Shadow Princess (28 page)

They had stopped in Jalandhar, almost right outside the western gateway of the Nur Mahal Sarai. Jahanara glanced out at it with curiosity, for it had been built by her grandfather Emperor Jahangir’s twentieth wife, Mehrunnisa, and named after her—after one of her various titles, Nur Mahal, the Light of the Palace. Emperor Jahangir had then changed his wife’s title to Nur Jahan, more lofty, of more consideration, now to mean the Light of the World. But the
sarai,
a rest house for weary travelers, had been built in the early days of their marriage, and it was already, some twenty years after its completion, steeped in legend—for a person in voyage, the words Nur Sarai had become a hallmark of perfection, and every other
sarai
in the Empire was compared to this one. When the slaves from the
zenana
came to assemble in front of her kneeling elephant, Jahanara handed the sleeping Goharara to one of the women and descended to stand in front of the massive entrance to the
sarai.
Somewhere, a mile ahead in the dust and scrub, Bapa, Aurangzeb, and Roshan would have halted also to pitch tents, light cooking fires, set up
shamiana
awnings to keep them cool. They had passed by the
sarai
and gone on because Empress Nur Jahan was a woman Emperor Shah Jahan detested, even though her niece had been his wife, and her brother—his father-in-law—was still one of his dearest supporters. And his children, Jahanara thought, could call the Empress their grandaunt. But for her elephant to have stopped at precisely this spot, when it could well have lumbered on for the lunch meal to another, only meant that Bapa wanted her to see the
sarai.

She stepped back and noted the red sandstone building’s thick and blind walls that stretched on each side, ending in engaged octagonal guard towers. The gateway itself was in two stories, the front carved in relief with exquisite depictions of court life—the
chaugan,
the battlefield, the peacocks in the
zenana
gardens, trees in full flower. Inside, the building was square, only one story high, and had arched verandahs running all around. Set inside the cool darkness of the verandahs were thirty-two rooms on each side. There was a
hammam
in one corner, a cookhouse in another, and a group of apartments in yet another with gold padlocked doors where Emperor Jahangir had stayed to please his wife when the
sarai
had been built.

“She had imagination,” Dara said softly by her side. He had come upon her as she stood in the center of the courtyard, and as he spoke, Jahanara felt Nadira’s touch upon her other arm.

“She is not dead yet, Dara,” Jahanara replied mildly as an idea came to her. Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, had been given a pension of two hundred thousand rupees a year when Emperor Jahangir died, and been sent to Lahore along with her husband’s body. It was customary for the widows of dead emperors to occupy a place in the imperial
zenana
of the new king, albeit a minor one, and usually as revered mothers who learned to involve themselves as little as possible in the new harem’s power structure. They were given a salary from the treasury, a roof over their heads, and a role to play in court occasions such as the Emperor’s birthday or the Nauroz festival, when they would send gifts and charity to the poor. With Mehrunnisa, such a pronouncement of a harmless retirement would have come easily to all of them, Jahanara thought, for they were related to her in two ways—she was their Mama’s aunt and their father’s stepmother. But then, there had been the small matter of Mehrunnisa attempting to put another son—Shahryar, who was married to her daughter Ladli—on the throne, and it had taken all of their grandfather’s guile and cunning to wrest power away from her and to their Bapa; —this Emperor Shah Jahan could not forget, and he did not forget.

She was forbidden to leave the city of Lahore and denied any access to the court. Jahanara did not think that her father, who would not break his journey at a rest house bearing her name, would welcome her into the palaces at the fort in Lahore when they arrived there. For the last six years, they had not spoken her name in his presence; it was as though she did not exist. This more than anything else was what Dara had meant when he spoke of her in the past tense.

They sat down in the shade of an enormous cypress growing in the center of the courtyard on spotless white silk-covered divans. The rest of the roof, open to the sky, was crisscrossed in thin iron bars, which formed a mesh, intertwining with the branches of the cypress. The rule in most
sarais
was that all the travelers had to pay their fee, find themselves rooms, and settle their livestock, their mounts, and their servants before nightfall. As the sun set, the great doors of the gateway would be shut, sealing the
sarai
from the outer world, and guards would take their places around the structure, which had no windows on the outside walls. Come dawn, the sentry would shout, “Wake and count yourselves and your belongings,” and he would wait for thirty minutes while the travelers did so, and if nothing had been stolen and no lives lost overnight, the great doors would be opened.

And such were the stories that Princess Jahanara Begam had only heard about the
sarais
in the Empire. For she had never herself traveled without an escort of at least six hundred men—eunuchs and
amirs
—and they had paused here only for a meal; as they ate in silence, her guards took up position in the verandahs, the eunuchs facing them, the nobles turned away in two solid lines of protection. The food came speedily from the kitchens, each platter from the imperial treasury, wrapped in gold and red cloth, which the head server untied in front of them, tasted discreetly, and then ladled out. Even with stone all around, breezes dipped into the courtyard through the iron mesh, rustled the leaves on the branches of the tree, sent the patterned shade skittering in patches of light and dark. When they had finished, they washed their hands and sat back.

“Entertainment,” said Dara, clapping his hands, and two of his musicians advanced to play and sing with a harmonium and a
tabla.
A juggler came next, picking up gold teaspoons from the white tablecloth six at a time and flinging them into the air so rapidly that he seemed to be surrounded by blades of gold. When he was done, he laid the spoons down quickly, plucking them out of nowhere, and said, “What next, your Highness?”

“What do you think, Jahan? You know his skill at mimicry; shall we ask him to do that?”

“Yes,” Jahanara said, laughing, enchanted by this eunuch of Dara’s who was so skillful. And she now knew why Bapa had wanted her to see the Nur Mahal Sarai—so that she could commission and build a better one herself; it would be a splendid use of her income.

