The Feast of Roses

by Indu Sundaresan

  He let the words hang between them. Khurram picked at the sash of his cummerbund with unsteady fingers. This was what he had wanted. This was why he had taken the chance of bringing Abdur Rahim to the conference. Once his advocacy of Khurram was so readily evident, the rest of the commanders would follow Khurram’s lead.

  Khurram spoke then of what he wanted to do. There were no voices raised in protest, no murmurs even. They all knew that when Khurram became Emperor, he would remember who had been in this room. The men rose from their places and, one by one, knelt and kissed the ground in front of the prince. When they departed, Khurram called for his slave Raza.

  • • •

  A few days later, Khusrau was laid up in bed with colic pains. Khurram solicitously sent the royal physicians to attend to him. The hakims looked at the prince’s white, pain-wrought face, ran their fingers over the thin pulse on his wrist, and clucked to each other in one corner of the room. They did not dare effect a cure—there was no cure against the determination of one brother to kill the other. This had merely been a rumor for so long. When Khurram had demanded to take Khusrau with him, Jahangir had been plagued with wailings from the zenana ladies. Why did Khurram request this? He must have some devious plan in progress. The Emperor had listened to all the women, but in the end, only one woman’s voice had prevailed, Mehrunnisa’s. She had said Khusrau must go. If he would not marry Ladli, it did not matter whether he was at court or with Khurram. Mehrunnisa did not suspect that Khurram would try to murder Khusrau—that thought did not cross her mind, for it was one so incredible. Khurram would be a fool if he followed through with this. His brother was in his care, and if he died in obviously suspicious circumstances, royal blood or not, Khurram’s head would roll.

  The hakims hung around in the room, as far as possible from the prince, trying not to hear Khalifa’s mumblings as she knelt by Khusrau’s bed. The princess was praying. Every now and then she would touch her husband’s hand, but he was in too much pain to react. He did not know she was there.

  One of the hakims split from the group and went down on his knees beside Khalifa. He raised his hands as if to pray and, still looking ahead, said in a whisper, “Your Highness, what has the prince been eating?”

  Khalifa turned to him in surprise. “What he normally eats, why do you ask?”

  “Please,” the hakim said hurriedly, “please do not look at me when I talk.”

  “All right.”

  “Perhaps . . . ,” the hakim paused, “it would be better if you personally oversaw his meals.”

  “Poison!” Khalifa’s voice rose. “You suspect poison.”

  The hakim stumbled to his feet. “I have already said too much, your Highness. I have to leave.”

  He almost ran out of the room, leaving a dazed Khalifa staring after him. That evening, the princess commanded a mud and brick chula to be built outside their rooms. She inspected every piece of meat and vegetable, washed each thoroughly before she cooked the food on the chula, and tasted the dishes before she put anything in Khusrau’s mouth. She watched over him for the next few weeks thus, and slowly the pains lessened, Khusrau’s stomach felt less raw, he became stronger. He recovered.

  • • •

  The dark night lodged over Burhanpur, smothering the city with a warm and humid coat of velvet. A few hours passed, and all the lamps were extinguished one by one as the city went to sleep. A thick silence settled in the streets, and the night watchman’s tapping stick rang out on the cobbled stones, accompanied by his voice singing out the hour. The moon in the skies was a broken half melon, with enough light to paint black and silver shadows under the mango and tamarind trees.

  Within the fort all was quiet. Khusrau’s palace was at the southern end, where the sun seared through the very walls during the day. The guards outside the palace were asleep, sprawled against the front walls, their spears slung over their laps.

  Two shadows detached themselves from behind a tree and crept up to the gates. They pushed the gate open and froze as it creaked. The guards did not move. The men slipped silently into the courtyard, pulling the gate shut behind them.

  “Why didn’t the guards awaken?” one man whispered to the other.

  Raza Bahadur turned to his accomplice. “They have been drugged. We can dance on their stomachs and they would sleep on.” He grinned, his teeth gleaming in the light from the moon. “However, be careful, perhaps someone is still awake.”

