Authors: Indu Sundaresan
There were perfume bottles at another corner filled with musk oil from Bhutan, and the bottles themselves were created out of turquoise enamel, studded with crystals and corals, their stoppers made from blue Aleppo glass.
“How much did this all cost?” Satti asked.
Jahanara laughed, her voice echoing off the walls of the Diwan-i-am, and she said, as carelessly as she could, “About two million rupees. I think; I do not know for sure, Satti.”
“You are a generous sister, Jahan.”
“Yes, I am. But this is not everything.”
“Is all this for us?”
They both turned to see Nadira standing at one end of the verandah. She was clad in thin white muslin, six layers of
peshwaz
, flimsy pants underneath, her head uncovered. A breeze stirred through the cusped arches that linked the pillars, and her clothes swirled around her. Nadira had the capacity for immense grace, Jahanara thought, and then wondered if that was why Dara had fallen in love with her. There were others he could have chosen to marry—and he would eventually marry others—but Nadira had captured his heart. It was difficult for Jahanara to see what the attraction was for this creature who glided everywhere, whose presence was so light, whose laughter was like the tinkling of bells heard at a distance. She was a wraith, with little substance. Nadira was slight, in her physical appearance and in the force of her character.
“For Dara and you,” she said.
“How lovely all of it is. The wines”—Nadira touched a light finger over the green glass bottles embellished with gold stoppers—“are they from Kashmir? The ones you like so much?”
“Yes, Dara enjoys this wine also. Nadira”—Jahanara tried to be gentle—“do you wish to be married to Dara?”
Nadira looked up at her—she was a couple of inches shorter than Jahanara—with a steady gaze that turned her hazel eyes dark. “What a ridiculous question, Jahan. And so close to the wedding.”
Satti Khanum cleared her throat, and Jahanara stepped back. It
was
preposterous to ask a bride this just before she was to be married, especially since the couple were all but married—the wedding presents had been sent to Nadira’s mother’s house in December as a guarantee, Jahanara herself had spent lavishly and worked tirelessly on the preparations, and there were only six days until the official ceremony.
“A husband,” Nadira said slowly, “is a blessing from Allah. I could not ask for another man to be my husband, one so accomplished, so beloved, so erudite; but then there is no one such as Dara. You should know all this, Jahan.”
“I do, my dear,” Princess Jahanara said. “I wanted to make sure you did also.”
“Enough,” Satti said, bristling. “Enough talk. Nadira, you must go back home now; it is unseemly for you to be here in the imperial palaces looking over your presents.”
Nadira nodded. She said, with a half smile, “Jahan, once Dara and I are . . . in a few months, I mean, we will look for husbands for both Roshan and you. As your sister, as your brother’s wife, I will take it to be my duty.” She waved to them and left the verandah by the steps leading into the
zenana
.
Jahanara felt laughter spill out of her. “She is not as inanimate as she makes us think.
She
is going to find me a husband?”
Satti Khanum’s expression was somber, her mouth tight, her eyebrows rigid. “It is good you find mirth in this situation, Jahan. But remember, a married woman has more influence, more standing than an unmarried one. We are born to but one purpose—to be wives and mothers; there is no other self to us than that. You must marry too, someday, and go to grace your husband’s home.”
There followed a long pause as Jahanara thought about this. She roamed the verandah of the Diwan-i-am, smoothing out the drape of a silk here, tapping the dazzling stones of a pair of earrings there. She did not believe Satti Khanum entirely—there was some truth to what she had said, but it applied only to women who had no wealth, no status, no eminence in society. Princess Jahanara Begam was the head of Emperor Shah Jahan’s imperial
zenana,
the Begam Sahib. The title itself was constructed to place her in the harem; if she had been the ruling wife of the Emperor, she would have been called the Padshah Begam. But both of her Bapa’s remaining wives were shadow women, as insubstantial when her mother was dead as when she had been alive. They lived in the luxury they expected, with sizable incomes, servants at their call any time of day or night, silks and jewelry in piled masses, but without any actual authority. In the Mughal harem, the most powerful woman was the one most dear to the Emperor, and in this case, for the first time in the history of the Mughals, it was the daughter and not the wife. Satti Khanum knew this, of course she knew this, Jahanara thought, as she listened to the skirts of Satti’s
ghagara
sweeping the thick pile of the carpets behind her. This was why, after Mumtaz Mahal’s death, she had attached herself to Jahanara, not Roshan, not the two other wives of the Emperor.