“Prince Aurangzeb,” said Dara.

The man’s face fell solemn immediately, his eyebrows lowered over his eyes; his forehead seemed to widen; his cheeks drooped downward; and though he wore a beard, it disappeared into his hand. He took a few fast steps, pretended to read a book, shook his head, and clicked his tongue in disapproval. Then he stood up very straight, his shoulders rigid, his ear turned toward the skies as though he were listening intently to something.

Dara roared, and Nadira joined him, but Jahanara felt a prickle of uneasiness. It was a caricature of Aurangzeb, an exaggeration of all his intensity—and it
was
real enough to be identified as Aurangzeb . . . and not humorous at all. She had expected something else, perhaps an imitation of a slave girl, or a merchant haggling, or even an animal, but this was cruel and improper. She opened her mouth to halt the excessive mirth that seemed to have bloomed all around the courtyard, when Dara’s buffoon changed his expression and his manner. He bent over, let loose his beard, ran his fingers through it pensively. His mobile face aged as he created wrinkles on his forehead and around the corners of his mouth. He still had not spoken, but Jahanara recognized Sadullah Khan, the Grand Vizier of the Mughal Empire, in his actions.

“Dara,” she said finally, her voice abrasive. “Make him stop! This is ridiculous.”

“Do you know who that is?” Prince Dara Shikoh asked.

“Stop, Dara, you’re courting danger.”

Dara bristled, and Jahanara saw a movement near the gateway leading into the courtyard. The guards had parted to let someone in, and for them to give way so easily, without warning to the courtyard’s occupants, could only mean that the man who had entered was of some importance. The two women’s hands went over their heads as they pulled on their veils to cover their faces. The man glimpsed the buffoon in the center for just a moment, but it was enough of a moment, before he turned to the side and addressed the pillars of the verandah.

“Your Highness, his Majesty requests that you start on your way again.” His voice was quiet and respectful and ended in a slight tremor. The laughter dwindled, and a stunned silence followed in its path. Everyone looked at the princess.

“Yes, thank you, Mirza Sadullah Khan. We’re ready to leave,” Jahanara said. “Please convey this to our father.”

“I will, your Highness.” He bowed, hesitated, and retreated.

“It was a joke,” Dara said when the Grand Vizier had left. His eunuch had melted into the verandah, transforming into his inconspicuous self. Jahanara rose and went to the waiting
howdah
outside filled with a sense of dread. There could be no explanation for the afternoon’s events, no excuse at all given to the Grand Vizier, nothing that could be done without creating embarrassment on both sides. A royal prince could not apologize and lower himself to a noble at court, no matter how high a position he held, and she could not send word to Sadullah Khan either, so he would be offended and angered.

If it had been anyone else who had come by, they could have insisted that he had been mistaken, but not now. Perhaps, she thought, Mirza Sadullah Khan would see this as mild merriment and not an insult, but somehow she did not think so—Dara, assured of himself as the next Emperor, was gaining a reputation at court for being discourteous.

A little part of her also recoiled with outrage from the brother she loved so much. Was this how Dara spent his plentiful leisure, by mocking others? The eunuch’s gestures had been too practiced for him to have performed this act for the first time . . . which meant that Dara had encouraged him, Nadira too, but she could only follow where her husband led. Bapa wanted Dara to be heir. Princess Jahanara Begam stayed in her
howdah
for the rest of the journey, refusing company even when they halted for the night or for meals. She was thoughtful, suddenly anxious. She could not talk with Bapa; he was, perhaps, more blind to Dara’s faults than she, and this incident only would become small and inconsequential in the telling. If this had been narrated to her, she would have thought so also. But Jahanara had been in the
sarai,
had seen for herself the deep hurt in Mirza Sadullah Khan’s expression, how he had struggled to keep his face stoic . . . and failed. Who could she talk to then?

In the distance, a man cried out, “Two hours to Lahore!”

They were nearing the end of one part of the journey. Lahore, Jahanara thought, where there was one person who could advise her—one woman who knew the workings of the imperial
zenana
as though she had been born into it, who had conspired and schemed; who had won numerous times, who had lost in the end.

It would have to be another furtive meeting. But Jahanara was becoming quite proficient at these, with illicit lovers and now political outcasts.

Against the prevailing tradition of keeping widowed queens at court, Nur Jahan’s isolation in Lahore was virtually complete. . . . Shah Jahan worked hard to sully the memory of his once-powerful stepmother, with the result that almost all of the historical works from his reign were explicitly critical of Nur Jahan.

—
ELLISON BANKS FINDLY
,
Nur Jahan, Empress of Mughal India

Lahore

Saturday, February 25, 1634

26 Sha’baan
A.H
. 1043

N
orth and west of the walled city of Lahore—the main and massive stronghold of the Empire that Emperor Akbar had built and Emperor Jahangir had added to—lay the village of Shahdara. The earth was level here, smooth and uncontoured, its soil dark, alluvial, rich in minerals. Shahdara itself was on the northern bank of the Ravi River, and here, some twenty years earlier, Emperor Jahangir had given the land to his favorite wife, Mehrunnisa, who had landscaped, planted lavishly, and created terraces, pathways, and fountains for a new garden so lush and pleasing that it had since been called the Dilkusha garden—that which gladdens the heart.

At Dilkusha’s southern edge was a lone mansion of brick and sandstone, its lines long and elegant, with a gate through which to enter landward and a series of sandstone terraces scored down to the waterfront. It was a desolate land in many ways—as was much of the Mughal Empire itself away from the seat of the imperial court—even though Shahdara was just across the river from the greater, walled city of Lahore, and the imperial fort cut into the northwestern corner of the city.