The Feast of Roses

by Indu Sundaresan

  Khurram at first had not responded to her summons, and then he had come, but so reluctantly that it was as though he was willing his legs to walk into her apartments. His face had been shuttered from his mother. He kept turning away from her as she had spoken, his answers to her questions had been mumbled. But he had been resolute. Jagat Gosini had tried to tell him that the alliance would not be to his advantage—true, Arjumand’s aunt had some small ascendancy over the Emperor right now, but that would not last, and what value would this marriage have then?

  The Empress had talked to her son through the night, but he would not bend. He would marry Arjumand. Finally, when her heart had been heavy with ache and her eyes had smarted from crying and a lack of sleep, Khurram had risen to leave. He stood at the door and asked, “Have you seen Arjumand, your Majesty?”

  Jagat Gosini’s spirit rose. “She is not fit for you, Khurram.”

  “I see.” Khurram then left, and the Empress hoped again. But only briefly. The marriage had taken place, she had attended the ceremony as she had had to, and Khurram never came again to visit her.

  Shaista Khan coughed at Jagat Gosini’s elbow. She leaned toward him. Another seer was at the door, your Majesty. He begged an audience. The Empress leaned away and pulled her veil over her head. Let this seer come too, let him promise her good fortune as the others had, now she had only promises left, nothing more substantial than that.

  The man came in and bowed. He carried a wooden cage with iron bars and a pack of cards. Jagat Gosini took a deep breath and then wished she had not. He had not bathed in quite a few days and was redolent of that very human unwashed smell. Sweat and dirt matted his long hair. His face was black from the sun and his teeth a rotting red from too much paan. For a man who had so much distaste for his body that he did not look after it, or take care to wash it at the Yamuna’s ghats every morning, his eyes were bright and lively, shining with a strange intelligence.

  The man spread out his cards on the carpet and let the parrot out of the cage. It waddled over—fly it could not with shorn wings—picked out a card, and turned it over. Sketched on the card in garish colors was a woman. An apsara, he said, a handmaiden to Indra, King of the Gods. She would bring beauty to her Majesty’s life.

  And so it went on for the next few minutes. One card after another lifted and turned over, a message read from it. After a while Jagat Gosini did not listen anymore. She wished the day were over so she could retire to her bedchamber to sleep.

  “Courage, your Majesty.”

  Her head whipped up. Had he really said that? But no, he was cooing to his parrot as though it were a lover. “Come, my darling, pick another card.”

  “Is everything lost to you already, your Majesty?”

  Now the seer looked at her and smiled. It was Mahabat Khan. Empress Jagat Gosini sat up.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I have news, your Majesty.” Mahabat shuffled the cards again with his grimy hands. He fanned them out. “Empress Nur Jahan is with child.”

  Jagat Gosini stared at him. “You must be mistaken, Mahabat. I have heard no such thing.”

  “True, nonetheless, your Majesty. And please, do not address me so.”

  “How long?”

  Mahabat took out little chips of almonds from a dirty bag tucked into his cummerbund and held them out to the parrot. It came over to peck in his palm. “I do not know, your Majesty. But just recently. It is early yet.”

  Empress Jagat Gosini leaned back into her divan. Mehrunnisa was pregnant. She would have a child, a son surely, and the Emperor would love her even more. Why did this have to happen? What of Khurram?

  “Children,” Mahabat said, still looking at his parrot, “have a way of returning where they belong, your Majesty. Prince Khurram is young, easily flattered by the attention given to him. This child will change things. He will realize it.”

  And for the first time in days, the lethargy lifted, and Jagat Gosini’s mind exploded with thoughts. True, Khurram would return to her. But Mehrunnisa’s child was a threat to all of them, mostly to Khurram. Was she the only one who saw this?

  “Mahabat, she must not have this child.” The words came out even as they were formed in her, and once she said them she could not take them back. Jagat Gosini looked around, but they were alone, and Shaista had gone to get the seer a glass of water to wet his lips.

