Authors: Indu Sundaresan
“Hush,” she said, her voice breaking, when his cries broke out again. “Hush, my little king, now you are safe with your mother.” She talked on, words of nonsense, of endearment, not even knowing where they came from. He quieted again, his eyes riveted on her face. She touched the black eyebrows that winged thickly above his eyes, already meeting in the middle, the lush head of still damp hair, the perfectly curved ears, the rosebud of a mouth. He turned his face and nuzzled against her breast, and an ache began to build inside her.
“Your Highness,” Ishaq said at her shoulder. “It is better not to . . . it will form too much of an attachment. The wet nurse waits; hand the baby to her.”
If it had been any other royal princess, or a noblewoman, in the normal course of events the baby’s mouth would have sought the wet nurse’s breast so that the new mother did not have to spoil her figure—a woman’s perfect body, immaculate even after childbirth, was much prized. But whom did she have to please? Jahanara thought, overwhelmed by an unexpected desire. The baby began to cry again, his face turning crimson, his fists balled as though ready for a fight.
“Just one time, Ishaq,” she said, pleading, her fingers struggling with the ties of her
choli.
“I do not understand—” he said, but he helped her loosen the strings that held her bodice together at the back and watched as she offered her breast to the child.
The baby rooted around until he found the nipple and began to suckle. Jahanara leaned back against the pillow, her body melting, her limbs liquefied. This was love, she thought, such love as she had never had before, as she would never again experience. For the rest of the night, she lay with her son in her arms, thinking of the name she had chosen for him, as the moon waned in the sky, to be replaced by the glow on the eastern horizon that heralded dawn. She was invigorated, alive, not anymore in need of sleep. When the child woke, she kissed him on his lips, gave him her breast at regular intervals, forgetting the promise she had made to her eunuch. The slaves came to take him from her briefly, to change his wet clothing and dry him. She sat up and watched until they brought him back to her.
She would have to give him up, but with force of will she forbade her mind to think of the parting, focusing only on the present.
As the morning flung its skeins of red and gold on the still-dark sky, she propped herself up on an elbow, the child snuggled against her, and wrote to Najabat Khan. At the very top of the page, she wrote
All is well by the grace of Allah,
so that he knew this letter brought him nothing but good news.
You have a son at last, my lord, and it is I who have given him to you. He sleeps by my side, his fist curled against his exquisite face, my milk still fragrant upon his lips. You see, I could not resist, though I know that from now on he will belong only to you . . . never, you must promise me this, to the women of your
zenana
. There must be only one woman in his life, the mother he will never know, but you must talk to him of me, tell him that his coming has shown me why I live. Keep him with you, on your travels and on your campaigns; I know you will cherish him because he is mine also.
I want to call him Antarah, after the Arab poet, for it is his work I have been reading, his poetry that has lulled me to sleep on many a difficult night. I must go, my son stirs, and soon he will open his mouth in hunger.
She laid down the quill and sprinkled sand on the writing to blot the ink before she folded and sealed it with her own seal—a single rose with six unfurled petals, a multifaceted diamond in the center that left its perfect imprint upon the wax, and tiny script upon one of the petals—reversed in the seal, righted upon the stamp—which read
By the order of her imperial Highness, the Begam Sahib Jahanara.
Later in the afternoon, when she had woken from a deep sleep, which had wrung all the fatigue from her limbs and left her clear eyed and bright, Ishaq Beg handed her a letter from Emperor Shah Jahan. It was written upon paper woven with gold and sealed with the imperial seal, which he had taken with him but which normally reposed with her in the
zenana
. In it were only two lines.
I hear you are well again,
beta,
and have completed your pilgrimage. When will you be returning home?
She held the child to her, laid her lips upon his soft skin, drank in his fragrance, and when he began to wail because she would not bare her breast, she handed him to the waiting wet nurse. He howled for a while, already sensing different milk upon his tongue, and resisted as long as his little strength held out, but in the end, he grasped at that strange breast and drank the woman’s milk as he had his mother’s. Princess Jahanara spent the day with her face in her hands, dry of tears, her heart hardening within her. Antarah had never been hers; it was madness for her to have allowed him to suckle at her breast. For the next two days, her breasts swelled with milk and rubbed painfully against the silk of her
cholis,
and she had to undo the ties at her back to ease the ache. Her nipples leaked when she heard her son’s cries—real and imagined—but Jahanara doggedly stayed in her bed, not once asking for the child to be brought to her.
• • •
On the fourth day after his birth, they all returned to the
zenana
apartments at Taragarh fort, and, at twilight, Ishaq ushered in a veiled woman, who bowed to her princess and waited by the doorway for a summons to enter.
“Why do you cover your face?” Jahanara asked sharply. “How am I to know that you are his wife?”
