Mistress of the Throne (The Mughal intrigues) (9 page)

I could tell we’d left Agra because the scent of sweetmeats and kebabs was fading, gradually being replaced by that of woods and forests. The bumpiness of our ride made me realise the heavily vegetated mud paths of the wilderness had replaced the paved streets of Agra. Day and night we travelled, stopping more frequently than usual so Ami would have sufficient rest. At times, Ami protested to Aba that he was making her feel like a burden by slowing down his troops en route to war, but Aba would not relent. He continued to pamper Ami, as if she were still in Agra.

The journey was long. Travelling with the Emperor was very different than travelling with anyone else. Even during the march to war, Aba paused to hold court every day at noon, dusk and dawn to anyone who wished to pay homage and present gifts. The local nobles – the
ranas
,
amirs, divans, maharajahs
– gladly paid us homage as the Emperor passed through lands they claimed to rule, knowing full well they were ultimately subservient to us.

Several days into our journey, I began to sense yet another change in smell.
Was it the Deccan?
The Deccan had a vague but familiar scent that is very difficult for me to even describe. The Deccan was really nothing more than an endless mass of jungle with interspersed pockets of isolated villages run by petty princes. Oddly, it was comforting to me. This is where I’d grown up, and though life was much more fulfilling now, I often thought of the Deccan with nostalgic joy, for this land was where I had spent many happy moments with my parents.

“Not there yet,” Ami would correct me. “But we’re getting close.” We’d actually taken a detour through the state of Gujarat and were several days from the Deccan.

Suddenly, the air was filled with the most putrid stench of waste I’d ever known. “What is that smell?” I choked. I began coughing and moved my shawl over my nose to attempt a partial escape from the stench. “It smells like death.”

Ami looked equally disgusted and worried. We moved the curtain of the canopy with our hand and looked out for answers. “Allah have mercy!” cried Ami.

The shock in her voice was nothing compared to my own feelings. I utterly lost my voice. Perhaps Ami had seen such a disturbing scene in the past, allowing her to be in simple dismay, but for me this was a sight unlike any other that had ever met my eyes. My breath quickened.

“Where are we, my child?” Ami asked rhetorically, probably aware I had no answer.

To our dismay, dead bodies of all ages and types were lining the streets. The road was littered with them: men, women, children, goats, cattle, dogs, horses. Those not yet cremated or buried had been partially consumed by jackals and vultures. This desolate village looked completely devoid of any inhabitants. The air was dry and suffocating, making it impossible to even breathe. “Allah have mercy!” repeated Ami. I stared at my mother as she again invoked God. Yet one devastating scene gave rise to another even more horrific one. I held my breath at the stench of the beggars now filling the air. I didn’t want to risk inhaling their affliction.

“Two
dam
!!!” yelled a man. so skinny I could see every bone is his body. He held a baby in his hands out to us.

“What’s a dam?” I asked Ami, trying to sound unmoved. She told me a dam was made of copper, and was the lowest form of currency; I had never seen nor heard of it before. As royalty, the lowest denomination I dealt with was the rupee, made of silver; but more commonly, I just used the
mohur
s, made of solid gold.

“Allah have mercy!” Ami continued as she gazed at the man. “They’re selling their children for money!” With no food for entire villages, the inhabitants had resorted to deserting their own children. As Ami and I stared at the devastation, we saw a group of men fighting each other for rights to a pile of dung to see if there was a piece of undigested grain they could eat.“This is the real India, Jahanara,” said Ami. “This is what you must fight for. The true sin and offence against Allah is poverty.”

“Wait! Wait! Please, we need your help!” A pale-skinned man at a distance pleaded with our caravan to come to a halt. Our soldiers immediately surrounded the poor man for the offence of stopping the King. Ami and I, seated in the palanquin behind Aba’s, heard bits and pieces of the conversation. Ami asked one of our eunuchs if the man was old or young, to which the eunuch replied, “He is young, handsome, and slender.”

