When Bijapur is just five kos away, Mirza decides to set up his base camp, making everyone busy in pitching their tents, watering and feeding their animals and setting up chullahs to cook food. Mirza has realized that he does not have a sufficiently large force to besiege the walled capital of Adilshahi and simultaneously chase away the enemy garrisons attacking his camp. After looking at the colossal walls of Bijapur when he had ventured near the capital with his scouts, he has also understood that it is nearly impossible to take the city by storm, even if he deploys every man in his camp to do so.
On the third evening, when a large moon hangs over the shallow hills north of Bijapur, Diler comes to meet Mirza who sits on a charpoy with Niccolau, Kirat and Udayaraj.
‘We have water and food that will last for two more days, and the surrounding country is laid waste by the enemy on purpose. It is drained of its water supply so that not a drop is left for us, and denuded of its trees to kill our animals by starvation.’ He comes straight to the point, his kohl-lined eyes fixed on Mirza. This is the first time Diler has spoken without bowing.
Mirza trembles with indignation and asks sardonically, ‘What do you suggest?’
‘You have planned to storm it; then do it quickly,’ Diler replies. ‘The city wall is more than three kos long and we cannot fill up such a long stretch with our men.’
‘Give me a solution, Khan Sahib.’
‘I had sent a few scouts to get the sense of the archers and artillerymen on the ramparts of the city wall. And some of them had gone as close as possible, but soon arrows started whipping overhead, some hitting the targets as many scouts started falling dead from their horses. The latest news is that the walls are protected by about thirty thousand footmen who have formed a ring around Bijapur,’ Diler says in a flat tone, his eyes flickering from one man to another. He asks Niccolau Manucci, ‘Do we have long-range cannons with us?’
Manucci keeps mum, his eyes pale with guilt. After a few moments he shakes his head.
‘We can send a few hundred of our men in the night to cross the moat, climb the wall and capture a bastion,’ Kirat says.
Diler looks at the young man more with pity and less with anger. Kirat Singh enjoys his position because of his father, and without a father like Mirza the boy is not even fit to be an orderly. He snaps, ‘Are you eager to feed the crocodiles?’
‘The fear of dying without water is mounting in the camp. I fail to understand—why have we come so far just to go back with hunger burning our stomachs and thirst parching our throats?’ Diler is curt. ‘I am sure that Shivaji is responsible for this. All along he was aware of Bijapur’s strength but he did not bother to warn us.’ This thought has been bothering him for a long time. Then suddenly slapping his right fist into his left palm he says slowly, his each word clear and precise, ‘Take my advice and eliminate Shivaji, if possible tonight. If you cannot do it, I will.’
A few moments after Diler leaves, Shivaji comes to meet Mirza, and senses the awkward silence. He has seen Diler leaving the tent in a huff and pass by him without greeting him. He bows to Mirza and sits next to him, saying, ‘My spy has news. The cannons on the city’s ramparts are ready to rain explosives and they have large stocks of saltpetre to last for a month of heavy artillery firing.’
‘What do you advise?’ Mirza asks Niccolau.
‘We must retreat before men and animals start dying without food and water.’
Mirza nods. The Mughal detachments sent a few days ago to bring supplies have not arrived.
‘Let me and my men take Panhala. We know its ins and outs; we have lived there for months,’ Shivaji offers.
Mirza lets the silence grow in the tent to do some thinking. Detaching Shivaji and his men from the Mughal army means giving him independence and that may prove dangerous. Keeping him in the camp may end up in getting him killed by Diler that will make every Maratha soldier go berserk in the camp. If Shivaji does capture Panhala, the Mughals will have Bijapur’s western stronghold in their hands and it will be easier for them to come back to annex Bijapur. Mirza is ready to take chances. He also has something new to tell Aurangzeb and divert the emperor’s mind from his failure to take over Bijapur, even before the battle could take place.
That night Mirza despatches a letter to the emperor:
I have asked Shivaji to proceed towards the fort of Panhala with his men. Once the fort is conquered, it can be our base to launch attacks on Bijapur. The Marathas know secrets of the fort, the strength of its fortifications and the trails hidden under the wooded forest at its foothills.
