Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  Around her, a few men pounded divots of tufted grass back into the steaming earth, which still seemed to throb from the reverberation of the horses’ hooves. Their heads were bent doggedly to the ground, and they kept their distance, for behind her Ishaq Beg, her Mir Saman, Master of the Household, ranged along the perimeter of the field. Jahanara turned to him finally and beckoned. When he had run up to her, she said, “Is he here?”

  “No, your Highness.”

  The moon was directly overhead now, flooding them with light—but it was a strange blue-black light that cast heavy shadows where it did not touch and set the diamonds in Jahanara’s hair to such a glittering sparkle that it was as though her head was aflame with an icy fire. She could see little of Ishaq’s expression, but she knew he was fretting, even angry. She knew him well, almost as well as Dara and Shuja, for Ishaq had been brought into Shah Jahan’s zenana when he was still very young, a boy of less than ten perhaps (for his parents were too poor or too indifferent to keep measure of time or dates), to be brought up there as a servant, and since he could not have stayed on in the women’s quarters once he hit puberty, he was made into a eunuch.

  “I have to see him, Ishaq,” she said.

  “This is not right, your Highness,” he mumbled, gazing around him into the murk of the kinshuk trees in the distance and the looming bulk of the Agra fort, from where an upturned bowl of light from the streetlamps embraced the skies. “There are other ways to meet a man. He could come into the zenana perhaps . . . but no”—he checked himself—“that would not be correct either. Marry him, your Highness, if your need is so great, then you can visit with him for as long as you like.”

  “I intend to,” Jahanara said. “And I will, one day, but not for some time to come yet; I am wanted in the imperial harem.”

  Ishaq Beg glanced at her in surprise; despite what he had said, this was the first he had heard of her wanting to marry. He had spoken to her as no other man would have dared—not her father or her brothers—chastised the propriety of what she was going to do, suggested a marriage instead, but Jahanara did not mind. There was little Ishaq and she had not talked about when they were growing up together. He had sat by her when the mulla came in for lessons, adjusting her veil, helping her with pronunciations; he had lain by her feet when she was unwell, grasping the heated skin of her shins and calves; he, not her mother, had held and pacified her at the sight of that first monthly blood, though he had not known what it was or why it had happened. A few years ago, curious, Jahanara had asked him what it was like to have no . . . feeling, no tug of the sensual, the sexual being within. He shrugged and gazed into her eyes directly, with no sense of embarrassment. “It happened before I knew very much about it. I know no other life but this one. I’ve seen other men maddened by their lust for women, blinded by it, so perhaps I am better off.”

  “Do you regret it, Ishaq?”

  It had taken him a long while to respond to that question, months, in fact, but Jahanara had not forgotten that she had asked it of him. And when he said, “No, your Highness, for I would not then have had the privilege of serving you,” she knew it was nothing other than the truth. Even with astounding candor such as this, neither of them had forgotten their place in the world—she was a royal princess and Ishaq Beg her eunuch, her slave, and her servant.

  They were, Jahanara thought now, as close as two human beings could be, with an undefined friendship. He was not her brother, her father, her mother, or her sister, and yet he was all of these, in some ways more devoted because his life was hers. And yet, she had not said anything to him of meeting Mirza Najabat Khan in March, nor that she had thought of him every day, watched for him as Bapa sat in the imperial court, and finally sent him this summons because she could not bear not being near him any longer. Ishaq, who had been her mother’s favorite eunuch, and still her closest friend in the imperial zenana, had not known until this moment that his princess had fallen in love with a courtier.

  “He is here, your Highness,” Ishaq said, turning toward the right end of the chaugan field, where a man waited, his horse’s reins held secure in his hands, the animal quiescent and obedient. “And I will be within call.”

