Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  There were amirs enough at court who would have been glad to escort the imperial army to Burhanpur, but Emperor Shah Jahan had insisted that a prince must be at the lead, and who better than Shuja, newly married and settled in his personal life—it was now time for him to take on princely responsibilities.

  “Dara does not want to go, Bapa?” Shuja had been bold enough to ask his father one day. They were walking to the morning jharoka together; it was Shuja’s day to accompany his father. Ever since that first jharoka after their mother had died, by tacit consent, one or another of them had always been at their father’s side—if Jahanara and Roshanara went, they stayed behind the curtain screening the balcony; if one of the sons went, they stood behind their father and listened as he was approached with appeals and given news.

  Shah Jahan hesitated and then continued walking as he put an arm about his son’s shoulders. “Beta, you must do something. You are a man now, married, with a child on the way. In my grief for your Mama, I have been remiss in giving all of you duties in the Empire. My father sent me on campaign at a very early age, and I learned on the field what it was to be in charge of an army of men, to be accountable for their lives, to teach them to obey my every wish. This will be your first command, but with Mirza Mahabat Khan to guide you in warfare—and he is an able general—you will be victorious in sacking Parenda. If we are to make any forays into the Deccani kingdoms, Parenda must fall to us first.”

  “I understand, Bapa,” Shuja said, shaking his head all the same in his ponderous way, “and am grateful for the honor.” He stood back as the eunuchs lifted the curtain and Emperor Shah Jahan stepped through onto the jharoka balcony. Today, the horizon glowed with an early dawn, and as the Naubat Khana played its music to announce Shah Jahan’s presence, the cries of “Padshah Salamat!” escalated around them. Shuja slipped in behind his father and, under cover of the noise, said, “Why is Dara not going?”

  It seemed to him that his father had not heard what he said, for the Emperor was a long time in answering. As the Mir Arz, the Master of Ceremonies at the jharoka and in the imperial durbar, read out the petitions, Shah Jahan nodded his responses or lifted his hand. He turned sideways and said, “I thought that you would prefer to be sent.”

  “Oh, I do, Bapa,” Shuja replied. It was the only thing he could say, for no one dared to protest the Emperor’s orders—even if, and Prince Shah Shuja’s mouth twisted deprecatingly—even if he was a royal prince and son of the Emperor. Having grown up in the imperial court, Shuja knew that the Empire’s beating heart lay where the Emperor was, and being sent away from court, even for glory on the battlefield, meant a loosening foothold in the Empire’s core. He had three brothers, and they could well steal their father’s affections from him, and when he returned (if he came back at all to court for more than a brief visit), what would be his standing with the nobles? His entire circle of influence would diminish, be restricted to the generals and soldiers with whom he associated. In his heart, as did the others, Shah Shuja wanted to be Emperor, and in sending him away, and keeping Dara by his side, Emperor Shah Jahan was clearly marking his preference for heir—to Shuja and to the Empire.

  “Dara is needed here, beta,” his father said to him now, turning toward him and presenting his back to the assembly beyond the jharoka balcony. There was compassion in the Emperor’s eyes, and to Shuja it seemed as though his father was warning him against having ambitions beyond his reach. Dara was the heir to the Empire—the rest of them would be given high ranks, enormous salaries, mansions and palaces around the land, jagirs and districts to administer, but before the Friday noon prayers, only one man’s name would be taken in the khutba by the muezzins of the mosques—only Dara would be proclaimed as Emperor for all of the Empire’s residents.

  “I see, Bapa,” Shuja said, and kept silent through the rest of the jharoka. When he returned to his apartments, he told his wife of his plans and ordered his effects to be packed. And a month later, when the army had been readied, he departed from Agra.

  As he left, Princess Roshanara touched her brother Prince Aurangzeb’s arm and said, “Shuja will never come back to court, will he, Aurangzeb?”

  The young prince frowned. “Not unless he returns as Emperor. But he does not seem to care about this very much.”

  “But you do,” Roshanara said quickly. “He is the first of us to leave so that Dara and Jahan can reign supreme by Bapa’s side. Your turn is next.”

