Shadow Princess (48 page)

She pressed her forehead against the screen and closed her eyes. Remembering. All she had now were her thoughts that stretched into long days and desolate nights. The Nauroz festival was a time of rebirth, of happiness, music in the hallways and at court,
amirs
with cheerful faces, the giving of gifts, the receiving of them. Food in plenty. Wine in the fountains. Jahanara had heard that Aurangzeb’s court was more austere. In Delhi, the Nauroz would be celebrated with a mere gesture—no elaborate meals, no laughter, certainly no alcohol. If the
amirs
wished to drink, they did so in their homes, in the safety of their
zenanas
—even the public houses had been shut. The Emperor’s bounty in these stark times was measured by cloth caps that he stitched himself. Even with the pall over her, Jahanara could not help grinning. Bapa had given his nobles grants of land,
jagirs
and estates, higher ranks, more money, jewels from the treasury, positions of repute. Aurangzeb, the fool, gave them
caps.
He had said that he had too much time on his hands after matters of state had been attended to, so he kept busy with his scissors, his length of dreary cloth, his needle and his cotton thread.

She wondered what the
amirs
thought of this, what they dared to think of the man whom they had put on the throne of the Empire. The man who had imprisoned his father and his sister and had killed all of his brothers. Remorse? Had they finally realized their stupidity? She was to find out from one of them at least.

“Jahan.”

Jahanara’s heart began a mad thumping, and she forgot everything she wanted to ask; every bit of bitterness fled. She turned, saw Najabat, and put her hands over her face, overcome with love.

He came to her side with quick steps and enfolded her in his arms. He was trembling, much as she was. It had been some six years since he had held her thus, and yet, there was nothing unfamiliar. The scent of his skin, the strength of his grasp, the rub of his beard on the top of her head. He pulled away to look at her. He had aged, she thought, his eyebrows fully white, his hair thinning on the top. But his fingers were warm on her skin, his mouth . . . She leaned into him and laid her lips on his. She did not speak when he lifted her effortlessly and carried her to the divan, undoing her
choli
and her
ghagara,
laying her out in front of his gaze. His hands went across her body, flitting gently over the scars from the burning on her stomach, back, and thighs, rising to cup her breasts. She began to cry, and he wiped her tears away, kissing the sounds from her mouth. A lone jackal howled below at the waterfront, but Jahanara and Najabat did not hear it as they hungrily reached for each other, as they kissed and loved in the heated night.

When they were done, she lay on the divan on her side, Najabat’s head buried in the curve of her shoulder, their breaths easing.

“I have missed you.”

“I thought,” he said, “that I would never see you again, my love. Thank you for summoning me to your side.”

A long pause. “What do you think we will do now, my lord?”

He turned her over and put his palms on her face. “Come to my house, Jahan, leave this fort. Live in my
zenana;
let me look after you as I ought to.”

She pulled his hands away, all the anger she had felt rising in her again. “And what of my Bapa? Who will take care of him? You don’t think—Aurangzeb and you don’t stop to consider that he is a broken, beaten man. What will he do if I am not here?”

He rested his head on the pillow, pain drawing lines on his brow. “I’m sorry. Things . . . could have gone differently. If Prince Dara, indeed the other princes also, had only paid heed to his Majesty’s claim on the throne, they would still be alive. My hands”—he lifted them up and they shook—“are stained with their blood. I have no right to ask anything of you, Jahan. I am not your husband, merely the father of your child.”

Jahanara rose to draw a
peshwaz
over herself and sat down again, cross-legged. “If Antarah deserted you when you most needed him, Najabat. If—”

When he said nothing, she continued, “It was not necessary to have killed the princes.” But she knew, all too well, that it had been. That Najabat had been following Aurangzeb’s orders when he hounded Dara over the Empire, when he sent Murad to the prison at Gwalior, when he stood by as Shuja was killed. But she recalled that moment when Dara’s head had come to them in a silver box, his eyes closed, an almost foolish expression on his face. She had known then just how powerless they had all become, how difficult it would have been to stop Aurangzeb once he had begun this war of succession. And he had succeeded, much as Bapa had all those years ago when the throne became his.

