Shadow Princess (19 page)

When she sighed, he had said, “I know as much as you do about Hugli, Jahan, and troops will be sent there. I’ve asked Bapa to send a
farman
to Qasim Khan, the governor of Bengal, to lay siege to the Portuguese settlement at Hugli and demolish it. Not a single able-bodied man will survive, and if the women and children live, they will be our slaves for the rest of their lives.”

And so it had come about. The assault on the Portuguese should have been brief, thunderous, ravaging, but to everyone’s surprise, they had held out long beyond any time frame considered reasonable—a whole three months. It had taught them all a lesson, Jahanara thought now in December of 1632, about the value of allowing foreigners to entrench themselves so deeply in Mughal land that they began to consider it their own.

The Portuguese had first come to the Indian coast in the late 1400s, when Vasco da Gama landed a ship in a southeastern kingdom, and had departed, cannily, with a vague treaty for trade from the local king and left behind a battalion of men to form a settlement. The first Mughal Emperor found his way to Hindustan only in 1526, over a quarter of a century later. Then there had been an English embassy at the Mughal court headed by Sir Thomas Roe and a slew of representatives from the Dutch East India Company. All of these other
firangis
the Portuguese Jesuits had fought hotly in skirmishes around the Empire, slowly acquiring the lands on the western coast—Bombay, Daman, Diu, and Goa, at the last of which was the seat of the Portuguese Viceroy to India. They had made forays into the eastern coastline also, in and around the Bay of Bengal, settling first at Satgaon and moving to Hugli, on the river by the same name, when the river’s waters near Satgaon began to silt up and left the port unusable for large ships.

In Hugli, the Portuguese had begun to build in earnest—a fort at Gholghat, a Jesuit church, a seminary, splendid mansions for people. And in the transferring of the crown from Emperor Jahangir to Emperor Shah Jahan, their confidence had grown, resulting in this wrecking. But they should not have underestimated either the wrath or the power of Emperor Shah Jahan and his favorite daughter, the Begam Sahib Jahanara.

At the end of the imperial siege, Hugli lay devastated. Five thousand men from the settlement died violent and terrible deaths. Their women and children were fashioned into a walking caravan and made to cover the distance between Hugli and Agra, some seven hundred and fifty miles, on foot like cattle. When they reached Agra, they were given two choices: convert to Islam or die. In the end, most of them converted, and they were given away to the
amirs
at court for use in their harems, or for use as slaves, or as anything they wanted.

When the news of the conquest arrived, Jahanara had come upon Dara in his gardens, staring morosely out into the deep afternoon shadows under a tamarind tree.

“What is it?” she had asked.

“The Jesuit fathers will not come to my religious sessions,” he had said.

“Dara.” She had put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t feel compassion for them or rely so entirely upon someone else who is but a servant in your lands. A good and just Emperor will not. So you must learn too.”

He’d stripped a stalk of the green tamarind of its leaves, scattering them on the ground before him. “I want to marry, Jahan,” he had said. “It is time this good Emperor had sons for the Empire.”

“Who?” she had asked, amused by his change in mood. “You are thinking of someone, or shall I find her for you?”

Dara had said almost shyly, “Nadira.”

Their cousin, Jahanara had thought, their uncle Parviz’s daughter, who had come back to Agra with them when they left Burhanpur. There was no reason to consider this anything other than a good match—she was a royal and had no brothers who would cause trouble in the future for Dara in coveting the throne, and they had all known Nadira as children.

“I will talk to Bapa,” she had said, rising and thinking of how easy it had been to furnish Dara with a wife, and one of his wanting. If only she could herself arrange . . . And so, a few months later, she had sent a summons to Mirza Najabat Khan to meet her in the
chaugan
grounds, setting unwittingly into motion an open, though unacknowledged, war between her sister and her.

The first-born son of King Shahjahan was the prince Dara, a man of dignified manners, of a comely countenance, joyous and polite in conversation, ready and gracious of speech . . . kindly and compassionate, but over-confident in his opinion of himself. . . . He assumed that fortune would invariably favour him.

—
WILLIAM IRVINE
(trans.)
Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, by Niccolao Manucci 1653–1708

Agra

Monday, January 25, 1633

14 Rajab
A.H
. 1042

T
he rubies, your Highness?”

“The tray sits in its own stand, on your right,” Jahanara called out. The servant looked about indecisively, shoulders hunched over by the weight he was carrying, not daring to lift his gaze in the direction of her voice. When he did not move, she sighed and said sharply, “Near the silks, no, not the reds, the blues. Move it closer.”

She watched his fumbling movements with exasperation, her fingers entwined between the carved floral gaps in the two-inch-thick marble screen behind the throne. It was the middle of the third watch of the day, around two o’clock in the afternoon, and the winter sun had finally seared through the morning’s mist to fling a sheer golden veil of light around the courtyard. But Jahanara’s vision was limited by the screen, and press as she would her face to the cool stone, she could still not see what the servant was doing and whether he had followed her orders.

When she leaned back, the pattern of the marble was stamped on her cheek, the side of her mouth, and a part of her forehead. She was in the
zenana
enclosure behind the throne in the Diwan-i-am, the Hall of Public Audience, at the fort at Agra. The hall itself was a mammoth open courtyard, circumscribed by one-story-high corridor arches in red sandstone. At one end of the yard was this rectangular verandah jutting out into the grass—with nine arches on the front and three on each of its two sides. The fourth side of the verandah was built into the fort itself and contained a throne room—a little corral—built entirely in gleaming white marble, whittled with niches for candles around Emperor Shah Jahan’s
gaddi
. The marble was inlaid on every possible surface, flat and recessed, with gleaming blue and reds and greens—turquoise, corals, and jasper—wrought in the shapes of blooming flowers and vines. The throne room was the jewel set within the verandah of the Diwan-i-am and had been, solely, Emperor Shah Jahan’s vision. The verandah had a flat roof and sat on a three-foot-high sandstone platform. Its pillars were white but actually built in sandstone and polished with a high-gloss lime
chunam
.

