Shadow Princess (35 page)

“Go!” She had swept to the windows and would not turn to look at him again. Silently, he had kissed his hand and sent the kiss flying toward her rigid back. “Aurangzeb”—her voice had been acid—“you take too much upon yourself. It’s not for you to tell me what I must do and what I must not. Come back when you’ve had some experience of the world yourself, and talk with me then.”

He had not replied because he had felt that there was no response he could make that would satisfy her. She would realize one day that he had been right; Aurangzeb was content to wait until then, knowing that he had done his duty in attempting to protect Jahanara, who was misguided in her actions and needed his succor. One day, she would even accept it.

The water of his bath cooled as Aurangzeb sat in thought in his tent at Orchha. He could hear the soldiers shouting and singing outside, their voices broken into stupidity by alcohol and opium, its sweet, sickly smell permeating even the canvas walls of his tent. It was still an hour to sunset, and they were already drunk, he thought, nauseated. If he had been the true commander here, he would have put a stop to all of these unseemly festivities, ordered a halt for prayer five times a day, had the camp swept free of the women of ill repute and the
nautch
girls.

He dried his hands on a towel and picked up his quill again, blocking out the sounds of carousing with an ease that came only from practice. When Aurangzeb wanted, he could concentrate in a matter of minutes on something to the exclusion of all else. He wrote, steadily, almost identical letters to his father and his sister.

Here in Orchha, the erstwhile Raja Jhujhar and his father, Raja Bir Singh, have chosen their seat with the eye of an architect and a landscaper, without, I understand, having the benefit of either of these. How could these people from the plains have the kind of insight we have into such matters? But the countryside is fine in parts, and the palaces stand in a place of eminence. The river Betwa flows through this dry, baked, brown dirt, creating broad bands of opulent forests and farmlands along its banks, as though it carries the green within its clear blue heart. During the day, partridges, wild fowl, and bustards scurry across our path—they are plentiful, and I have already shot a fair number. The trees hide other animals—the
nilgau,
deer, tigers, and leopards. Wild elephants trumpet all night long, especially when a female is due to give birth, which the soldiers tell me should be anytime now, and we are all fearful of entering the forest for the next few days. The Betwa’s waters are sweet and cool to a parched throat, the palaces are of a fashion I have not seen anywhere else in Hindustan, with their flat roofs, their
chattris
in our style, some domes here and there, all standing in a ring in the river. The Betwa is unusual in this, it splits into two at a point and curves east and west, meeting to form one stream again farther south, and the Rajas have built their palaces in the center of this loop of the river, so that from the rooftops one sees the calm of azure water all around, creating an island.

He read over what he had written and copied it onto Jahanara’s letter. This would be the first time he had communicated with her since he left her apartments at the fort at Agra without saying good-bye. Though he had muttered the word at the doorway, he did not think she had heard. But she would be interested in reading what he had to say here, this much he assured himself, because he had tried to copy Emperor Babur’s writing style from the
Baburnama,
a book precious to both his father and Jahan. He could not keep from adding these words at the end of Jahanara’s letter, because he really did not know how to be humble—
I will touch only briefly upon the matter we talked of last. . . . Whatever happens, I will look after you, Jahan.

The Luminous Tomb

I always thought one of the chief faults of Hindustan was that there was no running water. . . . A few days after coming to Agra, I crossed the Jumna with this plan in mind and scouted around for places to build gardens, but everywhere I looked was so unpleasant and desolate that I crossed back in great disgust.

—
WHEELER M. THACKSTON
, (trans. and ed.),
The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor

Agra

Thursday, February 1, 1635

13 Sha’baan
A.H.
1044

W
ith the riverfront terrace completed, the tomb itself rose rapidly into the sky. When workers raised wooden walkways on stilts to build the dome of the central, marble monument, two other walkways zigzagged up to the top of the Miham Khana and the mosque on either side. All three buildings were constructed from brick and mortar, layer upon layer, with thick walls, domes, and arches, so that they would endure in their unsullied, new-built splendor five hundred years from now. But the facing of the main tomb was attired in the speckled white marble that Ustad Ahmad Lahori had convinced Emperor Shah Jahan to use, and the mosque on the left and the Miham Khana on the right, absolutely identical to each other in look if not in function, were clad in red sandstone. These two latter buildings, guardians of the Luminous Tomb through time, were to provide sanctuaries for the meeting of the nobles and commoners and hallowed places for prayer.

With all the aspects of the riverfront terrace finished, Ahmad Lahori stepped again onto the platform of the Great Gate and viewed his creation. The earth gaped from where he stood to the tomb itself, and the sun had carved out a space for itself in the roasted dirt and turned all of their skins a corroded brown, broiled their brows, desiccated their insides. It was finally time to begin planting in the gardens. For almost four years, they had all labored in the hundred-degree heat of the summers without even the meager shade of a sapling to cover them, and now that the main part of the tomb’s complex was done, they could breathe and rest as they performed the pleasurable task of raising greenery.

The first thing to do in the tomb’s gardens was to build the four immense sandstone pathways that would meet at right angles in the very center. Here would float a pool in white marble with severe square rims on the outside and voluted edges on the inside. There would be five fountains in this pool to mist water into the scorching air of the summer, and the waters would be clean and cool, for pilgrims to stop at, wash their faces, drink from the cupped palms of their hands. The main pathway that led from the Great Gate on the south to the tomb itself in the north would be similarly interspersed with fountains; the pathway crossing it, from east to west—thus dividing the gardens into the traditional
charbagh
—would be a blank walking path.

