“How are you, Ambassador?”
“I am doing well, your Majesty.”
“What do you have for me?” Jahangir asked, looking curiously at the book that Roe held.
Since it was etiquette to never appear before the Emperor without a gift, Roe had hurried out of his house with the latest edition of Mercator’s atlas. The ambassador had nothing else in his house to give to the Emperor; he was still waiting for the latest shipment from England. Upon arriving in India, Roe, comparing Mercator with the local maps, saw that the atlas wrongly showed the Indus River emptying into the Gulf of Cambay instead of the Sind. Lahore was nowhere near the Ravi, and of Agra, the capital of the empire, there was no mention.
He offered the atlas. “Since you are emperor of so vast an empire, your Majesty, please accept this book of maps. I give to a mighty king the world.”
“Everything that comes from you, big or small, is greatly welcome, Sir Thomas.” Jahangir laid his hand on his chest as he spoke. “Tell me, has your latest shipment arrived?”
“I expect it any day, your Majesty.”
“Where do you live?” Jahangir looked around. Roe pointed to the ruined mosque that was his home.
“That is very fine,” the Emperor said gallantly, as he signaled his attendants to move on. Roe bowed and waited until Jahangir was out of sight.
• • •
A few days later, news was brought to Roe that the English ship had docked at Surat. Among the gifts it carried for Jahangir were two mastiffs. Edwards had first brought the Emperor a mastiff as a present. That dog had gone to the hunt ferociously and killed a leopard and a boar, while the dogs from Persia had sniveled in fear. Impressed, Jahangir had demanded more dogs from Roe. Six mastiffs had left England, and only two had survived the journey.
Jahangir ordered that the two mastiffs were to always travel with him, borne along in gold and silver palanquins. Each dog was to have four attendants specially assigned to its care, and a pair of gold tongs was fashioned so that Jahangir could feed the dogs pieces of meat himself, without having his hands bitten off.
The shipment also brought the requisite hats, coats, and paintings that the Emperor was so fond of. After looking at them, Jahangir and Mehrunnisa chose the paintings that they liked the most, and these were sent to the royal ateliers, where the empire’s painters copied them in every exact detail. The paintings were given out to zenana ladies and courtiers as signs of favor. So English hunting scenes, battle scenes, pictures of the ladies of James’s court all adorned the palaces of the harem and the homes of the nobles at Mandu.
A few days later, Jahangir summoned Roe to his presence and showed him one of the paintings. It was of Venus and the Satyr, showing the Satyr with his horns and swarthy skin.
“You must remain silent, Roe,” Jahangir said. “I shall ask the nobles in the court for an interpretation of this wonderful painting you have brought for us from England.”
The Emperor turned to the assembled courtiers.
They eagerly gave their explanations, but Jahangir was not satisfied.
“No, none of you is right,” the Emperor said when the last person finished speaking. “You tell us what it means, Reverend,” Jahangir said to Reverend Terry, Roe’s companion and chaplain.
“Your Majesty,” Roe said. “The reverend is a preacher, a man of God. He knows very little of such matters.”
“Very well then, Sir Thomas, give me your explanation.”
Roe hesitated. Something was wrong, but what? “Your Majesty, the artist simply intends to show his skill, but the interpretation escapes me. I have not seen this painting before,” Roe said cautiously.
“I will accept your excuse and give you an explanation myself,” Jahangir said. His tone was as gracious as ever, but the words were not. “The moral of this picture is this: the painter scorns Asians. This is evident from the fact that the naked Satyr represents us, with his swarthy skin. See here,” Jahangir pointed, “Satyr is being held captive by the nose by Venus, who is a white woman. The painter means to show contempt for all Asians by portraying them as captives of the white people.”
“Most certainly not, your Majesty,” Roe said hurriedly. “I beg pardon if the artist has somehow offended you. There has been some misunderstanding.”
“Never mind.” Jahangir waved a hand. “I shall accept the gift nonetheless. You may go now, Ambassador.”
Roe bowed.
“By the way, take Mercator’s atlas back with you.” Jahangir handed Roe the book of maps. “I have shown it to the mullas at court, and none of them can understand it. I could not rob you of such a jewel.”
