Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  Afzal had subsequently—with a prescience Amanat could still not understand completely—given his allegiance to the then Prince Khurram, who was in disgrace with his father. But in the end, Khurram became Shah Jahan, and Afzal had recently been made the Diwan-i-kul, Prime Minister of the Mughal Empire, and on this new morning in 1633, Amanat Khan found himself also with a new title and the honor of adorning Empress Mumtaz Mahal’s tomb with the calligraphy that would make him famous for the rest of time.

  Hence Ustad Ahmad Lahori’s deference to him—as brilliant an architect as he was, called upon to help with the Emperor’s most treasured wish to construct this Luminous Tomb, Lahori was in the end but an exalted worker, with his fingers grimed by the mud and mortar that would build this tomb.

  But Amanat Khan would not allow this obsequiousness. He bowed to the older man and said, “I hear his Majesty has charged you with another commission?”

  Ahmad Lahori’s mouth split into a slow and satisfied smile. “He wishes to build an entire new city at Delhi and make it his capital. It will be called after his Majesty—Shahjahanabad. Emperor Akbar has this city”—he gestured around him to mean Agra—“he has left his mark upon it, and his grandson will leave his stamp on another. I am drawing up the plans right now, when I can get away from here to work two or three hours at night.”

  “You have the vigor of three younger men put together, Ustad Ahmad Lahori,” Amanat Khan said wistfully. “I have no doubt that Shahjahanabad is going to be a marvel for all, but this”—he gestured toward the void on the marble platform of the riverfront terrace and drew the curves and lines of the tomb’s main dome—“is why we were put on this earth by Allah.”

  In the end, these two men, and Mir Abdal Karim and Makramat Khan—the Diwan-i-buyutat, the Superintendent of Public Works for the Empire—met every day for the next decade to pore over plans for the tomb, check for inconsistencies, make adjustments to the measurements as the work progressed, beg for audiences with their Emperor so that they could discuss the changes and have them approved and execute them. By the time this lustrous mausoleum had taken root in the ground and all of its various components had been completed, the four men were to one another more akin than blood brothers. They knew one another’s joys and pains, celebrated together the births of grandchildren, mourned ones lost to death, breathed as though with one breath. Of the four of them, only Amanat Khan would leave his signature embedded in marble in the tomb, but it belonged—if it could be said to belong at all to any person but its patron, Emperor Shah Jahan—to all of them. They had sweated over their creation, buried workers killed in accidents, sat in dumbfounded awe on chill moonlit nights as their vision glimmered a serene white and seemed to reach out and embrace them in a blessing. They knew, with the instinct of highly trained men, experts at their crafts—nay, virtuosos of their crafts—that nowhere else in the world would there be a monument such as this.

  The tomb was built on a thin marble plinth, which sat on the marble platform on which the second ‘urs had taken place. Emperor Shah Jahan had wanted it to be in white marble, each stone perfectly matched, but Ahmad Lahori had pointed out, in his gentle way, that the gradations of pale color would provide a better contrast, frame the work, create an interest that pure white could not do. “And from afar, your Majesty, even from as near as the Great Gate, looking down the gardens at the rauza, no one will be able to distinguish differences in the stone—that will be evident only upon stepping up closer, on the marble platform itself.”

  And so it was. The tomb was constructed of white marble with a marble central dome and four smaller domes on its flat roof. There were four main pishtaqs—portals—facing north, south, east, and west, identical to one another to create a trompe l’oeil effect so that a person standing at any point around the Taj Mahal would not be able to tell which was the true entry. The main entrance was the southern pishtaq, with its huge arched portal. Amanat Khan would exercise his calligraphy on three buildings in the main complex—the tomb itself, the mosque on the same platform, and the Great Gate. Around the portal of the main entrance to the tomb was a rectangular band of marble inlaid with inscriptions from the Quran, the thirty-sixth sura—Ya Sin. And it was on the inside of the tomb, on the southern arch again, that Amanat Khan had engraved in Persian, “Written by the son of Qasim al-shirazi . . . Abd al-Haqq, entitled Amanat Khan . . . in the year 1045 Hijri.”