  The men ran up the stairs to the prince’s apartments. Their feet were bare and made no sound on the stones. Raza wiped his sweating face on his sleeve. At the top, they leaned against the door to Khusrau’s bedroom. The door was of solid and heavy wood, embellished with brass fittings. It did not give way. As they stood there, a lamp came flickering toward them in the darkness of the corridor.

  “Who goes there? Identify yourself,” the guard shouted, raising his lantern in front of him.

  “It is I, Raza Bahadur. I have a gift for Prince Khusrau from the Emperor,” Raza replied, whipping his turban off his head.

  “What is it?” the man asked. Raza watched as the man stumbled along the stone floor. He was drugged but had somehow managed to keep awake. He did not ask why they were here so late, why the gift couldn’t wait until daylight. The man swayed from one side to the other along the corridor.

  The guard groggily accepted the parcel from Raz and bent his head to look at it. Raza moved behind him. His dagger gleamed briefly in the light before he jerked the man’s head up and sliced his throat. The guard crumpled to the floor, dead before he hit the ground. His lantern crashed and the light went out, leaving a thick darkness. The smell of fresh blood swirled upward, and Raza’s accomplice gagged.

  “Was that really necessary?” he gasped, leaning against the wall to fight off nausea.

  “Yes. We must not be identified. Now let us find a way to get into the prince’s room,” Raza said curtly.

  “Wait a minute, Raza. Is the princess in the room? I will not be responsible for her death.”

  Raza dragged him to the parapet, where the moonlight lit up their faces. “We have a duty to perform and we will, irrespective of whom we have to kill. If Princess Khalifa is sleeping with her husband we may have to dispose of her also. But set your mind at rest, I hear that she is back in her apartments tonight.” Raza strode back to Khusrau’s door, his feet squelching in the pool of blood.

  • • •

  Inside the room, Khusrau was asleep. He woke at the knocking and instinctively reached under his pillow for his dagger. “Who is it?”

  “Your Highness, it is I, Raza Bahadur. I have come from his gracious Majesty, Emperor Jahangir.”

  “What do you want?” Khusrau asked irritably. “What is so important for you to wake me in the middle of the night?”

  “Your Highness, the Emperor has sent you a robe of honor.”

  “Leave it with the guards.”

  “Your Highness, I was asked to deliver it to you personally,” Raza argued.

  “Please open the door so that I can give it to you.”

  “Go away!” Khusrau yelled. “Guards, take this madman out of here.”

  “The guards are asleep, your Highness,” Raza replied. “It will be better if you open the door, or we will have to force our way in.”

  Prince Khusrau flung himself backward into the wall, pulling at the sheets for cover. “Go away!” he shouted again. What was going on? Where were the guards, and who was this man? Why did he come like this, in the darkness of the night? Khusrau began trembling and shivering. He pressed into the stone behind him. He could hear a loud thump. The door groaned. Another thud. And another one.

  Khusrau clutched his dagger close to him and rose from the bed. The men were working in darkness, that much he could tell. If they had no light, he could still fight them. He knew every divan and carpet in the room, could walk in it without hitting anything. The prince ran to the side of the door and stood against the wall, his heart banging. The door creaked on i
ts hinges one last time and then toppled onto the floor in a rush of air and sound.

  The men crashed into the room and stood for a minute trying to get their bearings. Before they could realize that Khusrau was not in his bed, the prince jumped on Raza’s accomplice. His dagger went cleanly into the man’s shoulder. The man shouted in pain and Khusrau saw a blur of motion, then a fist smacked into his chin. As he staggered back, stunned, the two men grabbed his arms and lifted him off the floor.

  He yelled and screamed. Help. Help me. Who are you? But there was no one to hear him. Raza held Khusrau down, his knee crunching into the prince’s thin chest. His accomplice looped a sheet over a broad beam on the ceiling. Khusrau was hauled upright and dragged to the center of the room. They knotted the sheet around his neck and yanked hard at the other end. Khusrau went bellowing and flailing into the air. His fingers grappled with the tightening cloth around his neck, and then they fell to his waist and to his thighs. His body twitched, life slowly ebbed away.

  In silence the two men let go of their end of the sheet until Khusrau slumped on the ground. They carried him to the bed, laid him on the mattress, and arranged the wrinkled sheet around him. In the light of the moon that came into the room through one of its windows, the prince looked as though he were asleep. As though he was, at last, at peace.