  He laughed. “I will go, and willingly, Roshan. What use is an Emperor who lolls around at court, who has not shed blood in wars, who has not the allegiance of the greatest warriors in the Empire? I will go, and I will return.”

  “You will need help here then.” It was said in an undertone, and she drifted out of the room before he could respond, but Prince Aurangzeb had heard, all too clearly, that his second sister was offering him her loyalty. She did not like Jahanara, and Jahan clearly supported Dara, so Roshanara found another brother to back. He did not mind this, Aurangzeb thought, as he had taught himself to be tolerant of almost everything—he would take Roshan’s help, but his love was for Jahan.

  Fourteen

  It is not without reason that the kingdom of which Lahor is the capital is named the Penje-ab, or the Region of the Five Waters. . . . Alexander is here well known by the name of Sekander Filifous, or Alexander the son of Phillip. . . . The river on which the city was built, one of the five, is as considerable as our Loire.

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

  Agra

  Monday, January 23, 1634

  23 Rajab A.H. 1043

  They departed from Agra for the long journey to Kashmir, which would lead them along the way to the city of Lahore—Emperor Shah Jahan’s first visit to both places as sovereign.

  The trip took the royal entourage through Delhi, where they halted briefly for a short pilgrimage to Emperor Humayun’s tomb, and then on west and north to Lahore, some three hundred and seventy-five miles away—fifteen days of hard riding by an army unencumbered by chattel and women; a month for them as they marched steadily, day by day in procession, their numbers a mile wide at its widest.

  Princess Jahanara Begam journeyed in an open howdah set atop an imperial elephant. The howdah was a wooden structure with a gold and gilt roof, four pillars, a broad seat strewn with comfortable cushions and bolsters, thin muslin curtains enfolding the whole. The curtains were long and flitted up and down in the breeze, providing a glimpse of her face at times, or her hands, or the little child by her side, whose bright blue gaze caught every passing scene with interest. A bevy of eunuchs surrounded Jahanara’s elephant, and around them were old and decrepit amirs of the imperial court, some even from the first tier in front of the Emperor’s throne. Though the child’s delighted laughter filtered through the thick, heated air, not one man turned to look upward at the sound—they kept their horses in rein and their own heads forward, doggedly following the long road toward Lahore.

  “Goharara,” Jahanara said, pulling the girl by the laces of her choli. “You will fall out, and then Bapa will cry when he sees how his child has been hurt.”

  “Will he, Jahan?” Goharara Begam asked. “Where is he?” She leaned out farther. “I cannot see him. The dust rises so that Bapa’s howdah is masked from here. Why does he not travel with us?”

  “Bapa is in conference with the amirs, beta,” Jahanara said. “And where did you learn to speak with all those words?”

  “When you were not around, Jahan,” she said with a smile that brought two deepening dimples in her rounded cheeks.

  That look, and those words, caught Jahanara’s heart, and she held her sister’s chubby hands in her own and then bent down to lay kisses upon them. They had all overlooked Goharara, she thought, in those early days after Mama died, and so she had been brought up by her wet nurses and her maids, women of some standing at court, true, but it had resulted in the princes
s thinking of one of the women as her mother. When she was a year old, she had called Jahanara “Mama,” once, and a wet nurse later told Jahanara that they had been telling the child her mother was away and would come to visit her. And so Jahanara had asked for her sister to come by her apartments to play while she read over the farmans her father sent into the harem for her approval and for affixing the imperial seal, or had sent her numerous gifts of gold and silver toys, or had seen her in passing as she moved from one of her duties to another. But they had all been neglectful of her—and this was easily done; Goharara Begam was a royal princess, she had caretakers aplenty, and her older sisters and brothers had their own concerns.

  “Come,” Jahanara said, drawing the child upon her knee and holding her fast against the wriggling. “If you are quiet, I will tell you a story.”

  “Laila and Majnu?” Goharara demanded.

  Jahanara sighed. It was an inappropriate story for a child, that ballad sung upon the Yamuna River the night she had met her own lover in her gardens, but Goharara had grown up in the imperial zenana, where gossip and tales of love never ceased from the mouths of the many women—the slaves, the concubines, the servants—where talk was free and unrestrained, where every child reached adulthood with a full and complete knowledge of the complexities of life and, consequently, little understanding of anything. Among the many rhymes and folk songs that had been sung to put the little princess to sleep, this was one. So Jahanara began her story, using the word love with care, so that Goharara might comprehend it as affection, as only a feeling from the heart and from the head.