  “Much better that she does not, your Majesty. A woman is always most vulnerable at this time, when her body and her mind are given over to the task of making a child. If anything were to happen to her . . . who would be blamed? Especially if this is done discreetly.”

  They heard footsteps, and Mahabat hastily pointed the parrot to the cards again. Shaista came in, and following him were three more soothsayers. The minister scooped up the cards and shooed the parrot into the cage in a hurry. In another minute, he had left, bowing to the ground and backing out without lifting his head. The soothsayers’ gazes stuck to him until he had gone, and then they asked questions. Who was he? Which village did he come from? What was his reading? Jagat Gosini fended off the queries and banished them, with strict orders to Shaista not to bring in any more men.

  Jagat Gosini sent word out asking if the news of Mehrunnisa’s pregnancy was true, and when she knew it was so, she distributed the news, slyly, into the various other zenana quarters. Fear came to live with a lot of women, and where fear came, anger followed. And with the temper came the cunning, the planning, the deceit. Many women had been known to carry a child inside them . . . and then, one day, to lose that child even before they saw its face.

  • • •

  “Runners have come from Surat, your Majesty.”

  “What news?” Mehrunnisa asked eagerly, reaching for the mailbag.

  She unrolled the letter and read it in silence. The English had successfully repulsed and then defeated the Portuguese thrice in the last few months. It was unheard of; the Portuguese had reigned supreme over the waters of the Arabian Sea for over a century, and now this captain, Thomas Best, had defeated them. Was this letter an exaggeration? Mehrunnisa smoothed out the paper on her knee. It was signed by Muqarrab Khan himself, the governor of Gujrat. He would not lie, surely. Muqarrab was now a Christian, influenced by the Portuguese into their religion and their needs, which they had told him were one, for they alone knew how to please this new God Muqarrab had agreed to serve.

  “Where is the Emperor?”

  “In his Ibadat Khana, your Majesty. The Jesuit fathers are in conference with him,” Hoshiyar replied.

  “Send a message requesting an audience immediately.” Mehrunnisa put the letter back into the bag and rose to go to her husband. The Ibadat Khana was the House of Worship built within the palace complex of the Agra Fort. The first Ibadat Khana—and the idea for it—belonged to Emperor Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri. It was not a temple but an octagonal hall, the ceiling slotted with glass to allow light, and everything within it an unblemished white marble—the pillars, the floor, even the sun coming into the hall. And here Akbar had invited the religious elite of the various religions of India to sit in his presence and argue the merits of their own faiths. There were Jain and Buddhist monks, the Jesuit fathers brought from Goa, Hindu priests, every Muslim sect in the land, and the Zoroastrians.

  A balcony ran around the top of the Ibadat Khana, fenced off by a marble screen reaching to the ceiling. Here the women of the zenana came to listen to the philosophies in the hall below. They were always silent, knew that the men in the hall thought the finer points of most religions to be their exclusive purview and a woman’s job was merely to follow the dictates of her husband’s or her father’s or even her son’s creed. Questions were not admitted—indeed, the men below did not even know there were women listening, or if they did, they allowed it by ignoring it.

  Mehrunnisa climbed the steps to the balcony and pressed her face against the screen. It was night, the room was but dimly lit with small torches in sconces on the walls. The men argued—s
ome loud and forceful, some more timid but still so persistent that they repeated their sentences over and over again until they had been heard. The Jesuit fathers, Pinheiro and Xavier, were there too.

  They had suddenly grown small, Mehrunnisa thought. They had tried, for many years, to convince first Akbar and then Jahangir of the finer points of Christianity. But for both the Emperors, there were too many flaws. Monogamy could not be accepted. How could a monarch marry only one wife? An empire ran on politics, and if God dictated a king’s behavior, He did so through the king, and then, the king was only obeying God in accepting more than one wife. This, quite apart from the fact that the empire benefited from the numerous unions. There were other perplexities. What was a virgin birth? How could that even exist?

