The Feast of Roses

by Indu Sundaresan

  And again, as in Mewar, the problem that presented itself was, who could be sent to the Deccan?

  When Jahangir had sent Khurram to Mewar, Mehrunnisa had thought it would be a good opportunity for him to think about her demand that he marry Ladli. Time away from Arjumand would allow him to see the advantages of the match. But now there could be no such alliance. Mehrunnisa was loath to let Khurram go to the Deccan. If he came back covered in glory from there, as he had from Mewar, her task of getting Ladli married would be doubly difficult.

  She was silent for a while, thinking of this, and woke from her thoughts to hear Ladli say, “So do you think he will go, Mama?”

  “Yes,” Mehrunnisa said finally. “The Khan-i-khanan needs the direction of a royal prince. Khurram will go.”

  “And will he take Arjumand?”

  Mehrunnisa looked up from her work in surprise. “I do not know. Perhaps.”

  “I see.” Ladli put her feet into the earth near the rock and traced figures idly with her toes. “Mama?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Can I . . . is it possible at all . . . can you ask the Emperor if I can marry Khurram?” This was said in a rush, accompanied by a deep, rosy blush that crept up her neck to her hairline.

  Mehrunnisa sat back, stunned into silence. Why had she not seen this would happen? Ladli spent most of her time in Khurram and Arjumand’s apartments, playing with their children, or lying about on a divan. The prince was a handsome man, and he could be charming when he chose, this Mehrunnisa knew from experience. He had Ruqayya’s quick laughter, her ready wit. He had a humor that was engaging. And Khurram was, finally, the heir to the throne. Although years had passed since they had fought and parted ways, Mehrunnisa had not been able to give that importance to any other prince. Khurram, beloved of his grandfather Emperor Akbar, was beloved of the courtiers too. Why should it be so impossible that Ladli would find herself in love with him? And how could she tell her daughter that Khurram had had the chance to marry her but had said no? And that he had probably said no at the behest of Ladli’s favorite cousin, Arjumand?

  Ladli was crying now, deeply embarrassed at having asked such a forthright question. Tears came down her cheeks and flowed unhindered down the line of her clean chin. “I am sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I know Khurram is too magnificent for me to even look at him. But I thought that if he went away to the Deccan, he would go for a few years . . . and he may forget me.”

  “Come here, beta. Let me explain something to you,” Mehrunnisa said. Her heart tore inside her at Ladli’s tears. She knew how shattering love could be when it was not acknowledged, and when it would never be so.

  Ladli shook her head. “You said you can do whatever you want, Mama. Every day I see you do things other women would never think of doing. The Emperor listens to you. Ask him if Khurram can marry me?”

  “Ladli . . .” Mehrunnisa hesitated, wiping the base of her neck where sweat soaked into the cloth of her choli. “This is simply not possible.”

  “Why? All you have to do is ask. Why do you not ask?”

  “Beta, there are many reasons why. Reasons I cannot explain to you. You are too young—”

  “I am not young anymore, Mama,” Ladli said bitterly. “I am seventeen, the same age you were when you married my father. Arjumand was betrothed at fifteen; she would have been married then if things had progressed as they should have. If you could arrange for Arjumand’s marriage, why not mine? Do you love her more than me?”

  Mehrunnisa rose and came over to Ladli. She tried to put her arms around her daughter, but Ladli jumped off the rock and stood to one side, her hand raised to block her mother. “You know you can do this.”

  “Ladli,” Mehrunnisa said as firmly as she could. “You must forget Khurram. There will be no marriage with him. Is that clear?”

  All the fight fled from Ladli. She moved away on feet that were old and tired. Her shoulders hunched into her. “Only too clear, Mama.”

  When she left, Mehrunnisa went back to her work and dug furiously in the soil, uprooting a few vines, slicing her spade through the thick, fleshy meat of near-ripe gourds. She was deeply angry, not with Ladli but with Khurram. He had made her daughter fall in love with him. He was responsible for this. He would go to the Deccan as soon as she could manage it and take Arjumand with him. He would leave his three sons at the royal court as a surety against any rebellion. As for Ladli, only one thing wouldcure her—marriage to someone else. Khusrau may have said no to Mehrunnisa as Khurram had. This time, she was determined that yet another royal prince would not deny her.