  “I do not fear him, Ishaq,” Jahanara said softly. She raised her right hand and snapped her fingers. Two grooms, their eyes to the ground, brought a gleaming white Badakhshan horse up to her and fled as soon as her hand had touched its bridle, not even daring to stay on to help her into the saddle, though it had been many years since she had needed such assistance. But they ran because she had shed the long length of her white chiffon veil on the earth before she walked to the middle of the field, was clad now only in a white silk choli, which hugged her figure, the sleeves caressing her wrists, and a pair of pantaloons gathered at her waist in folds which narrowed down to her ankles. Her hair, rolled and pinned neatly at her nape, was studded with diamonds, and the stones glittered on the silk of her outfit also. Jahanara laughed, the sound breaking out of her as she put her foot into the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. She had ordered specifically for this horse to be brought from the imperial stables for her tonight because it was from Badakhshan, where Mirza Najabat Khan also found his lineage, and because of the spray of black, like an ink spot, on its pristine white forehead—the only color it had anywhere on its body.

  The horse rode well, a little inclined to spiritedness, but it wanted only to fly, not trot, across the empty chaugan grounds. Jahanara had covered part of the way to the end of the field when the man met her halfway and reined in his horse beside hers. Perhaps he had not seen her fully in riding across toward her, but when his horse had stilled to a mere moving of its hooves, he glanced at her naked face and then away.

  “Your Highness, I beg your pardon,” he said.

  “Look at me, Mirza Najabat Khan.”

  He did, turning back not with reluctance but with an eagerness and a boldness that sent a thrill through her. In the sparkle of the silver light that surrounded them, his eyes were almost black, and the moonlight touched the planes of his face, painted his broad forehead, the slant of his cheekbones, and dipped into darkness in the hollows of his eyes and under his nose.

  “I would not have thought . . .” He went no further with that statement.

  “That I would be so daring?”

  He nodded uncertainly. She had been brave here, in letting a man who was not her husband see her face, audacious in inviting him to the polo grounds in the middle of the night for a meeting, perhaps unwise also. But in that first moment when they talked, Jahanara forgot everything else. Their mounts snickered, and Najabat Khan’s gaze fell upon the mark on her Badakhshan horse’s forehead.

  He reached out to stroke it, his hand moving involuntarily. “I had only heard of this horse in his Majesty’s stables; it traces its bloodlines to the Macedonian Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus. That horse was a brute in legend, known for its speed and strength, and it is said that all of its descendants have this splatter of black on their forehead and one blue eye.” There was awe in his voice, and when Jahanara’s horse whinnied and shook its head, Najabat yanked his hand away. Jahanara watched him with a small smile, amused at his admiration for a mere horse, irritated as well that he had not glanced upon its rider again.

  “He has a blue eye,” she said.

  “How did his Majesty acquire him?” Najabat asked, still engrossed by the animal. “There is a story that one of the king of Badakhshan’s aunts, whose husband had owned the only stables with the descendants of Bucephalus, killed all of them, rendering the line extinct. I cannot believe that one such still exists.”

  “He was bred in the imperial stables, Mirza Najabat Khan.” Jahanara was suddenly weary of this talk and of Najabat’s obsession with a horse. She had asked for it to be brought to the chaugan fields as a mount for her this evening precisely because of its history and its lineage. There were thirty-nine others like this one in the stables reserved for the horses of Badakhshan, each said to be bred from Alexand
er’s horse, and they were magnificent animals. But so was she.

  The man opposite her lifted his head in acknowledgment and gazed directly into her eyes for the first time. His expression gave nothing away, but he did not leave either. Jahanara was certain that there were people in the field watching them—her grooms and syces and Ishaq Beg were there, of course, but others whose business it was to spy, to whisper into ears, to spread calumny. But she had not cared when she asked for Najabat Khan to come here, in part because she was the Begam Sahib of the imperial harem, the most powerful woman within, and in part because she had wanted to be with him. Now, a shiver racked her body when she felt his eyes upon her, this close, a few feet away at most, and if he lifted a hand to reach out to her as he had to her horse, he could touch her.

  “You do not have to be here, Mirza Najabat,” Jahanara said quietly. “I thank you for coming, but it is dangerous, as you well know, and I am better protected than you are.”