Roe bowed and cursed under his breath. He had made two mistakes, and both had not been directly of his doing. He rushed home and wrote a furious letter to the East India Company detailing the incident with the painting and cautioning them against sending any more allegorical pictures for fear of offending the Emperor.
Giving the atlas to Jahangir had been his own mistake, but only for the lack of anything else to give. Mercator showed the Mughal Empire to be but a paltry piece of land on the earth. There were other vast countries, some explored, some not. The Emperor had called himself “World Conqueror” upon his ascension—according to Mercator he was no such thing. Roe had insulted Jahangir.
The Emperor made no further reference to the painting; his point had been made—it was a diplomatic glitch, and if the English wished to remain longer in India they would not make such a blunder again. The oils and watercolors that came from England were now of benign and happy scenes, pleasing to the eye, not even remotely reprehensible to the sensibility.
And so time passed. The plague waned and finally came to its death in northern India. Another winter came, it was awaited with terror, but no, Agra, Delhi, and Lahore survived. Jahangir and Mehrunnisa decided to return to Agra, and from there go to Kashmir for the first time since they had been married.
The Emperor made Roe the same offer he had made William Hawkins—if he wished to stay on in India and quit the East India Company, he only had to say so. The imperial treasury would give him a huge salary, one much bigger than what the Company was paying him now; he would be a legitimate mansabdar of the empire, a commander of a thousand horses, and finally, he would get the title of Khan. Sir Thomas Roe Khan. Or Khan Thomas Roe. Any way he wanted it.
Roe wrote one final letter to the East India Company directors, resigning his duties. He advised against another “official” ambassador to take his place. It was useless, he said, to try and wrangle a treaty from the Emperor—his Majesty was too canny to lose the tremendous advantage he had, that of playing the English and the Portuguese off each other.
On February 17, 1619, a fleet of ships put to sea from the bar off Surat, headed for England. Sir Thomas Roe was aboard the Anne.
He wanted to go home.
* * *
1. The amount must indeed have seemed enormous to our author, as the regular revenue of England at that time could scarcely have exceeded a single million.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In a single empire there was no room for two such masterful spirits as Nur Jahan and Shah Jahan. Each had known the other too well to be under any delusion. The issue was perfectly clear—Nur Jahan must either soon retire from public life or supersede Shah Jahan by a more pliable instrument. With characteristic daring and ambition, she preferred the latter course. The difficulties were great but she was not the person to be deterred by any difficulties.
—BENI PRASAD,
History of Jahangir
This year the monsoons came to Agra in their season. Turquoise clouds turned indigo, indigo deepened into a plum purple, etched with the brilliant silver of the sun behind them. The heat dwindled, and the sky was no longer a burned white glaze at midday. The Yamuna slowed and waited. Deliciously cool breezes swirled through the city, lifting silk ghagaras with their fingers, caressing heat-worn faces, raising spirits, and bringing smiles.
The city was decked out in it
s best finery. The streets had been swept with palm-leaf brooms, and the cobbled stones shone with washing. Houses were newly whitewashed, the blight and smell of the plague ostracized, rooms, courtyards, and gardens fumigated. The bazaars of Agra thronged with well and healthy people. There were no more furtive looks to see whether the man shivering nearby carried the dreaded plague, no fleeing at the sight of red and angry boils on an arm or a leg oozing pus, no rushing through the bazaar with noses and mouths hidden in the long folds of turbans. The plague had departed. Agra could live again. And the city had more reason to live—after five long years away, Emperor Jahangir was returning to the capital of the empire.
On the afternoon of the royal procession into Agra, the monsoon clouds opened their arms and let fall their burden of rain. It was a warm, soothing rain. Faces were raised to the sky above, mouths opened to let the water come in. It was a benign rain, one that would bring life to the city and the fields around it. It was a welcomed rain, one that would wash away memories of the plague, of the terrible deaths when entire families had been extinguished, with no one even left to perform the rituals of the cremations. Emperor Jahangir had commanded the rains to Agra. He thought it fit to return, so the monsoons came to receive him.