  • • •

  Khalifa awoke with a start and stared with bewilderment at the ceiling. Where was she? She involuntarily reached out a hand for Khusrau but hit only empty space. Khusrau had insisted that she return to her chamber for the night. His mutterings and dreams kept her awake, so just this one night, he had said, so she could rest finally after all these past weeks spent nursing him. The princess got up and went to the outside verandah, shivering in the cool morning air. The sky was pinkening with dawn, birds had started their busy chirping, and the air was fresh and delicious. She glanced down at the front courtyard, looked back toward the rising sun, and then looked down again. Something was wrong . . . the front gates were open. Why?

  Khalifa turned from the verandah and ran back into her bedroom. In a few minutes, she was flying down the corridor. As she turned the corner, the princess stepped into something wet and sticky. She stopped and put a hand to her bare feet. Her fingers came away stained with a thick fluid that looked suspiciously like blood. It streaked red and thick along the floor. Khalifa ran to Khusrau’s room. She saw the dead guard lying across the doorway, his head hanging grotesquely at right angles from his torso. She jumped over his body and fled inside.

  Khusrau was on the bed, his face turned away from her. Khalifa bent over him, praying aloud. Her fingers slipped on cold, stone smooth skin.

  “Khusrau! Get up!” she screamed.

  Khalifa tried to pull his face toward her, but his neck was rigid and unmoving. She put her cheek on his chest, there was no sound, no comforting beating of a heart. “Khusrau,” she said, her voice breaking and subdued. “Wake up, my dear lord. Wake up.”

  • • •

  Khurram was away hunting in the forests near Burhanpur. The message reached him two days after Khusrau’s death. The runner came upon him, sweat-stained and weary, as the prince was raising his musket to his shoulder to aim at a placidly grazing nilgau. At the sound of the runner’s footsteps, the nilgau scampered off, and Khurram turned irritably. “What is it?”

  The runner proffered the letter, he could not talk, he could barely breathe for the panting, and he had not stopped to rest even once, his feet flying as though on fire.

  Khurram handed his musket to the Mir Shikar and unrolled the letter. “Prince Khusrau has died suddenly in Burhanpur.” He glanced up at his commanders. The men did not meet his gaze. They looked down at their feet, at the barrels of their muskets.

  “I must go to my brother.” Khurram ran to his horse and jumped into the saddle. As he kicked his heels into the horse’s flanks, the whole hunting party scrambled for their mounts. They rode away from the hunting grounds and headed directly for Burhanpur. They stopped only to eat and change horses at the sarais along the way, and so, tired and drooping in their saddles, the prince and his commanders rode into Burhanpur. People thronged the streets, wailing and crying, their wails louder when they saw Khurram. He nodded to them, tears on his face. Dismounting in the outer courtyard of the fort, he ran to Khusrau’s apartments. The prince’s body lay on a huge slab of ice, melting wetly onto the floor. Khalifa sat on the ground in one corner, staring at her hands. She did not look up when Khurram entered, and would not listen to him when he knelt by her side and kissed her hands.

  The next morning, Khusrau was buried in the gardens of the fort. Khurram was one of the pallbearers; he took his brother’s body to its grave and watched as mud was thrown over the coffin and a large marble slab pushed over the top. Then he went to his rooms to write to his father. When he finished the letter, he called his commanders to him and read out the contents. Khusrau had died of colic; he had been suffering for the past month. Khurram could not send his body to Agra for a proper burial because it had already decomposed in the heat.

  Matab Nuruddin Quli stood apart from the group crowded around the prince. Quli had been present at the first conference when Khurram had invited the commanders to the zenana reception hall. Nothing had been said outright about killing Khusrau, but all the men knew that they were complicit in this. Yet something gave way inside Quli. Khusrau had been a royal prince, and this was murder. Quli had gone into Khusrau’s bedchamber in the middle of the night to look at the prince’s body. He had stepped into the water melting from the ice and loosened Khusrau’s collar. The angry red gashes around his throat had told their own story, and an unmistakable one at that. Then Quli had looked toward the princess. Khalifa had fallen asleep, alone in the room with its one flickering oil lamp and her husband’s body. She had been sleeping as she sat, her head plunged into her neck, tears dried on her cheek. She had not heard Quli come in.