  He did not reply for a while, and Jahanara felt a flush warm her face under his fixed scrutiny. Here, in the cobalt darkness of the night, she was shy in his presence. What would it be like, she wondered, in a bedchamber with candles glowing on the walls, his every expression open and lit for her?

  “Are we to have a race, your Highness?”

  “Do you play chaugan, Mirza Najabat Khan?” Jahanara had to steady her voice when she spoke.

  He drew in a breath. “Ah, that is it then. I play.”

  Laughter radiated from her face, and her expression softened; the cool blues of the moon’s overhead light set the diamonds in her hair to dazzling. “What else, on a chaugan field?”

  “What else indeed, your Highness? I was stupid to think that you might not be able to—” he said, and in his voice there was a trace of admiration.

  “I hear you are a stellar player.”

  “No, your Highness. Merely good; and I don’t think it immodest to say so, since there are many others better than I. His Highness Prince Aurangzeb is superb.”

  “A game?” Jahanara asked. Her right hand lifted casually into the air, and two grooms materialized by their sides and offered them polo sticks. Najabat Khan’s was fashioned with silver casings on the wood, and even in this light, verses in Persian that lauded the game were visible in the silver. Jahanara’s stick was similar to his, a little shorter and encased in gold. The metals gleamed dully in their hands.

  “It is a dangerous game, your Highness,” Najabat said.

  “Only if your seat is not good, Mirza Najabat,” Princess Jahanara replied before digging her heels into her horse’s flanks and riding away. Her voice came floating back to him through the cool night. “They tell me I’m one of the best. If I may be immodest enough to say so.”

  As they reached the center of the field, Ishaq Beg shouted, “Hup!” and they saw him set fire to a puck and fling it into the sky. The fire burned sparsely as the puck flew in the air and landed on the ground between them. At the same time, tiny torches flashed around the field, marking out the boundary. Earlier in the evening, these grounds had been lit by bigger torches, held aloft to throw their light into every corner, and the puck that had been used was embedded with glass and semiprecious stones so that it sparkled in the firelight.

  Jahanara and Najabat used a plain wood puck, fashioned out of palas or kinshuk wood, a dense and thick hardwood that burned slowly. The kinshuk tree, which grew everywhere in the Indo-Gangetic plains, thrived in the beating sun, arid conditions, and poor soil. Even as Jahanara bent to knock the flaming puck into the air again and toward Najabat’s goal at the far end, the grove of kinshuks growing at the foot of the Agra fort’s battlements were in full and early bloom. By this time of the year, the leaves had fallen from the trees’ black and gnarled branches, and they were thickly laden instead with clusters of orange and vermilion-colored flowers. The flowers had no discernible perfume, merely an unmatched beauty—on a bright day when the sky was a cerulean blue, the trees stood out starkly against this background with their burning flowers, and so they were locally called flame-of-the-forest.

  They played for a third of a ghari—approximately an hour—and did not talk for the whole time, even at the ends of the chukkars, each of which lasted seven minutes. Seven minutes of play, and five minutes of resting in between. And for each chukkar, Jahanara changed her mount—a groom came to lead away her steaming animal and replace it with another, cooler, fresher horse. Every horse had the mark of Bucephalus on its forehead, and Najabat Khan slowly became used to the luxury of being around these precious animals, used so casually in a chaugan game. There was a string of horses for him also from the imperial stables, lesser mounts than those Jahanara was riding, but Najabat did not mind. In the beginning, Najabat Khan had reined in his horse, allowed his princess to knock the puck from his control and even take it toward the goal. But a short while into the game he realized that she was no amateur either at riding or at chaugan, and he stanched his impulse to be generous or kind. And so, they thundered up and down the polo grounds, riding hard, breathing even harder, their arms and thighs aching by the end. As they played, a robust fog rolled off the Yamuna River and crept around the streets inside the Agra fort, then broke free to march over the grounds. Soon, the only sounds they could hear were of their panting and their horses’ breathing in the silence, and they could only thinly discern the flaming, flying puck, glittering gold in the white of the fog.