  • • •

  Khurram strode the length of his apartments. When he reached the end of the long room, an arrow of sunshine touched the diamonds on his turban and his cummerbund. He turned and marched up to the divan where Arjumand sat.

  “I will not go to the Deccan!”

  Arjumand looked up from her embroidery. Khurram had stormed into their apartments half an hour ago. This was the first time he had spoken to her, but Arjumand knew her husband well. When he was in a rage, it was better to let him work things out for himself. So she had kept silent.

  “Who says you are to go, my lord?” she asked now.

  “The Emperor ordered me to the Deccan, but it is obvious where the orders come from.”

  “Softly, my lord. It is said she has spies even in our palace.”

  Khurram looked around and then twisted his young face to hers. Jahangir had sent for him early in the morning. Ambar Malik had rebelled again, and Parviz was a poor leader. So Khurram had to go and relieve him of his command.

  “What did you say?”

  “What could I say? I had to agree.” Khurram ran his fingers through his hair worriedly. “Why does she want to send me away?”

  Arjumand frowned. “Why indeed? Is there some real danger to the empire from Ambar Malik?”

  “I do not think so. The lands he has stolen from us were ones we took from him. He has gone no further, but he is too close now.” Khurram sat down on the divan and hunched forward, hands resting on his knees. “Why should I have to go, Arjumand?”

  She smoothed the hair on his nape, and Khurram leaned into her hand. “Because there is no commander like you, my lord. You must go, if you obey the Emperor in this, and return victorious, as I am sure you will, his Majesty’s approval will fall upon us again. Then, no one can shake it, not even the Empress.”

  “Do you think that is all there is to this order? The Deccan is a long way off, Arjumand, and will be farther still when his Majesty returns to Agra.”

  “What do you worry about, my lord?”

  “You,” he said, taking her hand and placing it on his chest.

  “I will come with you,” Arjumand said with a laugh. “This time, I will come. And no one will be able to stop me.”

  “Are you sure?” Khurram asked anxiously. “It is not comfortable on campaign.”

  “I will come.” Arjumand’s back grew rigid. “I will come,” she said again.

  Khurram rubbed her hand over the silk brocade of his nadiri. Upon his return from Mewar, the Emperor had gifted him this coat in the Diwan-iam. It was a sign of imperial favor, favor he knew Mehrunnisa would dearly like to tear off his back. So he wore it every day—once the coat was bestowed the wearer could have many more sewn. Khurram had three hundred nadiris.

  Arjumand said he must go to the Deccan; as she spoke more of it now, Khurram saw that it would be to his advantage indeed. He would return to court and be showered with gifts, perhaps even a new title. His succession would be secure. He had stayed by the Emperor’s side all this while, watching Mehrunnisa at court with a thick sense of dread. She flaunted rules, flirted with conventions, but her hold on his father was as strong as ever. She could do no wrong, and so Khurram worried if he had done the right thing in refusing Ladli. He could no longer go to Mehrunnisa and ask for the alliance again—it would be like asking for forgiveness. Another thought rose to disturb him.


  “I cannot leave Khusrau here,” he said suddenly, interrupting Arjumand. “If I do, the Empress will make him marry Ladli.”

  She sat up and turned his face to her. “Then take him with you, my lord.”

  “Take him . . .” Khurram smiled at her in delight. “Yes, I will take him with me. He will be safer with me than with the Empress.” He kissed her on her mouth. “You are brilliant, Arjumand.”

  The next day Khurram approached his father after the afternoon Diwan-i-am session and walked back with him to the zenana apartments. He would go, he said, if he could have Khusrau’s company during the journey. Why, the Emperor asked? Where had this sudden brotherly affection come from? Khurram protested that he had always had that affection. Khusrau was blind, a burden on his Majesty, surely a trip away would benefit all of them? Jahangir let Khurram trail beside him as he went on. Any liking he had had for these two sons had vanished. They had insulted Mehrunnisa, and in doing so, had insulted him. In the end, he agreed to Khurram’s request.

