowly, leaning over her father. She could hear the harsh rasp in his breathing, the rumble in his voice as he spoke, and knew him to be frail and failing. If he would last the night, she thought, perhaps he would last another few years, but she saw nothing but defeat in his rheumy eyes, smelled the sourness in his breath, felt the too-tight clutch of his hands around hers . . . as though he knew too. “We have been here for nine years, Bapa.”

  They were in the Shah Burj at Agra fort—the octagonal balcony jutting out from the battlements of the fort, clad in white marble, inlaid with semiprecious stones—where Shah Jahan had commanded elephant fights in the pounded earth maidan below, where the crowds had thronged in the early mornings, hoping for a glimpse to reassure themselves that he was alive and well.

  “I wonder,” Emperor Shah Jahan said now, turning his face to the view beyond the arches of the Shah Burj and the glow of the white marble dome in the distance, “if anyone even believes that I still live. I
s Aurangzeb a good sovereign, beta?”

  “There is talk in the streets that he intends to reissue the jizya.”

  Emperor Shah Jahan smiled, though it was a weak smile and cost him an effort, at the end of which he began to cough from deep within his chest. When the coughing had finally stopped, he laid his aged face in the curve of his daughter’s shoulder and said, “Aurangzeb was always a fool; he must know that he cannot rule a largely Hindu empire by offending almost all of its inhabitants. There will be rebellions. He is a fool.”

  Jahanara stroked her father’s hair. Emperor Akbar had abolished the jizya when he began to build his Empire in Hindustan—it was a tax on non-Muslims, a head tax, paid for the mere fact that a person was a Hindu. There were other rules surrounding the jizya that created fear and loathing and, in doing so, an atmosphere of unrest. One of them was that no more than three Hindus could talk on the streets together or congregate in one another’s houses, for they would be automatically considered to have been in collusion against the Emperor and so fined or jailed. But Aurangzeb was always too rigid in his beliefs. Since the meeting with Najabat three years ago, reluctantly on her part, Jahanara had begun to correspond with Aurangzeb. She still refused to see him or to enter his zenana, but she did write to him, and when she had heard this news, her letter had been fiery. She had called him stupid also, and much more, but he had not listened.

  She laid her father back on the pillows, and he picked up her hand and kissed it. “I am not very accomplished at farewells, Jahan. You saw how difficult it was for me to let go your Mama.”

  Jahanara stilled his words. “Not yet, Bapa. You must not talk thus.”