  “We should stop now, your Highness,” Najabat Khan said, bringing his horse close to Jahanara. They were ensconced in a cocoon of white, and the temperature had dropped as time had passed, but they were both too heated to feel the change.

  “Yes,” Jahanara replied. “I can no longer see where I am going.”

  He reached out to hold her hand, and Jahanara felt dizzy with joy. Her heart thundered and crashed in her chest, and she felt the warmth of his skin as his fingers enclosed hers. She let her gaze drop, too overcome even to look at him anymore. “Our path is perfectly clear to me, your Highness,” he said. “I know where we are headed.” He bowed from his saddle. “I will not disagree with you on one point—you are indeed entitled to call yourself a good rider. And . . . I commend you on the Hugli problem, your Highness.”

  She blushed again. “Your help was invaluable.”

  “I wrote you a few words of advice, your Highness. You advised his Majesty well. He is fortunate to have you. Indeed, any man would be fortunate.”

  When he hesitated, as though afraid that he had said too much, Jahanara said, “A safe ride back home, Mirza Najabat Khan.” She pulled her hand out of his grasp with a half laugh. “This is unwise.”

  “As on the other occasion?” he asked. When her brows knit in confusion, he said, “But never mind that; now I know and will wait for your call again. Until the next time, your Highness. Thank you.”

  When Jahanara Begam entered her chambers an hour later, she was tired, her entire body ached, but she was humming with exhilaration. The chaugan game had been enough for her to justify considering Najabat Khan as a husband. If Mama had been alive, none of this would have been necessary—Mama would have told her that she was to marry this man, any man, and she would have submitted. Although perhaps she would have used Ishaq Beg to find out something about him and protested the choice if necessary. But now, it was she who had to do this duty to herself. This was woman’s work, and neither Bapa nor her brothers would care or be adept at this, thinking only of political connections or dowries in relation to marriages. A woman always wanted more than that. For Jahanara, Najabat would be an only husband. He was married, of course, he already had two other wives, but once he married her, Jahanara decided, there would be no others, and the previous two would cease to exist.

  She slept then, a dreamless and contented sleep. In another part of the zenana, Roshanara Begam was awake and leaning over the balustrade of the balcony that fronted the Yamuna River. She stood there until the sun came to claim the skies again. When she turned to go into her rooms again an
d prepare for her father’s morning jharoka, it was evident that she had been crying. But she dressed carefully and washed her eyes with cool water to soothe the redness in them. As she left her chambers, she put a palm-size velvet sack of silver coins into the hands of one of the eunuchs outside, who had come back from the polo grounds in the middle of the night and bent to whisper in her ear as she slept.

  • • •

  Earlier in the year, just before Mumtaz Mahal’s first ‘urs were celebrated in the Jilaukhana of the Luminous Tomb, Emperor Shah Jahan had given orders for the siege on the Portuguese settlement in Hugli in Bengal, on the eastern edge of the Empire.

  Since Najabat Khan had first brought Dara and her news of the Portuguese rebellion—if it could be termed thus—on their travel back to Agra, Jahanara had sent him two missives about the situation. They had been simple communications in writing—for Najabat Khan could not come into the imperial harem, or meet her anywhere else in public, without setting tongues astir with gossip. But letters, on paper, opened and read in front of the zenana’s eunuchs and slaves and any other royal woman who passed by, were disregarded. The politics of the situation did not bother most of the women, and they thought it mere dabbling on Jahanara’s part.

  She had had to drag Dara away from his studies of Hinduism with the Brahmin priests who came for his instruction, or from his pleasures, such as they were, with dancers from the harem, or jugglers or men with pet monkeys that performed tricks.

  “Come, Dara, be serious. What should we do, really do, about the Hugli problem?” Jahanara had said in exasperation as Dara’s attention wandered yet again to the book he was currently reading.

  “Does it really matter, Jahan?” Dara had asked. “We are to celebrate the anniversary of Mama’s death in a week, and here you worry about the firangis who have set up a fort at Gholghat and call themselves kings of a tiny sliver of land somewhere in the steamy, heated, mosquito-ridden waters of the Bay of Bengal. What does it matter?”