“They could not have celebrated Dara’s wedding so splendidly,” Jahanara said, more to herself than to her companion.
“No,” Satti answered, as though she had followed her ward’s train of thought all the way through, “but they are here to stay and will not leave when you do. And the gap formed from your absence, one of them is sure to fill.”
She stopped abruptly, and Princess Jahanara watched her think this time and saw a realization map her face. When Jahanara left to marry, one of her father’s wives would again be supreme in the imperial
zenana
, and in the tussle for domination, Satti might well be left without a role to play. Perhaps she should not advertise either her attachment to or her exhilaration in being the Begam Sahib’s servant so openly. Perhaps a little diplomacy, a division of affections, was advisable. Jahanara felt sudden pity for the woman, because she was herself privileged as no one else in the imperial
zenana
was, beloved of her father, possessed of a wealth unimaginable to any other woman, perhaps anywhere else in the world. As she stood in the midst of the shimmering stack of presents she was giving her brother on the occasion of his wedding, Jahanara knew that she was etching her name in history. One day, four or five hundred years from now, posterity would talk with amazement of her generosity, her open hand, her dominance over the glittering
zenana
. She had more money than Dara, the crown prince, the much-touted heir; all of this had cost her only about a tenth of her annual income.
“You have something else on your mind, Satti? Or do you wish to go?” Jahanara asked, wearied by the talk and her emotions. To think that the two of them—Nadira and Satti—so inconsequential themselves, would consider
her
so . . . just because she did not have the protection of a husband. Even more insulting was that they thought she would lose the protection of her father.
“I heard,” Satti said and then hesitated, “about Mirza Najabat Khan. The
chaugan
at midnight. It was inappropriate, Jahan, so unlike you to act on impulse. If you are . . . indeed . . . wanting a man, I would advise a marriage. I will talk with your Bapa if you wish; you know I am here in the place of your mother. Give me the opportunity to do this for you.”
“It was no impulse, Satti,” Jahanara replied, fighting to keep her voice firm, even reasonable. That there would be gossip, she had known, but for Satti Khanum to talk thus, in terms of her wanting just any man, and then assume Mama’s place in her heart; this was unthinkable and far beyond a servant’s duties. “And I will speak with Bapa when I consider it necessary.”
“You are young, my dear—”
“My Mama was married at nineteen, Satti, and she was betrothed to Bapa five years before that.”
“Jahan, if your Bapa should come to know of—”
“Is that a threat, Satti?”
“Of course not,” the older woman said hurriedly. “It is impossible that you would even think so. Am I nothing to you, Jahan? Remember that I have taught you since you were a child, been by your mother’s side, am still here now for you poor, motherless children.”
“I do know all of this, Satti,” Jahanara said quietly. “And now I must be alone.”
She would not apologize. If her Mama had still been alive, there would have been at least one woman who had some authority over her; Satti, for all of her sagacity and obvious interest in them, was not her mother. Jahanara thought that all of her immense power and wealth, both in the
zenana
and at court, had given her the merest smidgen of arrogance—but it was well deserved. And the Mughal kings and queens had learned the value of having this confidence in themselves, of heeding the advice of retainers and courtiers but paying attention to their own opinions both within and without the harem. Some years ago, Emperor Akbar had had to battle his regent, Bairam Khan, for ascendancy when he attained his majority, for the regent had come to think of the Empire left in his safekeeping as his own and, in the
zenana
, Akbar’s wet nurse, Maham Anagha, had assumed a place of eminence that had been more difficult for him to shake. Jahanara knew well all these stories from the past, had studied them carefully, and just as cautiously had chosen the women and the eunuchs who surrounded her, but she never let them think of themselves as being more than what they were—servants, retainers, and slaves.
Satti left, her step faltering, although she was already eager to pay a visit to Emperor Shah Jahan’s wives; perhaps she could say she had come to invite them personally for their stepson’s marriage.