The streets were jammed with people along the route of the procession, soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder to keep them from stumbling under the path of the imperial elephants and horses. When the imperial elephant turned the corner into the main street of Agra, the people yelled.
“Padshah Salamat!” All hail the King!
Eager hands threw jasmine and marigold flowers in front of the elephant and showered rose petals from upstairs balconies. Jahangir and Mehrunnisa sat on a gold-and-silver-plated howdah atop the elephant. As it lumbered over the cobbled street, its huge feet crushing the flowers, they dipped into embroidered bags and flung masses of silver rupees into the crowds.
Mehrunnisa laughed at the crowds, laughed with them, suddenly so happy to be back at Agra. Her veil clung to the lines of her face, she was as wet from the showers as the people below, drops of water drenched the silk of her choli and her ghagara, but she did not care. The men shouted praises of her too. They welcomed her back with as much love as they did the Emperor. It was good to be home, and Agra was home.
When they entered the palaces, nothing had changed. In the gardens a few trees had sickened and died and so had been cut down. In the zenana apartments, divans and carpets had been burned after the plague. But nothing much else had changed. The marble floors shone mirrorlike with polishing. The heavily pleasant smell of musk perfumed the hallways and apartments. The carpets, newly woven in Agra workshops, gleamed in a myriad of colors. The once deserted gardens and corridors echoed with voices filled with delight as the women who had stayed back ran out to welcome Jahangir and Mehrunnisa. They met as many of the zenana women as they could, paid their respects to the elders, and went to their rooms. There, Mehrunnisa started planning for Ladli’s wedding.
• • •
The usual formalities of a wedding were skipped over for Ladli. Normally, marriages began with a call to the marriage broker. These were women usually of many years, their faces cracked with wrinkles, gray, thinning hair showing patches of brown skull, teeth yellowed from chewing tobacco and paan leaves. Marriage brokering was a prosperous business; everyone got married at some time or another, so the women were in much demand. Almost from the announcement of a new birth, they would visit the homes in their neighborhoods, watching over the children with the fussing of a maternal hen. How was he doing in his studies with the mulla? Or had she learned her embroidery well, were the stitches like seed pearls? If not, a scolding was bestowed upon the tyrant. Do you not want to marry well? So when the time came, when the parents looked around for a prospective bride for their sons, they would approach the marriage broker.
Mehrunnisa had a long time to think about Ladli’s marriage after Prince Khurram left for the Deccan. He sent news every now and then of minor victories. Pockets of land were conquered, Ambar Malik’s men were captured or driven away, and the imperial army rested before beginning a fresh onslaught. Months had passed since Khurram was gone, and Mehrunnisa watched Ladli grow still and quiet. Now she knew. And suddenly the years seemed to grow on her. Ladli no longer ran flitting through the corridors, her laugh no longer burst upon Mehrunnisa’s consciousness while she prepared farmans, and there was a dullness in her eyes.
It was then, as Mehrunnisa wrestled with Roe’s demands for the treaty and Ladli’s sudden loss of interest in everything, that Emperor Jahangir fell ill again. It was much like the last time. His asthma came upon him, and Mehrunnisa spent hours by his bedside, wishing that she could somehow breathe for him, listening to his lungs tiredly inflating and deflating. She read when he wanted to hear the sound of her voice, she slept sitting on the floor, leaning against his divan, his hand near her head. He only had to touch her or move and she would awaken. Ladli came to be with Jahangir too, through those long and by now familiar hours of nursing. She did not say anything about Khurram, but when news came of him, or from him, she left the room.
So Mehrunnisa stood between a beloved husband and a beloved daughter, holding the weight of the empire in her hands. She was the one who went to the jharoka each morning, there were no darbars at either the Diwani-am or the Diwan-i-khas; all the empire’s business took place in the courtyard below her jharoka balcony. She moved tiredly through the days. Jahangir recovered soon, much sooner than she expected, but his breathing still troubled him greatly. He gave her a gift when he was well.