  Mehrunnisa and Jahangir had talked of the arguments from the various religious leaders. Even Hinduism was incomprehensible. Widows could not marry again, the soul was reincarnated, and most terrible, the practice of Sati, where a woman killed herself in her husband’s funeral pyre. But there were Hindu queens in the zenana; they had their beliefs and knew better than to argue with Jahangir about them. It was enough—actually, more than generous—that he allowed them their faith within the walls of his harem.

  Mehrunnisa watched as Father Pinheiro bent to Father Xavier. They talked under cover of the noise in the room. Had they heard about Best? If they had heard of the new Englishman in India, it was unlikely they would know of the defeat of their fleet in the Arabian Sea. Hoshiyar came into the Ibadat Khana now, and the Emperor rose from his divan in the center of the room.

  “I must retire from this discussion,” Jahangir said as the leaders dropped into silence and bowed to their Emperor. “But please do continue if you wish.”

  They only waited until Jahangir left before commencing again. But to fill the Emperor’s absence, fifteen Ahadis, the personal bodyguards of the Emperor, filed into the room, daggers in their cummerbunds, spears in their hands, their faces unyielding. Here in the Ibadat Khana, if the Emperor were not present to stop it, blood would flow in the name of God—so excitable were the men. The Ahadis were there to maintain order; any man who threatened another, no matter who he was, how exalted his position, would be first thrown into prison, and then let out only to be banished from the Ibadat Khana. Raised voices were allowed, but hands could not be raised.

  “Mehrunnisa.” Emperor Jahangir came up behind her. “Have you come to listen?”

  “Your Majesty, I have received communication from Surat.” Mehrunnisa showed him the letter. “The English ships have defeated the Portuguese at sea, not once but thrice.”

  He read it carefully. “So it is true. Muqarrab Khan writes to say that the empire should come to the aid of the Portuguese.” Jahangir shook his head. “This cannot be.”

  “Do you think they know?”

  They both leaned their foreheads against the screen and looked down. Father Xavier glanced up, but he could see nothing, so they did not move away.

  “The Portuguese are too arrogant, Mehrunnisa, too sparse with their gifts now. They are my guests at Agra and have been accorded all the respect due to a guest. But they misuse this,” the Emperor said. He spoke softly, but even had he yelled, he would not have been heard in the noise that rose from the floor of the Ibadat Khana. He held up the letter again. “Muqarrab has given this Best a treaty to trade with Gujrat. Should we extend the territory?”

  “So much favor, your Majesty? And so soon?” Mehrunnisa asked.

  Jahangir laughed. “Let him think so at least. The treaty will not bind us to anything definite; we can follow Muqarrab’s admirable example and say quite a lot and still say nothing.”

  “Yes,” Mehrunnisa said, “and an English ambassador should be commanded to court, your Majesty. Not one,” she inclined her head toward the hall, “who makes pretensions for being a man of God and deals in mortal things, but who is a noble, who can claim a high birth, and is more worthy of your notice. This may be a beginning . . .”

  “We shall see if it is. At least we do not need either the Portuguese or the English in the Arabian Sea. We want them, but do not need them yet.” Jahangir put an arm around his wife’s shoulder and pulled her close. “I do remember about your ships, my dear. Have they come home from their first journey?”

  She shook her head. “I have heard nothing.”

  “They will, and soon.” He pulled away to look at her face. Mehrunnisa was not wearing her veil; there was no one to see her but Jahangir and Hoshiyar. The Emperor cupped his hands around her chin and kissed her gently, on her mouth, on her nose, and her closed eyelids. Then he enfolded her like this, with her head bent into his chest, with just her forehead touching his heart, and his arms about her neck. “How are you feeling, beloved?”

  He spoke still more softly now; Hoshiyar, at the door to the balcony, would not hear them, and the shouts from the hall below resounded through the screen.

  “Tired,” Mehrunnisa said. She smiled into the embroidered cloth of his nadiri coat. “Tired when I am reminded of it.”