  The inscriptions were all in the sulus script in Arabic. Amanat Khan used the official court language of Persian only on the epitaph on Empress Mumtaz Mahal’s cenotaph and to sign his work.

  Ahmad Lahori had provided for an underground burial chamber, where the Empress’s body was interred and covered by an elaborate marble cenotaph with inlay. In the central and upper room of the tomb there was another, more magnificent cenotaph—a false one, meant to deceive possible tomb marauders. This room was octagonal, entirely clad in white marble, with eight arches on each of its walls in two stories, the top layer of arches mimicking the bottom layer. Only three of the archways were perforated with windows that covered the entire arch; the other four were blank, and one was the entry into the tomb. The windows were paned with sheer glass from Aleppo, in shades of jade and nephrite, the cool greens bringing the verdure of the outside inside, the color of the light percolating into the white marble in the chamber, so that it seemed as though Empress Mumtaz Mahal rested, indeed, in the garden of Paradise. The floor was paved with marble, with a mosaic of black stone stars. A marble railing inlaid with carnelian and jade, with delicate marble screens in between cut in the shapes of flowers and circles, replaced the original gold railing upon Emperor Shah Jahan’s orders, for he thought one night of the foolishness of placing so much heavy gold in full sight of every visitor—marble had a lesser value and so was less enticing to steal. The gold latticework lamps, also commissioned at the time of the gold railing, remained, however.

  The tomb had white marble dado panels both inside and outside in the pishtaqs, which were decorated with flowers in relief, their details so precise and botanical—stamens, pistils, sepals, and petals—that they would fool many a man into thinking they represented some actual flowers grown in Hindustan and not, as was more often true, a fancy of the artist. Ahmad Lahori had supervised even this small item in his building of the tomb and had sat over the wizened men, their fingers, faces, eyebrows, and noses clogged with the fine white dust that rose as their chisels cracked away at the stone. When they had presented the first dado panel to him, he had been astonished by their handiwork—these men who let their skills out for hire wherever the Empire demanded it—and let them sign the work thus with their imaginations.

  The false cenotaph in the public upper chamber was in white marble, the color of freshly drawn milk, inlaid profusely with stylized flowers in tiers—a lapis lazuli blue, a jasper red, a bloodstone black, an agate and sard brown, a carnelian orange, a chlorite and jade green, and a yellow limestone. The top tier had a band of marble inlaid with Quranic inscriptions, which Amanat Khan chose with care—as he did for every part of the tomb, the mosque, and the Great Gate.

  They were still standing in the Great Gate when the sun broke into the sky and sent its rays to imbue the empty gardens of the Taj Mahal with a rosy hue as the light echoed off the sandstone walls.

  “You see how splendid it is going to be, Ustad Lahori?” Amanat Khan demanded. “All radiance, a sensation, Paradise indeed. And I am proud to be in partnership with you.”

  “Thank you,” Ahmad Lahori said, and for once he did not protest the use of the title; it was as though he finally accepted his own brilliance. He spoke again, so softly that Amanat Khan had to lean inward to hear the words that dropped from Lahori’s lips. “A Luminous Tomb.”

  Thirteen

  I . . . hope I shall not be suspected of a wish to supply subjects for romance . . . but . . . It is said, then, that Begum-Saheb, although confined in a Seraglio, and guarded like other women, received the visits of a young man of no very exalted rank
, but of an agreeable person.