The next morning, when Diler comes to know about Mirza’s decision, he laughs out loud, in front of Mirza’s messenger who has come officially to tell him about the developments. He knows that the strength of Shivaji’s rapidly moving light infantry lies in its speed, and his hill forts are a perfect refuge. If you ask him to strike at remote places, inflict damage, cut off enemy lines and run back to the safety of a hill fort, it is perfect, but if you ask Shivaji to besiege, dig trenches or storm a massive hill fort like Panhala, then that is a disastrous military decision. Shivaji can take the hill forts when the fort-keepers and the garrisons are weak, unprepared, but that is not the case now. Only the Mughal army has the strength to take the forts by storm, sapping or mining for trenches, and even they have failed to storm Bijapur. No doubt that Shivaji had captured Panhala before, but that time Adilshahi’s fort-keepers were not alert and had not expected the defeat of Afzal Khan at the hands of a rebel. Times have changed now; Ali Adil Shah has woken up to save his kingdom.
‘And how is Shivaji planning to take Panhala? By climbing the hill with his men at midnight?’ Diler asks the messenger mockingly.
4
A few hours before the morning star appears in the sky, a thousand of Shivaji’s infantrymen reach the north-western foothills of Panhala. Some of them know the slopes that will take them to the Rajdindi bastion close to the hidden tunnel that enters the fort. At the south-eastern foothills, Shivaji arrives with a squadron of horsemen. He has planned a surprise attack on the fort garrison and he will be successful only if the Adilshahi garrison is not alert and awake, but this is the chance he has to take.
The forest is denser here and it is easy for them to tether their horses to the trunks of the trees and, thankfully, the neighing of the tired horses dissolves into the rustle of leafy branches swinging with the gust of wind. Shivaji constantly scans the surroundings, keeping an eye on the faint outline of the fort wall through the rustling canopies. He and a few of his men wait at the foothills while the rest start climbing the hill. Shivaji watches as his men brave the steep slopes and difficult ridges of the hill, fearing the sudden appearance of rampart guards waiting in ambush or a shower of large stones rolling down to kill them, but that does not happen. Something else worries him: Palkar has not arrived with his squadron and his sarnobat has never been late before.
A little less than a thousand Marathas arrive at the fort early in the morning, some from the tunnel near Rajdindi Gate and some after climbing the wall rear Sajjakothi with catapults and ropes. In the beginning it is all quiet, but before they start dispersing, hundreds of Adilshahi soldiers waiting in ambush behind the walls of Ambarkhana leap out, killing and scattering the Marathas.
Shivaji waits for his men to give him a signal of their victory by blasting the cannon mounted on the ramparts near Sajjakothi, but even as the sun rises there is no sound. The plan is in place, his men must have climbed the slopes to reach Rajdindi Gate as well as Sajjakothi, and then dispersed on the fort to kill the sleeping garrison of a few hundred men. This is the easiest and fastest way to conquer Panhala. However, it is only when the sun rises to a considerable height in the sky that a bleeding man manages to come down where Shivaji stands. ‘They . . . the Adilshahi soldiers, have killed all our men,’ he mumbles and falls at his master’s feet. ‘Palkar never arrived. He has defected to the Adilshahi.’
5
Shah Jahan breathes laboriously,
struggling to get some air into his lungs as he writhes in pain. For the past few weeks he has been down with fever and bowel problems and he is constantly in an urgent need to urinate. A Hindu medic has been summoned to give him opiate painkillers, but it is not working. The former emperor whose treasury was once filled with unthinkable wealth, the man who has created the Taj Mahal, is on his deathbed with just a few women sobbing around him. Eunuch Mutamad watches the dying man from a distance with a blank face. He has been told that he must begin renovating Agra Fort once the old man dies.
Jahanara is numb with sorrow. The words of Mir Sayyid Muhammad Qanauji sitting in a corner reciting the holy Quran float in the air:
Allah, give us good in this world,
and the world thereafter,
defending us from the torment of the fire.