In the gardens beyond, the cicadas had begun their incessant chirping. A woman’s voice, lustrous in song, floated in the warm night air from the banks of the river. Najabat put a hand on Jahanara’s thigh, daringly, and she let it lie, thinking of another night so many years ago—thirty or so—when she had listened to a woman singing while waiting for a lover. Since Najabat and she had come together in Kashmir, there had been no necessity for any other man. He had been everything to her. She bent to kiss his hand, held it in hers, sketched lines over the back and in his warm palm.

“Why did you call for me, Jahan?”

“I missed you,” she said again, looking at him, her eyes fixed on his face. She had missed him. So much. Perhaps—and she was being honest with herself—more than she had before, when she had been busy in the
zenana,
at court, by her Bapa’s side. But as much as she loved her father, he was an inadequate companion—ill most of the time, querulous and demanding at others—and she was tired of being in pain all the time. So . . . this little interlude.

“And nothing else?” he asked.

She looked away. “There can be nothing else. I do not stay with Bapa because it is my duty . . . though it
is.
I adore my father, and when he dies, Najabat, it will be my hand that will close his eyes, my image he will take with him on his final journey.”

“So he told me also,” Najabat said in a low voice.

“Who?”

“Your son. He said that I must not come between you, that this must be your decision, that you must do as you please, because you are no mere woman.”

Antarah had said that to Najabat. Princess Jahanara Begam leaned over and kissed her lover again, buried her mouth in his neck and cried. She had not seen her son in many years either, and there was no easy way to beckon him to her side, not as she had done his father. He was more or less a stranger to her, a gift from Allah to be cherished in brief moments, and each time she saw him, she marveled at how he had grown, what a fine young man he had become, how endearing, how beloved. Antarah was twenty-eight years old, a father himself, with his own
zenana,
and the title of Shah Alam from his Emperor—Aurangzeb’s sly way of acknowledging her lover and her son. As if she cared, Jahanara thought. But she did care, in some part of her heart, that her child should be so lauded at court, that his achievements should be recognized, that his father should be proud of him. Only the fact that Aurangzeb’s hand had signed the imperial
farman
granting Antarah his new title was troubling.

“Is he a good Emperor?” she asked, her voice muffled.

Najabat did not reply for a while, his breathing even. “Perhaps,” he said finally. “It’s too early to tell yet.”

So Najabat was disappointed too. In the past few years, Jahanara had been thinking about kingship and empires also. Dara would have been little better, this she saw now, because the Empire needed a king with a warrior’s heart and his had been that of a poet. Shuja and Murad would have been too precipitous in their decisions, too raw. Aurangzeb she had always considered would have been a bad sovereign, and he was proving himself thus. An ache came over her. Was this then the end of the Mughals? Who would rule after Aurangzeb? Did he think all of his numerous sons would forget the lessons he had demonstrated for them in grabbing the throne? Just as he doubtless was waiting for his father’s death, so were his sons awaiting their grandfather’s death, because he had taught them this. With no respect, no consideration, no pity, no sympathy . . . no real feeling, how could the Empire survive?

“You should go now, my lord,” she said.

Najabat dressed slowly, deliberately stretching out the minutes in Jahanara’s apartments. He did not take his gaze from her face. “Will I see you again, Jahan?”

She shook her head.

“We don’t have much time left. I am fifty-six years old this year, my love. What if I were to die?” He said this with a little smile on his face.

“And I will be fifty next year, Najabat,” she said, coming into his arms one last time. “But my place is here with Bapa. If Allah wills it, when Bapa dies, I will come out of the fort. Aurangzeb still wants me in his
zenana.
” She grimaced. “He has promised me the title of Padshah Begam. Roshan, I hear, is merely Shah Begam; he still waits for me, you see.”

“You see how much you are loved on the outside?”

“And on the inside, here, by my father.” She stepped back and raised her hand in farewell.

•  •  •

“How long,
beta
?” Emperor Shah Jahan asked. His hair had whitened after his wife’s death, thirty-two years ago, but now it had taken on the sickly, yellowed sheen of a beaten man who had been lying in his bed for a long while.