  —ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE (ed.) AND IRVING BROCK (trans.), Travels in the Mogul Empire, by François Bernier A.D. 1656–1668

  Agra

  Wednesday, October 12, 1633

  8 Rabi’ al-thani A.H. 1043

  Jahanara waited in the private gardens attached to her apartments, elbows on the stone baluster set in the fort’s walls, her face cupped in her palms. From here, she could just discern the thin thread of the Yamuna winding its way down to the site of the Luminous Tomb. The dying end of a torrid summer, and the river’s waters had receded, leaving wide banks of sand and packed silt, and somewhere in this newly acquired land there was the flicker of a cooking fire. Princess Jahanara Begam could not see the people around the fire; they sat outside its feeble rim of light to keep away from its warmth. Every now and then, a woman would step forward, stir the pot over the flames, and step back again. Each time she did that, an aroma of garlic, ginger, and onions swirled upward to the princess. The cook was the singer, she thought, for each time she moved, the singing stopped. And then it began again, a lusty, guttural voice, full of promise, picking out the words in a folk song to the accompaniment of a faint dholak. It was a song about lovers—Laila and Majnu, both members of a Bedouin tribe in Arabia in the seventh century. Majnu was a shepherd in the tribe, and when he fell in love with Laila, her father did not consent to a marriage, so her hand was given elsewhere. Demented with grief, Majnu wandered out of the encampment one night and was never seen again, but desert travelers heard his voice even to this day, reciting verses in praise of his beloved.

  The woman below finished her song, and a silence followed from her companions as the last notes of the dholak rumbled into the dark. Jahanara leaned out as far as she could to see if she could identify the singer. She would ask Ishaq Beg to bring her into the harem one day so she could perform for the ladies; there was a lovely, haunting quality to her voice, and though Jahanara had heard the story many times, in prose and in song, she had never heard it like this. Then, in the dark of the night, she flushed, remembering why she was here. Her hands were cold but steady, and it surprised her. For she waited for a man who would teach her what it was to love.

  “Your Highness,” he said quietly behind her, and she turned.

  He was the son of the lead singer in her personal orchestra and had come into the imperial zenana many times, slipping past the guards in disguise, shedding his veil and skirts once inside. Jahanara had laughed with admiration when she first saw him, and then in a detached manner, observing a man not of the family at such close quarters. Since, he had come again and again, and his tenor lent a charm to the women’s voices, his person was pleasing. She looked at him, thinking only that she had made the right choice for this night. He was tall, slender at the waist but muscled on his arms and his back. He kept his strong face shaven clean, with thick eyebrows, sparkling black eyes, loose and gleaming curls that framed his cheekbones. He wore gold studs in his ears—Jahanara had given these to him one evening—and his hands were immaculate, the nails trimmed.

  There was about his mouth a small droop bespeaking weakness of character and an expression of pride at having been summoned here. That he would come, Jahanara had known, and she had not anticipated any of the humiliation she had felt when Mirza Najabat Khan left her waiting. But this man was a musician’s son, and Najabat Khan was an amir at court—breeding would tell, she thought. And all she wanted from him was a night, perhaps more if he pleased her. From Najabat Khan . . . No, it was madness to think of what she so patently could not have.

  “It is a lovely night, your Highness. We have lost the moon, but the stars shed the light of a thousand sparkling diamonds.”

  Jahanara tilted her head to gaze up into the night sky, and, as she did, he moved closer to her, his feet crushing the ground cover of thyme. She began to tremble then and wonder if she was doing the right thing. She was thankful that he did not touch her, merely looked out at the river.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked when she was calmer.

  “We do not need to do this, your Highness,” he said, somber, reflective. “I will leave when you command, never return if you do not wish it, and never speak of what happened here—it will be as though it did not take place at all.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You are kind, more than I expected. But”—and for the first time, she met his eyes—“I intend for . . . this to happen. Only . . . I do not know what to do.”

  He smiled, and she shivered at the intensity of his gaze upon her. She put out her hand, and he took it in his warm one. He was the first man other than Najabat, not a father, not a brother, not an uncle, to caress her in something akin to love. They walked away from the edge of the garden into the lawn. The pathways were framed in small gold diyas, their tiny flames vertical in the still air. The verdant patch of grass was also dotted with diyas, and along one corner, framed by a sandstone arbor wound with thickly blooming jasmines, was a divan, covered in silk sheets and strewn with bolsters. There were silver trays of fruit and paan by the divan, green and purple grapes, lush slices of melons under a silver netted sheet, the tiny apples from Kashmir that Mumtaz Mahal had been fond of.