  So Khurram left Mandu for the Deccan to enormous fanfare. He rode out in a copy of the English coach Roe had given Jahangir; a new jewel-studded sword worth one hundred thousand rupees hung from his belt, and tucked into his cummerbund was a short dagger worth forty thousand rupees. The coach had two copies, one for Mehrunnisa and one for Prince Khurram. The original had been dismantled and reupholstered in brocade and jeweled silks. Brass nails had been replaced with silver nails, and the floor of the coach had been covered in beaten silver sheets.

  Khurram’s entourage was not ten days on its journey when Empress Jagat Gosini died. The illness came upon her suddenly, a fever one night, delirium the next, a coma the following morning from which she never woke. After Mahabat Khan, her one ally, was banished to Kabul, Jagat Gosini was crushed into obscurity. Even Khurram was lost to her—lost, really almost from the first year of his life, given to Ruqayya, and then to Arjumand. The woman who merely gave birth to him had little place in his affections, and this Jagat Gosini realized at last. That Ruqayya had defeated her.

  There might have been some solace in the news that came to Mandu just before Jagat Gosini’s passing, but she died without hearing it. At Agra, a month before, Ruqayya Sultan Begam had died too. She had chosen not to travel to Ajmer and Mandu with the royal court. And one day, in the zenana palaces of the Agra Fort, Ruqayya saw the dreaded rat flee shrieking through her apartments to dash its head against the wall. The bubonic plague took her. But Ruqayya died as she had lived, greatly daring, a woman of substance.

  Mehrunnisa mourned Ruqayya’s passing with a depth she had not expected. It was not a daily grief, for Ruqayya had been at Agra these past few years, and so there had not been a daily connection. But she had always been there, someone Mehrunnisa could ask for advice, someone to talk with, even through the written word . . . now no more.

  Parviz was still, in his desultory fashion, living in the Deccan. Only Prince Shahryar was at court. Khurram went on his new campaign with a lightened heart, sure that he had taken out yet another arrow from Mehrunnisa’s arsenal. But he forgot that his youngest brother was seventeen, born the same year as Ladli.

  Shahryar was old enough to be married.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The King’s revenue of his Crown-land, is fifty Crou of Rupias; every Crou is one hundred Leckes, and every Lecke a hundred thousand Rupias; all which in our money is fifty millions of pounds;1 a summe incredible, and exceeding that which is said of China.

  —J. TALBOYS WHEELER, ed.,

  Early Travels in India, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

  Sir Thomas Roe had been in India for two years now, and he was wretched. He was no closer to a treaty than when he had first come to the Emperor’s court. The fevers that had caught him upon his arrival never really let go—they came and went with a frightening regularity, leaving Roe feeling sick most of the time. He had taken no trouble to learn the local languages; Roe knew just a smattering of Persian, with which he haltingly communicated with Emperor Jahangir. When it came to the treaty itself, or any talk of it, Roe had to let his interpreters do the talking. It was frustrating to not know whether the formality of his language and his respectful tone and manner had been communicated. He could only watch Emperor Jahangir’s reactions, and as always, Jahangir kept a bland face and always gave Roe a polite reply. Diplomacy was a tedious, time-consuming, temper-keeping process, and Roe was running out of both time and temper.

  His royal hosts were very kind, though. Almost every day, fresh kill from the Emperor’s hunt—boars, wild pigs, nilgau ( a kind of blue ox), venison, and partridge meat—found its way to Roe’s kitchens. Mehrunnisa sent him slave girls for his use too, which Roe returned with a respectful thanks, but his was a bachelor establishment, your Majesty, he explained, women had little place in it. She gifted him golden and luscious muskmelons that she had grown in the zenana gardens—Roe found these irresistible and cool in the heat of the summer months.