Princess Jahanara Begam was standing behind the throne’s recess, within the walls of the fort, and trying to direct from there the thirty servants who were scurrying around in the verandah. She had ordered the floor of the verandah to be meticulously cleaned and laid over with cotton mattresses, and she had had brought thick Persian rugs in deep reds and carpeted the whole from one end to the other. When that was done, the men had disappeared one by one into the
zenana
behind her, to a special anteroom where they were given their precious burdens, which they brought out in a procession. These were all presents that Jahanara was giving to Dara and Nadira for their wedding, and today she was going to display them for the court to see, as was traditional before a marriage took place.

Jahanara put her hand on the latch of the door which led into the throne area, and another hand was laid on her wrist at the same time.

“What are you doing?” Satti Khanum said. “You cannot go out until the servants have left.”

The princess took her hand away from the door. “I know, Satti, but they are dolts, with no sense about how to arrange the gifts. Look, that man has spilled the rubies.”

And so he had; as he turned, the lower edge of his
qaba
had brushed against the tray and sent it thumping onto the carpets. The rubies had scattered over the red Persian rugs, glowing with a fire’s heart. The man glanced behind him toward Jahanara and Satti Khanum, whom he could not see, and crouched to gather the faceted stones in the skirt of his long tunic. When the rubies were collected, he stood there staring at the burden on his lap. His mouth was loose, his face filled with longing and awe. His monthly salary was three rupees, and in the folds of his clothing he held a
khazana
worth at least forty thousand rupees. His hands quivered with want.

“I must go,” Jahanara said, and, pulling her veil over her head, she opened the door and stepped out onto the balcony. As the servants watched in mute astonishment, she drew her long
ghagara
around her knees and vaulted down into the verandah.

Ishaq Beg said harshly, “Get out!” and the men fled down the long halls of the verandah and into the tepid sunshine. The fifteen eunuchs guarding them brushed and patted them down as they exited the courtyard, tripping over each other in their haste to leave.

Satti Khanum followed Jahanara into the verandah in a much more leisurely fashion, out into the
zenana
at the back of the throne and down steps.

“You are always in a hurry, Jahan,” she said. “Some caution would have been advisable.”

Jahanara nodded, only half listening. Satti was the older sister of Emperor Jahangir’s poet laureate, Talib-i-Amuli, and had lived in Persia until he called for her to come to Hindustan. Here, Talib had the Emperor’s ear, and he had his sister assigned to Jahangir’s son’s harem when she was forty years old, aged already by Mughal standards. To the young Mumtaz Mahal, she had provided counsel and companionship and stayed by her side through her numerous confinements, looking after the children as they grew older, taking over the education of the princesses.

And yet, Jahanara thought, as Satti and Ishaq fetched and carried the trays on her orders and laid them out where they would be viewed at their best, she was stifled by Satti’s sternness, her constant cautions, her very chatter. Satti was an old woman now, as old as Jahanara’s grandmothers would have been, her face lined deeply in the forehead and around the mouth. Her back was stooped, and some of her teeth were missing. For Satti Khanum, entry into the imperial
zenana,
being attached to the quarters of the woman who became Empress, had been beneficial. She had an adopted daughter, a girl she had taken for her own upon coming to Hindustan, who was married to Amanat Khan, who had been recently hired as a calligrapher for the Luminous Tomb. She had continued on in the imperial harem, had amassed riches in gifts and bonuses from her mistress, and thought of herself as supreme . . . after the princesses. Satti had taught Jahanara Persian and verses from the Quran, and, in the change of power from Mumtaz Mahal to her daughter, had forgotten that Princess Jahanara Begam was no longer her student.

When all had been arranged, Satti and Jahanara stood in the center of the verandah.

“Such treasures for the prince and his wife,” Satti said in a whisper.

For treasures they were. A month before, Jahanara had sent a hundred thousand rupees’ worth of jewels and clothing to her uncle Prince Parviz’s widow, who had taken a house along the banks of the Yamuna River a short distance from the fort, for the first part of the wedding proceedings. That had been merely a promise. Laid out in front of her was the rest of what she was going to give Dara and Nadira.

Massive gold trays piled with lustrous raw silks from Thailand in colors of rose and pearl, ten diamond necklaces worth between fifty and a hundred thousand rupees set in heavy gold, bangles studded with rubies and pearls, muslins as fine as summer mist fashioned into pantaloons and bodices and veils—and each of these had gold and silver
zari
embroidered into the fabric, strewn with diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and rubies. A merchant had brought a bag full of rubies from Badakhshan, and Jahanara had bought his entire inventory for Dara, unable to resist the glow of red, like luscious pomegranate seeds, overcome by emotion because the Balas rubies were mined in the land where Mirza Najabat Khan claimed his ancestry. He would see these rubies also, later in the evening, when the Begam Sahib’s gifts to her brother would be presented to the nobles at court by the light of torches and candles, the colors of the silk muted, the diamonds sparkling. And a few hours from now, Emperor Shah Jahan would visit the Diwan-i-am himself, along with the ladies of the imperial harem, to view the gifts.

Jahanara recognized the wonderment in Satti Khanum’s voice, mingled with a little jealousy and some frustration, and she smiled to herself. She had a huge income from her father, and
this
was the value of all that money. The envy was directed toward her, not Dara or Nadira, who would receive all this magnificence, because it meant she could so easily give away so much and not miss it.