But the two women in the verandah had left something unsaid and hanging in the air between them. Without the persuasive influence of Empress Mumtaz Mahal, was it possible that Emperor Shah Jahan—having just lost one beloved woman in his life—would allow the other, his daughter, to marry and carry her affections away from the imperial
zenana
to the harem of another man?
• • •
A week later, on February 1, 1633, Jahanara sent henna to Nadira’s mother’s house on the banks of the Yamuna River, and along with it the
sachaq,
the official wedding gift to the bride. Two hundred servants went on foot in a procession, bearing upon their heads, hands, and shoulders round silver and gold platters heaped with brocades from Gujarat and Banaras and jewels from Satagaon and Surat. In front of the men, Ishaq Beg carried a plate with fifteen solid-gold cups, in the depths of which lay pungent-smelling henna paste, made from the crushed central veins, the petioles, of the henna leaves. To fill the cups to their brims, thousands of henna leaves had been harvested when they had just unfurled at the break of dawn, dewdrops still glittering like crystals on the young green. The leaves themselves would work well enough for dyeing hands and legs and hair with brilliant orange—but for Dara’s
hinabandi
ceremony, Jahanara had ordered each tiny leaf to be stripped of its petiole, where the concentration of the dye was at its highest, and these slender veins were then powdered in marble mortars, mixed with water from the Ganges, and set to rest in their gold cups.
At Nadira’s house, the women waited eagerly for the gifts and the henna, and the whole day was spent in singing, dancing, and decorating all the women’s hands and legs in lush designs. Jahanara and Roshanara did not attend the ceremony, and they were not to attend the wedding itself—their role, as Dara’s sisters, was to wait in the imperial palaces to welcome Dara home with his bride the next day. Dara went to Nadira’s house late in the afternoon and was ushered into the women’s quarters so that one of Nadira’s sisters could adorn the skin of his hands and his feet with little dots of henna.
The next day, Emperor Shah Jahan went to his oldest son’s apartments in the Agra fort just as he had finished dressing and fastened the wedding
sehra
across his forehead. It was a crown that tied at the back; for the common man, the
sehra
was made of fresh flowers woven into strings—Dara’s
sehra
, a gift from his father, was a thick band of gold embedded with diamonds, which ended in velvet ropes at the back of his head, and in the front there were twenty strings of pearls, each eight inches long and each corded with perfectly matched pink pearls the size of cherrystones. The strings ended in a ruby apiece, lavishly faceted and glowing with fire.
Shah Jahan then took a
farman
from a pocket of his brocade
qaba
and handed it to Dara.
“What is it, Bapa?” Dara asked, weighing the rolled sheet of paper in his hands.
“A gift. Your sister has given you so much; your father can do no less.”
Prince Dara Shikoh unrolled the scroll and read its contents. As a wedding present, he had been given the city of Lahore, all the buildings contained within, the taxes from its bazaars, the people who lived there, the duties from its customhouses. He felt a rush of tears behind his eyelids and blinked them away. Lahore was one of the seats of the Mughal Emperor, as much a capital city as Agra and Delhi—when his father came to stay, he would from now on come as his son’s guest. In the handing over of the
farman,
Emperor Shah Jahan had made his oldest son very wealthy, almost on par with his oldest daughter. The revenues would be Dara’s to do with as he pleased, to reinvest, to spend in constructing gardens or
sarais
or mansions anywhere in the Empire.
He bent to perform the
konish
to his father, and Shah Jahan stopped his hand as it rose to his head in the salutation.
“You are my son, Dara, from you I do not expect servitude,” he said, smiling.
“Bapa, thank you. I do not know how to express my gratitude; you have given to me one of the jewels of your Empire, and I will guard it jealously.”
“As you will, eventually, the Empire itself, Dara,” Shah Jahan said almost inaudibly, speaking to himself, but Dara heard him, and this first concrete indication of his father’s wishes sent a thrill through him. He was superstitious, so he attributed this good fortune to the woman he was about to marry—Nadira had brought all this to him. He stepped back and let the pearl strings of the
sehra
fall about his face again. Dara, the bridegroom, was also to be veiled during the ceremony; only later, in their bedchamber, according to custom, would the bride and groom lift the coverings on their faces and see each other for the first time.