  Roe doggedly reciprocated to each of the offerings with something of his own. The Company sent huge cargoes of gifts of all kinds to India, hoping to buy their way into the country. But Roe could not match Mehrunnisa and Jahangir’s generosity—their pockets ran deep into the imperial treasury itself.

  The imperial couple dithered, their quills never quite hovering over Roe’s much desired treaty, though always open in courtesy to Roe. The Empress had what she wanted from the ambassador—protection from the Portuguese for her ships in the Arabian Sea. Her ships, somewhat incongruously, also carried the Portuguese cartaz. Roe woke from one of his illnesses to find the Jesuit priests reestablished at court and a special new envoy from the Viceroy a pace away. Mehrunnisa had acquired a double indemnity of sorts. Both the English and the Portuguese patrolled the shipping routes, both of them guarded her ships, both wished the other to damnation, and neither knew how to achieve it.

  Roe said nothing, knowing he had been cleverly finessed. He still hopped around the topic of the treaty, of course. For her part, Mehrunnisa did not ask Roe, what trade with England?

  It was not a ridiculous question. What was it England had to offer in trade for all they wanted from the empire?

  There was literally nothing from the English markets that would sell in Indian markets in large enough quantities to own the title of trade. The English offered broadcloth; in the beginning it was a curiosity, but so impractical in the end, too thick and heavy and unsuitable to the searing heat of India. The advantages lay with the empire. Roe was here not merely as the first official ambassador from England but very much as the chief representative of the East India Company. He had orders to buy a number of items such as gumlac, copper, brass, silver, cotton, indigo, saltpeter, opium, and spices like pepper, turmeric, and saffron. The two most important were indigo and cotton.

  Indigo was a dark blue vat dye used to color silks, wools, and cottons. It came from a plant that grew in the brackish water in places like Bayana, southwest of Agra. The dye was precious, named neel, or “blue,” in India, though Roe called it as all others did: indigo, or “the color of India.” The leaves of the plant were soaked in huge vats of water for two days until the blue dye seeped out. The water was then drained, and the indigo sank to the bottom of the vat. This was allowed to dry and then rolled into balls and stored in clay jars for shipment. The warehouses that housed these precious indigo balls were huge buildings, lit by the sun through ceiling skylights, with massive shelves reaching to the roof, each stacked with jars of indigo.

  The English were vying with the Portuguese and the recently arrived Dutch for most of the Indian goods. As a result, the price of indigo fluctuated wildly, depending upon the demand for the dye or the supply, which in turn depended upon the indigo harvest. Roe was almost daily in touch with news from Bayana about the price of indigo, and when it fell, he bought large amounts to store in their factories for the next ship to England.

  Not having a very favorable balance of trade, having nothing to offer in return for wh
at they were taking out of the empire, the English were pouring gold and silver coins into India for the goods they bought. England’s coffers were slowly depleted, and the Mughal imperial treasury grew fat with gold and silver. As soon as the English coins came to the treasury, they were promptly melted down and recoined with the Emperor’s stamp.

  Roe wrote numerous letters to the East India Company warning them of the consequences of pouring too much silver into India. The imperial treasury was so surfeit that the silver deposits in the empire lay unmined, the miners off in search of a new trade. When the empire needed silver, the English practically gave it to the Mughal treasury, to melt and export as the need arose. So with all his worries about diplomacy and courtly behavior, Roe had this other added headache. Finally, the Company decided to trade with their imports.

  Porcelain came from Macao, camphor from Borneo, spices from Achin and Bantim, raw silk and lignum aloes from Thailand, ivory and amber from Africa, and silver from Japan. The markets at Agra were lavish with all these curiosities from so many countries around the world that no Indian merchant had ever set foot upon.

  So Roe plodded on in India, executing his duties as conscientiously as he could, and all the while yearning for the cool dampness of England. One afternoon, Roe was lying in a hammock strung in his gardens when an attendant brought news that Jahangir’s entourage was passing by. The ambassador hurried out to pay his respects. When Jahangir was abreast of him, Roe bowed from the waist. The Emperor reined in his horse.