  “He sings for her in the desert, Jahan,” Goharara said. “But he cannot find her again.”

  Jahanara nodded. She had asked for the musician’s son many a time after that one night, but for her, there was no mystique anymore in this act of love. She understood now that her heart was given to Mirza Najabat Khan, and the other man was but a poor substitute, even though she knew him better. If she had been more common . . . But she was a royal princess, and he was not her equal in rank, in standing, and she had called for him for the one need that had nothing to do with her heart. Goharara grew limp in her arms and slept, a thumb in her mouth. Jahanara looked out through the netted curtains. The sun bleached the landscape to a salt white, laid calm over the stunted trees dotting the terrain where nothing moved in the afternoon. When they passed through a village on their route, children sat wide-eyed upon treetops or the roofs of the houses, watching their progress; women stopped as they drew water from wells; birds took flight from their path. She watched the rising of dust somewhere ahead in the long caravan of camels, elephants, horses, and oxen, and knew that a call to halt had been made, and sure enough, in ten minutes, sentries shouted out the summons and the words came floating back to Princess Jahanara.

  They had stopped in Jalandhar, almost right outside the western gateway of the Nur Mahal Sarai. Jahanara glanced out at it with curiosity, for it had been built by her grandfather Emperor Jahangir’s twentieth wife, Mehrunnisa, and named after her—after one of her various titles, Nur Mahal, the Light of the Palace. Emperor Jahangir had then changed his wife’s title to Nur Jahan, more lofty, of more consideration, now to mean the Light of the World. But the sarai, a rest house for weary travelers, had been built in the early days of their marriage, and it was already, some twenty years after its completion, steeped in legend—for a person in voyage, the words Nur Sarai had become a hallmark of perfection, and every other sarai in the Empire was compared to this one. When the slaves from the zenana came to assemble in front of her kneeling elephant, Jahanara handed the sleeping Goharara to one of the women and descended to stand in front of the massive entrance to the sarai. Somewhere, a mile ahead in the dust and scrub, Bapa, Aurangzeb, and Roshan would have halted also to pitch tents, light cooking fires, set up shamiana awnings to keep them cool. They had passed by the sarai and gone on because Empress Nur Jahan was a woman Emperor Shah Jahan detested, even though her niece had been his wife, and her brother—his father-in-law—was still one of his dearest supporters. And his children, Jahanara thought, could call the Empress their grandaunt. But for her elephant to have stopped at precisely this spot, when it could well have lumbered on for the lunch meal to another, only meant that Bapa wanted her to see the sarai.

  She stepped back and noted the red sandstone building’s thick and blind walls that stretched on each side, ending in engaged octagonal guard towers. The gateway itself was in two stories, the front carved in relief with exquisite depictions of court life—the chaugan, the battlefield, the peacocks in the zenana gardens, trees in full flower. Inside, the building was square, only one story high, and had arched verandahs running all around. Set inside the cool darkness of the verandahs were thirty-two rooms on each side. There was a hammam in one corner, a cookhouse in another, and a group of apartments in yet another with gold padlocked doors where Emperor Jahangir had stayed to please his wife when the sarai had been built.

  “She had imagination,” Dara said softly by her side. He had come upon her as she stood in the center of the courtyard, and as he spoke, Jahanara felt Nadira’s touch upon her other arm.

  “She is not dead yet, Dara,” Jahanara replied mildly as an idea came to her. Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, had been given a pension of two hundred thousand rupees a year when Emperor Jahangir died, and been sent to Lahore along with her husband’s body. It was customary for the widows of dead emperors to occupy a place in the imperial zenana of the new king, albeit a minor one, and usually as revered mothers who learned to involve themselves as little as possible in the new harem’s power structure. They were given a salary from the treasury, a roof over their heads, and a role to play in court occasions such as the Emperor’s birthday or the Nauroz festival, when they would send gifts and charity to the poor. With Mehrunnisa, such a pronouncement of a harmless retirement would have come easily to all of them, Jahanara thought, for they were related to her in two ways—she was their Mama’s aunt and their father’s stepmother. But then, there had been the small matter of Mehrunnisa attempting to put another son—Shahryar, who was married to her daughter Ladli—on the throne, and it had taken all of their grandfather’s guile and cunning to wrest power away from her and to their Bapa; —this Emperor Shah Jahan could not forget, and he did not forget.