  They drank a goblet of wine each, and Jahanara felt bold enough to reach out and touch his face. He kissed her palm. When he undid the front laces of her white chiffon peshwaz, she did not protest. She was wearing five layers of chiffon, each a color from the rainbow, the weave so fine that each garment could be pulled through one of the rings on her fingers. They barely covered her, but as he loosened her clothing, for the first time he let his eyes wander over more than her face. By this time, her shyness had fled.

  In the verandahs that bordered the gardens, eunuchs stood on guard, their backs turned. They were deaf to the sounds. And although questions would buzz around their ears from the next morning on, they were mute forever. The Begam Sahib had, figuratively, a gilded sword’s blade against their necks—it was more than their lives were worth for them to talk.

  Some time later, the man rose, arranged his clothing, and, though he very much wanted to, did not dare to bend and kiss his princess’s slender foot, which nudged against him as he stood by the bed looking down upon her.

  “Go now,” she said, her eyes shining. She did not thank him. For even in the short time that she had learned about love, she knew that she had given him as much pleasure as he had her.

  When he had left, she rested her cheek against her hand and thought of what they had done. Her skin tingled with feeling, alive and aflame, and she felt tired, though pleasantly so. This was the pleasure the women of the imperial zenana sought so assiduously, risking meetings in gardens with men they did not know, imprisonment if the Emperor heard, or perhaps worse, death by being pinned under a merciless sun for hours. It had been relatively easy to bring this man inside the harem, for there were—always had been—easy routes. Tunnels and back staircases, greedy palms waiting to be weighted with gold mohurs, mouths that would not flap. This Jahanara had always known, for she had grown up in an imperial zenana, and since Mama’s death, when she had become supreme in the harem, she had turned away from the gossip about Bapa’s numerous slaves and concubines. Though she had listened carefully and noted down each infraction, she kept that knowledge only for future use—if that need arose. She did not care that the gossip would now be about her, for what could they do? she thought. What would they dare to do? She was the Begam Sahib.

  Her heart emptied of feeling when she thought of Najabat Khan, of how she could have been with him tonight if he had wanted, if he had only come the other day . . . for this was all they could have now. Bapa would never let her marry, in fact—and her lip curled in distaste—he had hinted, no, said outright, that Roshan was in love with Mirza Najabat Khan. What was Roshan compared to her? Then an ache came to settle in her, tinged with a modicum of self-pity, but she brushed it away; she had deeply enjoyed herself tonight, forgotten her cares, and not been worried about being in love . . .
and being hurt, or disappointed. Perhaps it was better this way.

  By the time she slept, the whole harem had heard of Jahanara Begam’s visitor and that he had spent hours in her garden, on a divan, under a sky of stars that glittered like newly faceted stones. The news did not filter into Emperor Shah Jahan’s apartments—yet—because the women were afraid, because his reaction was wholly unpredictable. Jahanara was not a wife or a concubine but a daughter, one so powerful that her father might well forgive her for snatching a few moments of gratification—the only thing he could not give her himself. Most of the women knew better than to credit the rumors about Shah Jahan and Jahanara. But they talked through the night, waking each other with impulsively thought-of comments, putting together with greedy avidity the few facts they had been told. What they had not heard, their imaginations supplied—for there was only one act between a man and a woman in the dark.

  • • •

  Later that year, Emperor Shah Jahan sent Prince Shah Shuja to the Deccan, ostensibly to oversee the campaign there and attack the fortress at Parenda. He left in great state, at the head of an infantry fifty thousand strong and a matching cavalry with horses, elephants, and heavy artillery. The Deccan campaign was merely an excuse to send Shuja away, and they all—Dara, Jahanara, Shuja, Aurangzeb, and Roshanara—recognized that. Although Mahabat Khan, the Khan-i-khanan, who had been left at Burhanpur to continue the Deccan wars when the imperial family had returned a year ago to Agra, had sent numerous missives to his Emperor for assistance, promising victory if it arrived.