  The noble had buttoned Khusrau’s collar again and stood in the semidarkness looking at the princess for a long while. Then he had gone home, but not to sleep.

  Prince Khurram sealed his letter and called for the runners.

  That night, two runners set off for Agra. Mehrunnisa and Jahangir were on their way back to the capital after their stay at Kashmir. Both runners were carrying a letter for the Emperor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  She communicated her suspicions to Jehangire: she told him, that Shaw Jehan must be curbed; that he manifestly aspired to the throne; that all his actions tended to gain popularity; that his apparent virtues were hypocrisy, and not the offspring of a generous and honest mind; that he waited but for a convenient opportunity to throw off the mask of deceitful duty and feigned allegiance.

  —ALEXANDER DOW, The History of Hindostan

  The servants waited in a row at the very front of the campsite, peering anxiously into the west, but there was no sign of their Majesties. Tiny hills, childlike compared to the Himalayas they had just left behind, rolled and swayed in the path of the dying sun. The royal entourage was camped at Bahlwan on their way back to Agra from Kashmir. Early that morning, Jahangir and Mehrunnisa had left on a hunt in the neighboring forests.

  The men stood, their eyes upon the cusp of two gently sloping hills, and finally saw a little cloud of dust smearing the golden light of the western horizon. One of them broke away from the line and trotted steadily toward the royal party, some two miles away.

  Mehrunnisa and Jahangir rode together ahead of the others. They were both tired, and gloriously so. It wasn’t just the exhilaration from the hunt, the scent of the prey, the smooth shots from their muskets, but also the freedom from being confined to a jogging palanquin on the journey south to Agra. Mehrunnisa glanced at the Emperor and smiled. She did this so often that he finally turned to her.

  “What is it?”

  “You are well today, your Majesty.” And he did look well after all the months of illness. The air of Kashmir, pure, heady and clear, cut through by
the Himalayan mountains, had been beneficial to all of them, especially to Jahangir. Without the dust of the lower plains to clog his lungs, his asthma had cleared and his cough had vanished.

  Jahangir smiled at her. “I feel as though I were young again.”

  “But you are.”

  “You flatter me, Mehrunnisa,” he said, laughing. “Look at the gray in my hair.” He patted his comfortable stomach. “Look, my cummerbunds have been growing larger and larger, one day the workshops will send a message that there is not enough cloth in the empire!”

  She reached out a hand to him, and he held it, looking into her face. Mehrunnisa was unveiled, it was too hot to cover her face, she had said, her breath stopped under the muslin in all the dust. So she had taken it off and laid it about her shoulders. And they had ridden ahead of the rest; all that could be seen of her was that slender back, straight upon the saddle, the legs looped over the horse, the neck rising from the shrouds of the veil, and a small glimpse of her profile as she turned to Jahangir.

  “You are as lovely to me as the first day I saw you, Mehrunnisa,” the Emperor said.

  Little lines of worry patterned her forehead. “Have I done nothing to disappoint you, your Majesty?”

  “Why? . . . Because of Ladli?”

  Mehrunnisa nodded, her eyes troubled. “I still wonder . . .”

  “It cannot be wrong,” Jahangir said, “I hear there is to be a child.”

  “Perhaps; it is too early yet, but perhaps.”

  “Then why are you so tense, my dear?” He leaned over to rub her back. Their horses bumped into one another and then shied away. “I miss Asmat too. She was truly a mother to me.”

  Mehrunnisa allowed her horse to amble a few yards to the right and yanked at the left rein when she saw he was straying. She did not speak, just listened as the Emperor talked about her mother. Asmat had died last October, six months after Ladli’s wedding. She had been too ill to attend the ceremony, but none of them had realized that she would never rise from her bed again. And after Ladli’s wedding, Mehrunnisa had been so occupied with watching her daughter to see if she was happy, content, or at least merely not distressed that she had not watched over her mother. Asmat had died as she had lived, gently, not staining the lives of those around her with evil or malice. She had been a quiet presence for many years, and had gone just as quietly.