  She was forbidden to leave the city of Lahore and denied any access to the court. Jahanara did not think that her father, who would not break his journey at a rest house bearing her name, would welcome her into the palaces at the fort in Lahore when they arrived there. For the last six years, they had not spoken her name in his presence; it was as though she did not exist. This more than anything else was what Dara had meant when he spoke of her in the past tense.

  They sat down in the shade of an enormous cypress growing in the center of the courtyard on spotless white silk-covered divans. The rest of the roof, open to the sky, was crisscrossed in thin iron bars, which formed a mesh, intertwining with the branches of the cypress. The rule in most sarais was that all the travelers had to pay their fee, find themselves rooms, and settle their livestock, their mounts, and their servants before nightfall. As the sun set, the great doors of the gateway would be shut, sealing the sarai from the outer world, and guards would take their places around the structure, which had no windows on the outside walls. Come dawn, the sentry would shout, “Wake and count yourselves and your belongings,” and he would wait for thirty minutes while the travelers did so, and if nothing had been stolen and no lives lost overnight, the great doors would be opened.

  And such were the stories that Princess Jahanara Begam had only heard about the sarais in the Empire. For she had never herself traveled without an escort of at least six hundred men—eunuchs and amirs—and they had paused here only for a meal; as they ate in silence, her guards took up position in the verandahs, the eunuchs facing them, the nobles turned away in two solid lines of protection. The food came speedily from the kitchens, each platter from the imperial treasury,
wrapped in gold and red cloth, which the head server untied in front of them, tasted discreetly, and then ladled out. Even with stone all around, breezes dipped into the courtyard through the iron mesh, rustled the leaves on the branches of the tree, sent the patterned shade skittering in patches of light and dark. When they had finished, they washed their hands and sat back.

  “Entertainment,” said Dara, clapping his hands, and two of his musicians advanced to play and sing with a harmonium and a tabla. A juggler came next, picking up gold teaspoons from the white tablecloth six at a time and flinging them into the air so rapidly that he seemed to be surrounded by blades of gold. When he was done, he laid the spoons down quickly, plucking them out of nowhere, and said, “What next, your Highness?”

  “What do you think, Jahan? You know his skill at mimicry; shall we ask him to do that?”

  “Yes,” Jahanara said, laughing, enchanted by this eunuch of Dara’s who was so skillful. And she now knew why Bapa had wanted her to see the Nur Mahal Sarai—so that she could commission and build a better one herself; it would be a splendid use of her income.

  “Prince Aurangzeb,” said Dara.

  The man’s face fell solemn immediately, his eyebrows lowered over his eyes; his forehead seemed to widen; his cheeks drooped downward; and though he wore a beard, it disappeared into his hand. He took a few fast steps, pretended to read a book, shook his head, and clicked his tongue in disapproval. Then he stood up very straight, his shoulders rigid, his ear turned toward the skies as though he were listening intently to something.

  Dara roared, and Nadira joined him, but Jahanara felt a prickle of uneasiness. It was a caricature of Aurangzeb, an exaggeration of all his intensity—and it was real enough to be identified as Aurangzeb . . . and not humorous at all. She had expected something else, perhaps an imitation of a slave girl, or a merchant haggling, or even an animal, but this was cruel and improper. She opened her mouth to halt the excessive mirth that seemed to have bloomed all around the courtyard, when Dara’s buffoon changed his expression and his manner. He bent over, let loose his beard, ran his fingers through it pensively. His mobile face aged as he created wrinkles on his forehead and around the corners of his mouth. He still had not spoken, but Jahanara recognized Sadullah Khan, the Grand Vizier of the Mughal Empire, in his actions.