As the caravan resumed its journey, I snuck my head from behind the gold-embroidered curtain on my elephant to look upon the village again. As I did so, my gaze settled on a man wearing a white shirt tucked into dark pants with sweat pouring down his face. Tall, with blond hair and green eyes, he was truly the most handsome man I had ever seen, though I couldn’t understand why I felt the need to stare at him. As the elephant rode by, I continued staring at him though he wasn’t looking at me. Finally, he moved his head up and towards me and our eyes met. He smiled at me, sending me into a quiet fit of embarrassed joy, and I ducked back into the palanquin. When I gathered the courage to peek my blushing olive face out of the palanquin again, the man was gone, and I was filled with a sudden sadness because I knew I would never see his handsome face again.

That night we camped in the outskirts of the famine-stricken town. The stench had left the air, and the royal cooks had begun to prepare roast chickens, curried lamb and mixed vegetables for our dinner.

As always, Aba insisted on having dinner with us. Ami asked, “What was the commotion with that
firangi?
” as she sipped her soup sporadically, as if with a depressed appetite.

“His name is Gabriel Boughton,” Aba replied. “He’s a physician with the East India Company.” The East India Company was a corporation of British merchants who lobbied the Mughal emperor for trading rights in India.

“What’s he doing here in this desolate land?” inquired Ami, taking the words out of my mouth.

Aba said, “Well, though he’s a doctor by trade, it seems his official profession now is a commercial traveller for the East India
Company.” Aba took another bite of his chicken, seeming little interested in saying anything more about this man who, I was embarrassed to admit, had piqued my growing interest. “He seems to have travelled from Surat to Gujarat on his way to Agra, but seeing the devastation from the famine caused him to remain here.”

Gabriel pleaded with our generals for food and supplies and a small garrison of soldiers to protect him and those with him from robbers. In response to his request, Aba ordered half of all rations travelling with the caravan to be given to Gabriel, to be distributed as he saw fit; imperial tents to be used as safe houses, living quarters, and hospitals; and 200 troops were set to guard his supplies and men. Aba also ordered 5,000 rupees to be distributed every Monday among the deserving poor. As for the governors of the Deccan, who had sat silently and increased their treasuries during this time of destitution, Aba ordered them to be relieved of their duties and sent back to Agra immediately.

That night, Aba bid Ami and me goodnight with his kingly kiss on our foreheads, oblivious to how his story of Gabriel’s courage and heroism had affected me. As all girls do, I dreamed of romance. Was it just lust or something much deeper I felt for this man? I had read poetry devoted to this thing called ‘love’ and of how numerous people along the ages had withered and died from this strange illness. But to me, love was nothing more than an illusion, a concept meant to be heard, not felt. Still, I decided that with time I would approach Ami about how I was feeling and let her guide me. My inner feelings were too raw and fragile to be shared with anyone else.

The Burhampur fort was a much smaller building than our fort in Agra. Made of brick, it reflected the undeveloped and simple character of the region it was located in.

As our caravan finally arrived in the fort of Burhampur, I continued to think about the pale-skinned man with whom I’d shared but one moment of eye contact. I wondered how people in
his country lived and what traditions they followed. Unlike most Mughals, Gabriel had no facial hair; his head-hair was blond; he wore tight English trousers; his eyes were hazel green. Yet here he was, thousands of kos from his home, yet he’d stopped the royal caravan to plead for rations for my people, while we, the royalty, were ready to merely drive past the people’s plight. Such gentleness was rare in the Mughal household. Perhaps Dara had it, I thought, but even he now spent more time on religion than in practical community service.

As we arrived at the imperial fortress in Burhampur, I helped my pregnant mother to the harem quarters, using the opportunity to talk to her about this encounter with the firangi. Though only three months pregnant, her face had turned pale white, and she was losing weight from her face and arms, as if this child was literally draining the life out of her. She was unable to walk without the assistance of another, and even then she moaned with every step.