“Nine years,” Jahanara said slowly, leaning over her father. She could hear the harsh rasp in his breathing, the rumble in his voice as he spoke, and knew him to be frail and failing. If he would last the night, she thought, perhaps he would last another few years, but she saw nothing but defeat in his rheumy eyes, smelled the sourness in his breath, felt the too-tight clutch of his hands around hers . . . as though he knew too. “We have been here for nine years, Bapa.”

They were in the Shah Burj at Agra fort—the octagonal balcony jutting out from the battlements of the fort, clad in white marble, inlaid with semiprecious stones—where Shah Jahan had commanded elephant fights in the pounded earth
maidan
below, where the crowds had thronged in the early mornings, hoping for a glimpse to reassure themselves that he was alive and well.

“I wonder,” Emperor Shah Jahan said now, turning his face to the view beyond the arches of the Shah Burj and the glow of the white marble dome in the distance, “if anyone even believes that I still live. Is Aurangzeb a good sovereign,
beta
?”

“There is talk in the streets that he intends to reissue the
jizya.
”

Emperor Shah Jahan smiled, though it was a weak smile and cost him an effort, at the end of which he began to cough from deep within his chest. When the coughing had finally stopped, he laid his aged face in the curve of his daughter’s shoulder and said, “Aurangzeb was always a fool; he must know that he cannot rule a largely Hindu empire by offending almost all of its inhabitants. There will be rebellions. He is a fool.”

Jahanara stroked her father’s hair. Emperor Akbar had abolished the
jizya
when he began to build his Empire in Hindustan—it was a tax on non-Muslims, a head tax, paid for the mere fact that a person was a Hindu. There were other rules surrounding the
jizya
that created fear and loathing and, in doing so, an atmosphere of unrest. One of them was that no more than three Hindus could talk on the streets together or congregate in one another’s houses, for they would be automatically considered to have been in collusion against the Emperor and so fined or jailed. But Aurangzeb was always too rigid in his beliefs. Since the meeting with Najabat three years ago, reluctantly on her part, Jahanara had begun to correspond with Aurangzeb. She still refused to see him or to enter his
zenana,
but she did write to him, and when she had heard this news, her letter had been fiery. She had called him stupid also, and much more, but he had not listened.

She laid her father back on the pillows, and he picked up her hand and kissed it. “I am not very accomplished at farewells, Jahan. You saw how difficult it was for me to let go your Mama.”

Jahanara stilled his words. “Not yet, Bapa. You must not talk thus.”

He grasped at her wrist to pull away her hands and say, “I smell apples on my skin; it means death, my dear.”

So he still remembered that prophecy from fifty years ago, when the
fakir
had warned him that one of his sons would cause him grief and that, when the time came for him to go, his hands would be scented with the aroma of apples. She leaned over and put her nose in the cup of his hand, and there she smelled it too, the scent of the fruit.

She sobbed then, bending her head to let the tears pour over the wrinkled skin of his knuckles, beset by an abrupt fear of the emptiness his dying would leave. They had been so isolated for the past nine years, left here with a sprinkling of retainers—eunuchs and slaves. It was said that there was still a heavy guard outside the fort’s walls, but she had never seen the soldiers herself. Aurangzeb had sealed all the entrances to the fort except for one, and left only a man-size opening in that one. All of their food—grains, vegetables, meat, water—was brought through that doorway and inspected carefully before it was allowed in. And so they had lived, Bapa and she, alone and for the most part even happy. He had talked for long hours about his childhood and his youth, about growing up in the care of his grandfather Emperor Akbar and his favorite wife, Ruqayya Sultan Begam, who had adopted him—no, forcibly removed him from his mother’s quarters into hers. Jahanara had not met her great-grandfather, and even her grandfather Emperor Jahangir was but a faint memory to her. But her Bapa’s stories had told her so much about them—more than the official histories could ever record, more than posterity would ever know. An old man’s ramblings, Shah Jahan had said, now when he had nothing else to do.

“There is your Mama,” Shah Jahan said softly, and they both turned to gaze out at the Luminous Tomb. Oil
diyas
burned around the perimeter of the dome, and they could see it sparkle along the curve of the river, the light from the lamps reaching up to cast the freestanding minarets as marble swords spearing the skies. Mists had begun to roll outward from the river’s cool winter waters, and the tomb seemed to float above, untethered from the ground.