The words have no impact on Jahanara who has started sobbing. She stares at her father whose breathing is now shallower and gaze emptier. She remembers his titles: Father of Victory, Star of the Faith, Muhammad the Second and Lord of the Conjunction, Warrior of Islam, Refuge of the Caliphate and Shadow of God on Earth. After a few moments, Shah Jahan stops breathing. The women in the chamber start wailing and beating their chests. Jahanara collapses on the ground.
When she comes by and looks at her father’s bed, it is empty.
‘Where is my father?’ she screams and catches hold of one of her maids and shakes her violently for answers.
‘They have taken him away,’ the maid manages to utter.
Jahanara runs to the parapet of the burj like a woman possessed. She looks down and sees something she will never forget in her life. Her father is being taken out by four bearers from a small gate on a wooden bier. The bearers are led by two holding torches, one of them is Mutamad for sure and the other looks like the eunuch Phul. They seem to be in a terrible hurry to dispose of the body of her father whose pale face looks ghostly in the yellow light. Did they know he was to die today?
‘Stop! Stop!’ she screams, but within moments the small procession disappears from her vision.
A verse starts forming in her mind:
O sun of mine,
you have vanished from my eyes.
When will there be a dawn that will stop my cries?
Oh, the emperor of the universe,
the axis of the world and the king of its fate,
open the eyes of kindness to see my state,
I cry insanely,
with only wind to grasp,
I burn like a candle,
with only smoke to rasp.
In the middle of the night, Mutamad washes Shah Jahan’s body in the cold waters of the Yamuna and then the mortal remains are taken to the marble mausoleum, the Taj Mahal. The dethroned emperor is buried next to his wife. When his corpse is lowered into the white stone enclosure, only one teardrop falls on him, and it is Mutamad’s. The heart of the eunuch, who has hated Shah Jahan all his life, melts.
Early next morning, Aurangzeb gets the news at Dilli and sighs with relief. The sick old man who was refusing to die all these years, seven to be precise, is finally dead, forced to be dead, setting Aurangzeb free to be a legal emperor. The holy men of Mecca will no longer be able to question him about the legitimacy of his throne.
6
It has been a month since Shah Jahan passed away. Aurangzeb has come to Agra after seven years. Was her father’s death planned by her only surviving brother?
Jahanara cries softly, standing on the open gallery that is framed with pillars and a low marble parapet, where precious and semi-precious stones create inlaid stonework elements of some vanished dreams. Behind her are airy chambers built on fort walls, and before her is the Taj Mahal. Between her and the mausoleum, eagles circle with serenity, unconcerned about the terrible misfortunes that have fallen on the fort inmates.
She stands there watching the Taj Mahal for a long time till the shadows of a vanishing day slide down on the mausoleum. A question haunts her: why had her father, who had started recovering, his face, less sunken and skin regaining its original colour, suddenly taken ill and died? After the new massage therapist sent from Dilli had replaced their old one, father’s health had started deteriorating at an alarming speed. She did have her reservations about the masseur with his big hands and the strange-smelling massage oil. She has wondered many times whether that oil had anything to do with her father’s death. She had questioned the masseur and he had said that the new European physician appointed to treat royals in Dilli suggested some herbs to strengthen her father’s bones. Within weeks, Jahanara had noticed clots of dried blood stuck at the rim of her father’s nostrils. After a few days, his nose had started bleeding so profusely that it had scared her. His hands and feet trembled and he developed high fever and stomach spasms. A few days later, he could hardly breathe, his chest swelling and then deflating like bellows of a blacksmith and then, in the end, he died of fever, dysentery and urinary trouble. Something nagged Jahanara in that moment of grief—the order from Dilli for the burial had arrived even more quickly. She had fainted, but her maids had told her the details of what had happened.