The marble staircase in the fortress was poorly maintained, its edges cracked and uneven. One could see the wear and tear on the tiles of the steps, on which thousands of people had stomped through the ages. Ami moaned every time she raised a leg to take a step up.

I asked her, “How long was it before you knew you loved Aba?” as we limped up the stairs.

Ami looked at me as if annoyed that I would choose such an inopportune time to ask such a question. “How many times do I have to tell you the story?” she asked me wearily. I stared at her feet as we continued to climb, pointing her where to step and trying to bear her weight as she leaned on me.

“I know the story,” I replied, “but you never told me how
long
before you
knew
.”

Still moaning and limping, she huffed, smiled at me and said: “Instantly!”

Indeed, I’d heard the story of my parents’ romance many times. In fact, nearly everyone in the Mughal kingdom knew it. It had become somewhat of a legendary fairytale. While every king and queen would have some stories recited about them praising their
beauty and greatness, my parents didn’t need any court chronicler to create a mythical tale about them; their story was popular long before they were crowned – and it was factual!

My parents had met 23 years earlier, in 1607 at the royal Meena Bazaar, a private marketplace where the women of the aristocracy purchased dyes, oils, waxes and perfumes that were essential for their elaborate daily beauty rituals. Men were strictly forbidden, however, and any man caught in the bazaar would have his hands and feet cut off at the minimum. Certain dates, however, were reserved as ‘contrary dates’ during which men and women were all welcomed in the bazaar regardless of rank. The bazaar on these dates looked less like a traditional marketplace and more like a lusty pleasure garden, with courtship and flirtation flowing in both directions between men and women.

Some otherwise passive and docile aristocratic women and concubines would even reverse their roles and become noisy shopkeepers, selling goods from behind the store pavilion and flirting with the young male customers, who, momentarily emancipated from the restrictive routine, would show off their courtly wit by asking prices in rhyming Persian verse.

One such stall was being managed by my mother, the daughter of the then Prime Minister, Asaf Khan, which prevented otherwise interested young courtiers from approaching the stall or striking a conversation with my immensely beautiful, fair-skinned mother. But if there was one courtier who was intoxicated by her beauty without being intimidated by her title, it was the young Mughal Prince, my father. Aba wasn’t intimidated by anyone else’s title or status, much to the chagrin of the other young men there. He moved from stall to stall, flirting and charming, but realising that as a prince, bargaining was beneath him, so his act of doing so was only to entertain the fair maiden and afford him the opportunity to flirt with her and give her the chance to flirt back. And though he knew he was off-limits to most of the young maidens, he enjoyed the game of flirtation.

But when my father reached Ami’s stall, he’s said to have stopped in his tracks. This was no maiden to be flirted with. She didn’t even
look typically Indian; she had Persian skin tone, and was tall and slender, and yet, for all these attributes, decidedly well-mannered and polite. Both their eyes are said to have gazed at one another for several minutes before Ami smiled and said, “Is there anything in my stall that pleases you, sir?”

“Much in this stall pleases me,” he replied. “This stall stands unique; it is the pride of the entire bazaar. If all the other booths were removed and only this one remained, it would be enough for me to come here every day and stay until it closes.”

Ami told me her face had turned red. After all, what wasn’t there to love in my Aba? Ami was a 15-year-old maiden, in her sexual prime, and here she’d met the future Emperor of India, just one year older, who was already a veteran of one war and a famous poet; a poet and a soldier, with good looks, artistic abilities, her age and a Muslim aristocrat. What girl wouldn’t fall in love with him? But she was not to be won over easily. She was to be a wife, she thought, not a concubine. Nor would she accept being second to any other wife. If she was to be Aba’s wife, she’d only be his if she knew she’d be the primary one. For this, she needed to know that Aba really wanted her.