The Emperor allowed her to mint coins in her name. It was an immense privilege; all through Mughal rule in India, no woman had had her likeness or name on the currency of the empire. Now Mehrunnisa did. She had a set of coins minted in the imperial workshops in gold and silver with the twelve signs of the zodiac upon them on one side, and on the other, written in Persian, were the words “by the order of the King Jahangir, the gold got a hundred ostentations added to it, by getting impressed on it the name of Nur Jahan, the Queen.” The minting of coins gave her a solid place within the empire’s structure. Mehrunnisa was now a sovereign too. She sat at the jharoka; she had coins with her imprint upon them; she was Emperor in all but name.
And this was literally so. There were three badges of sovereignty in Mughal India—the ability to sign on farmans, the imprinting of coins with a name or likeness, and the khutba. Mehrunnisa had the first two. The third was the calling out of the Emperor’s name in the vast and flung-out Mughal lands, where many would live and die with just his name upon their hearts—no sight of him, no other news, really, of him. The khutba said this: All hail Jahangir Padshah, Light of the Faith, Conqueror of the World, Lord Most Mighty. Every Friday before the midday prayers, the muezzins in every mosque around the empire sang out Emperor Jahangir’s name. Yet, as the last soft echo of their tuneful voices faded, another, unborn voice whispered Mehrunnisa’s name.
The empire began to see that Jahangir and she were one entity. Gone were speculations on why or how Mehrunnisa had found her place in the Emperor’s heart—she was there, to him as important as his life. He did not care about any filthy insinuations upon his manhood or virility in allowing a woman to run what had essentially been a man’s business. He was man enough not to care about it. Jahangir could trust no one but Mehrunnisa, and he let his courtiers, his nobles, his commanders know of this.
As Mehrunnisa saw her own power grow, she watched Ladli waste away, a wraith who haunted her mother’s apartments, always at hand, rarely speaking. She lost flesh from her bones, her eyes stood huge in her face. Ladli still smiled though, and each time she did, it broke Mehrunnisa’s heart. And it hardened her toward Khurram, for he had toyed with Ladli, almost deliberately.
A few days before leaving on their long journey back to Agra from Mandu, Mehrunnisa went to Ladli’s apartments. She found her painting by the light from the windows. Ladli was seated on the floor, her feet wedged under a div
an, the easel propped on her raised knees. Clay saucers of paint were arrayed around her on the stone floor. Some red pigment had spilled from a saucer, and gleamed like blood on the slabs. Ladli looked up, her face flushed from the heat, tendrils of hair escaping from her plait.
Mehrunnisa sat down next to her daughter. “What are you painting, beta?”
“The view from this window.” Ladli pointed with her brush. Her fingers were smeared with greens and blues. Mehrunnisa saw the outline of mango trees, the thick and dark green of their leaves, and an owl seated stoically on a lower branch. She kissed the side of Ladli’s forehead.
“You have some time, Mama?” Ladli turned to her expectantly.
“Only a little, beta. And then I have to go.”
Ladli dipped her brush into a pot of water, shook it vigorously, and pinched the wet bristles to clean the green paint. Then she squeezed the tip to a pinpoint and dipped it lightly into the streak of red on the floor. The owl’s eyes glowed.
“This is a night color,” Mehrunnisa said, looking over her daughter’s shoulder. “An owl’s eyes are brown and yellow in the daylight.”
Ladli smiled. “It is all perspective, is it not? To me an owl, either in the light or the darkness, has these glowing eyes. The mullas tell me it cannot see when the sun is out—I am giving it vision.” She turned to her mother, her gaze serious. “Which one is it going to be, Mama? Parviz or Shahryar?”
Mehrunnisa put her arm around her daughter’s thin waist and leaned her head on Ladli’s shoulder. She was growing old too. Perhaps not in years yet, but the constant battling to keep the empire on an even keel was fatiguing her. Ladli had become a young woman away from Mehrunnisa. Where had she got this gentle understanding? It had always been there, even before the whole Khurram episode. Only then, it had been hidden under her playfulness and a lively spirit that was now already weighted with sadness. Ladli was asking which of the royal princes she would marry. Somehow she had heard about Khusrau’s refusal. Her face buried in the cool skin of her daughter’s shoulder, Mehrunnisa prayed that she had not heard of Khurram’s.
The Feast of Roses Page 35