The women from the royal seraglio and Jahanara’s father’s other wives had gathered around her father’s bed, some wailing violently and some beating their chests. Just then, khoja Phul and khoja Mutamad had come rushing in, dressed in funeral white. They had barked orders, directing the four bearers who had come with them carrying a stretcher, and told them that the burial had been planned that night as per the emperor’s orders. The women, tearful and devastated, had pleaded with him to wait, and begged for a fair burial. Her father, the former emperor, had had a funeral procession akin to that of a destitute, led by a slave, two eunuchs and four carriers through the Mori Gate to the mausoleum. Her father, who had loved fabulous processions with thousands of spectators watching him, had been buried quietly, without any fuss. She had envisioned a totally different funeral procession for her beloved father: high-ranking mansabdars carrying the coffin through main avenues of Agra, with all ministers and councils walking beside the bier, with tens and thousands of people following to say adieu to their emperor, with palace servants throwing gold and silver coins to people waiting at the edge of the road to have a last glimpse of Shah Jahan. Nothing of the sort had taken place; instead, many questions had remained unanswered. How did the news of her father’s death reach Dilli so soon? How did they get the orders from Aurangzeb within an hour? Where did the masseur with large hands disappear? Whom will she pose these questions to?
7
Somewhere else in the Agra Fort, the atmosphere is festive as everyone is looking forward to their emperor’s fiftieth birthday that will be celebrated at the fort. Aurangzeb has finished inspecting the recently done-up diwan-e-khaas and has given his approval before marching towards the Musamman Burj, as his personal guards try hard to match his speed. The courtyard has a contingent of armed tartar women who stand at attention, their eyes downcast, their faces veiled. Abyssinian slaves prostrate in submission. Aurangzeb’s eyes dart across the courtyard. On the other side, hundreds have climbed stepladders, their long brooms moving in circular motion over the surrounding walls to sweep off the cobwebs. A few plumbers engrossed in repairing a fountain pipeline notice the emperor and fall to their knees, their faces pressed to the ground. The guards at the entrance of the Burj bow to the point that they can bend no more.
Inside, where her father has breathed his last, Jahanara hears the commotion. She knows that within moments she will face her brother, in the very chamber where her father had died a thousand deaths thinking about his slain sons and grandson. Her father’s chamber is empty and spotless as though wiped clean even of its memories. Her father’s bed, too, has been removed.
Aurangzeb walks in and finds his sister standing near the arched window. He shows no surprise and asks his guards to leave. He looks at her: she has lost some more weight, her face is swollen and her eyes are red.
‘Apa,’ he says softly. Hearing his vo
ice, she starts crying loudly. Dara bhai is dead, Shuja bhai is probably dead in Bengal, Murad is gone, Roshanara has died under mysterious circumstances. Aurangzeb is her only surviving sibling. He was a sickly child and Jahanara had to take great care of him as he would always fall ill with fever, cough and cold. In winters, when the palace went cold and windy, she used to wrap him up in a blanket and carry him around, never trusting the servants, but he wouldn’t remember that now. This is her darkest moment. She has to face the man who has wiped out her family and yet her mind seeks emotional comfort from him. Fate has put her in an extraordinary situation. She wipes her tears, swings around and faces her brother evenly, standing straight, refusing to lower her eyes. Aurangzeb’s pale glare is firm, without an iota of remorse. Her own reaction surprises her as her stomach clenches with fear under her brother’s searching gaze, but she has made up her mind about how to handle her emperor brother for she needs to survive to look after her orphaned nephews and nieces. Trying to sound clear to assert her genuineness she says softly, ‘Forgive me, brother. I think, in retrospect, I have misjudged.’
Aurangzeb keeps a blasé expression, unsure of what she is getting at. In his father’s days she had ruled from behind the throne, taking major political decisions and charting the fate of lakhs; now her destiny hangs on his decision. He notices that his sister’s eyes are bleary, surrounded by huge dark circles. He says nothing, waiting for her to continue.
‘I have realized my blunder, albeit late. I want to rectify. Let us start being a family again.’
There is silence. Jahanara does not remove her eyes from her brother who wears his prayer cap and holds his tesbih beads in his right hand. She feels as if she is like one of the beads, rolling, falling and being counted, utterly at his finger’s mercy.
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