With the pool in place, Ahmad Lahori began drawing up plans to bring in the water. He experimented with various engineering styles, visited the gardens around Agra, especially the first imperial garden, built by Emperor Babur some one hundred years ago, and mulled over an ingenious technique by which to lift water from the Yamuna River and into the gardens of the Taj Mahal. While Lahori was pondering how to conceal the workings of the system, so that it would seem as though the gardens produced water out of the heat and dust and the emerald trees, he met a Venetian, a traveler who was writing a history of India, or so he said to the great architect. Only mildly curious about this foreigner (for there were so many in Agra), Lahori invited him home for a meal so that the women of his
zenana
could have a look at him through the latticework net that divided the public and private spaces of his house. Amid the tittering and laughter from behind the screen, as the women examined the man’s red hair and his sweaty red beard and colorless eyes, Lahori let slip his dilemma about the gardens of the Taj, and the Venetian, in turn, boasted of some ancient waterworks in a country called Rome. Lahori clapped his hands, gestured to shoo the women away, and sent his guest on his way to write his history as he would, laden with gifts of silk cloth, a mule to carry his belongings in all of his wanderings, and a manservant. Lahori spent the night sketching, for the Venetian had given him an idea which he wanted to explore, and he had not had the heart to tell the man that, though the waterworks he spoke of had been in Rome for some one thousand years, in Hindustan they had existed for much longer.

An inlet was dug out from the river on the western side of the complex—the side which housed the mosque on the riverfront terrace—and here batches of sixty-two oxen went around in endless circles so that a waterwheel with buffalo-hide buckets could scoop water in turn and tilt it into an elevated aqueduct with channels open to the sky. The aqueduct ended in three large cisterns raised to the level of the western compound wall, and the entire system lay outside the western wall of the Luminous Tomb’s gardens. From the cisterns, a lone pipe snaked its way into the wall and then downward, and the elevation was just enough so that when the pipes were connected with the fountain spouts of the central pool and the long pool of the north-south pathway, water gushed and played as it was intended to do.

In the gardens themselves, all the pipes, made of copper or kiln-fired or sunbaked terra-cotta, were buried inside the stone pathways—if a leak developed, or the system failed to work, the stone would have to be broken and lifted from the ground for the fixing. But Ahmad Lahori had just finished constructing a tomb formed of luminescence—a little seeping of water did not worry him, and, confident of his design, he boldly interred all the pipes in stone so that water would be seen, heard, touched, and felt in abundance in the gardens but its source would be concealed from view.

With the water in place, they began to lay out the trees in the sixteen quadrants of land in the gardens—each of the four quadrants formed by the main pathways had then been split into another four. Tall cypresses, chenars, evergreens, cotton trees, and medlars all struck root along the pathways in groups of two and three, and under their welcome, opaque shade, Lahori put stone benches to rest aching legs. The remainder of the gardens was left all light, brilliant and searing during the day, blue and silver in the moonlight. And here, in consultation with the Empire’s most expert landscapers and with agreement from his Emperor (by correspondence), Ustad Lahori laid out a series of parterres of finely wrought, slender sandstone pieces in the shapes of stars, rectangles, squares, and octagons, and crammed these with flowers. The land around the parterres was the green of a painstakingly cultivated lawn. And in this lush jade were jewel points of color according to the season—heavy pink and purple roses from Kabul, burnt orange marigolds, white carnations, sweating poppies, tulips and daffodils from the gardens of Kashmir.

And that was how the living frame for the building was formed, the sumptuous cool greens of the trees, the scent of flowers, and, floating above it all, the shimmering white of the Luminous Tomb.

The underside of the canopy is covered with diamonds and pearls, with a fringe of pearls all round, and above the canopy . . . there is a peacock with an elevated tail made of blue sapphires . . . the body of gold inlaid with precious stones, having a large ruby in front of the breast, whence hangs a pear-shaped pearl of 50 carats or thereabouts.

—
WILLIAM CROOKE
(ed.)
AND V. BALL
(trans.),
Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier

Agra

Saturday, February 10, 1635

22 Sha’baan
A.H.
1044

S
even years in the making, Emperor Shah Jahan thought as he ascended the three steps to the Peacock Throne and sank down on the main
gaddi
—a mattress thickly stuffed with cotton and upholstered in red velvet embroidered in gold
zari
and minute pearls. He was alone in the Diwan-i-khas at the fort at Agra, having sent all the guards and eunuchs outside, and this was the first time he was seeing the throne which he had commissioned soon after his coronation. Bibadal Khan, the superintendent of the imperial
karkhanas,
had begged to be allowed at this viewing, wishing to see his Emperor’s reaction for himself, to note his Majesty’s pleasure when his eye lit upon the glitter of gold and precious stones, to see whether he had executed this task to his ruler’s satisfaction. But Shah Jahan had banished him also, wishing for some quiet from the bustle of life that surrounded him daily. He had carved out this time from his sleep, rising before the sun as usual for the early-morning
jharoka,
and then, instead of returning to the
zenana
for a few hours of sleep, he had turned to the Diwan-i-khas, where the Peacock Throne would be unveiled to the
amirs
in the evening.

It was the month of February, and an impenetrable mist eddied into the courtyard from the Yamuna below, turning the battlements of the fort waxen, hiding from view the waters themselves. The white marble of the Diwan-i-khas’s pillars was dim and cold to the touch, and with the throne positioned in the center of the balcony, even the inlay work in blues and reds seemed to have lost its luster. For the Peacock Throne was brilliant. It was in the shape of a platform, six feet by four feet, atop four thick stumps clad in beaten gold sheets. On the main platform, on three sides of the throne, were arranged twelve pillars, which held up the canopy—the front, where the Emperor would sit and face the court, was open. Inside the pillars was a raised back for the throne, constructed of solid gold and inlaid with a thousand shimmering gems.