  “Does Hoshiyar know?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure why. Perhaps . . .” Her voice faltered. “It is the others I lost at this time. Perhaps it is that this child is, will be, so precious to history. I fear at times, mostly for his safety.”

  Jahangir pulled her more completely into his arms. Now her face was flat against the silk-covered buttons of his nadiri. Mehrunnisa was tired, too tired to even stand on her feet, so she climbed onto Jahangir’s feet, balancing on the incline, as he held her even tighter. “You must never fear, Mehrunnisa. As long as I am here to look after you, everything I have, my army, my treasury, is for you to use. As for the child, you must tell Hoshiyar at least. But he must have guessed, surely?”

  She smiled, blissfully wanting sleep. If Hoshiyar had guessed, he was being very discreet. He set down trays of cashews and sultanas by her side if she was hungry, but he had not yet brought the mixture of ghee, sugar, and almonds that was to fatten a woman at this time and, in doing so, fatten the child in her womb. As Jahangir and Mehrunnisa left the Ibadat Khana for the welcome quiet of the outside night, she slipped her hand into the Emperor’s. They walked back to her apartments.

  An imperial farman was drawn up and sealed by Mehrunnisa in Jahangir’s name. It allowed the English very vague trading privileges in the empire, as obscure in language as Muqarrab Khan’s own treaty had been. Mehrunnisa used Muqarrab’s document as a model for her own and added a new command—a representative of King James was to be introduced in the Mughal court.

  Thomas Best was nonetheless thrilled. It was the first imperial acknowledgement of English presence in India, four years after William Hawkins had set foot on Indian soil. He quickly wound up his business and set sail for England.

  But this was the next morning’s achievement. Mehrunnisa did not think that night, either in her waking hours or in her dreams, of Thomas Best, of Khurram and Arjumand, or of Abul or her Bapa. Her time was given over to the child. What would he be like? Would he look like Ladli? And this was entirely possible, because Ladli had very little of her father in her. And what would Ladli think of this new brother? It was too early; there was no outward sight of the child, nor a quickening inside her. The symptoms, such as they were, came as a sudden fatigue that turned her arms and legs into liquid, or a hunger that seemed to eat up the skin of her stomach, or the bile that rose to her throat at the sight of every food—even water had its distinctive and disgusting taste—or that she could smell every aroma around her. Even Jahangir’s perfumes, ones he wore and then chose not to wear for Mehrunnisa’s sake, were irritating at times. If she could not smell the sandalwood of his bath, she could smell the soap used to wash the Emperor’s clothes, and the sun that had dried it, and turned away from both equally.

  There was no doubt in her mind that there was going to be a child. Mehrunnisa did not want to tell anyone yet because she was afraid of the evil eye
and the sharp tongue of jealousy. And there would be rage in the zenana. She knew of other attempts to make a woman miscarry, attempts that had succeeded. A push down the stairs, a potion in the wine cups, a chant to invite misfortune. She would protect her child from all of those. Jahangir would not think such deceit possible in the women of his harem. But Mehrunnisa knew that she had angered too many women here, taken away privileges they once considered their own, and not just Jagat Gosini, but others too.

  But no matter, she thought. She would protect this child. Let them try to take him away from her.

  • • •

  A few nights later when the moon died into nothingness, Mehrunnisa opened her eyes. Her heart beat rapidly, and sweat spread thickly between her breasts. Something had woken her, what was it? A sound? Was someone in the apartments? No, it had been a dream, a strange and frightening dream where she was being chased by a faceless person. She stumbled and went down, hands came to touch her . . .

  She rose from the mattress and went outside into the gardens. The eunuchs on guard were all asleep, leaning against the pillars in the verandah. This was like a dream, that they would be so careless as to close their eyes while guarding the Emperor. Mehrunnisa did not wake them but went down the steps into the lawn. The night was dark as ink. A breeze whispered through the leaves of the tamarind tree, and a form, white and ghostly, flitted from one bush to another. She stood in the center of the lawn, not afraid of the spirits, not knowing whether she was awake or asleep still and all this was just an extension of her subconscious.