The woman proffered a letter, which she laid on the carpets in front of Jahanara, and receded a few steps. In it was the hand of the man she loved, the man who had fathered her child, and he told her that this woman was one of his wives, childless herself, to whom he had given the responsibility of bringing up Jahanara’s child. She would look after him well and treasure him as she would her own.
“Take off your veil.”
“Your Highness,” the woman mumbled. “It is better this way. I will never harm your child . . . and never consider him mine; you must rest assured of that. But he is my husband’s son, and my lord has commanded me to be his nurse and his caretaker; I would do nothing to disobey his orders.”
Ishaq brought the baby, swaddled in silk, one chubby hand over the top of the swaddling, his face blissful in repose. The woman craned her neck to look at the child, took one step forward, and then fell back. Her arms, which had risen involuntarily upon seeing Antarah, returned to her sides. Jahanara touched the baby on his forehead, on his nose and cheeks, and on his lips, she then brought that hand to her own mouth and motioned to Ishaq to lay the child in the woman’s arms. The baby settled deeply into the cradle she had made and turned his face to her with a small sigh.
“Go,” Jahanara said, her voice threaded with ache. “An imperial guard will escort you back to Agra. Thank you.”
The woman bowed again, silently, and let herself out.
• • •
Some three weeks later, Jahanara set out for Agra herself. She had memorized her son’s face, thinking that she would never see him again, but already, she had forgotten the perfume of his little body, the rounded curves of his cheeks, the fans of eyelashes against his skin as he slept. She was on her way to resume her duties as the Begam Sahib of her father’s harem, for he had written to say that both Aurangzeb and Murad were to be married, to two of the daughters of Shahnawaz Khan Safavi, a powerful
amir
at court, who could trace his lineage so closely to the Persian Empire that he still carried the name Safavi.
Jahanara had to prepare the gifts, schedule the various events, play hostess to the two weddings. Murad was only fifteen years old, she thought, and he would already have a wife. She, who was the best loved of all of her father’s children, had just given up her only child because she would never marry. She worked all day long, every day, giving orders, overseeing arrangements, greeting visitors, reading to her father, who did not seem to want to let her out of his sight. It was when she collapsed in her bed that the tears came, filling her with an immeasurable ache, choking her throat. When she did sleep, it was to awaken still fatigued, her dreams crammed with thoughts of Antarah, of Najabat, of her brothers’ wives, who could openly carry children in their wombs, bear them in comfort, never send them away.
While they celebrated the weddings at Agra, more good news filtered in from the northwestern frontier of the Empire regarding the reconquest of the trading outpost of Qandahar.
• • •
When Emperor Jahangir had lost Qandahar in 1622 to the Persian Shah, Emperor Shah Jahan—then Prince Khurram—had refused to come north from the safety of the Deccan to help. Instead, taking advantage of his father’s attention being focused elsewhere, he had thundered into Agra in the hope of capturing the treasury. Emperor Jahangir had left Lahore with a large army to meet the forces of his errant son, had vanquished him and sent him into exile. But Qandahar had fallen to Shah Abbas of Persia.
Even some fifteen years after the event, Emperor Shah Jahan could not shake off the impression that he had been solely responsible for the loss of Qandahar. From the very first year of his reign, he had given orders to Said Khan, the governor of Kabul, to send out diplomatic missions to the Persian governor of Qandahar, Ali Mardan Khan, in the hope that he could be convinced to betray his Shah. And so it had happened. Without a single shot fired, or a single life lost, Qandahar became Mughal territory again. When Princess Jahanara heard the news, she suggested to her father that Ali Mardan Khan should offer his allegiance in person. That way, the governorship of the newly acquired Qandahar could be given to Said Khan himself. It was a brilliant diplomatic move—for Said Khan was firmly on the Mughal side and could not be swayed into releasing Qandahar again to the Persians without a fight.
When he came to Agra, Ali Mardan Khan was feted and given a large
mansab
at court, while Jahanara watched him carefully from behind the
zenana
screen in the imperial
durbar.
A month later, she said that he was an able general and a warrior, court life would not befit him, but the governorship of Kashmir would. So Ali Mardan Khan, who had just begun to chafe at the rituals and duties at court, went gladly to the Himalayan kingdom of Kashmir—what had started for him as a wise maneuver to enter the service of Emperor Shah Jahan by giving up Qandahar had culminated in his becoming one of the most trusted generals at court. Before the year ended, his Emperor had rewarded his loyalty by making him the Amir-ul-umra.
With the majority of the work completed on the Luminous Tomb, Ustad Ahmad Lahori and his Emperor shifted their attention to Delhi and the new city of Shahjahanabad. An auspicious date was determined by the court astrologers, and on Friday, the twenty-ninth of April, 1639, workers began leveling ground on the banks of the Yamuna River. Stonecutters, ornamental sculptors, masons, and carpenters left Agra for Delhi, and, just as they had near the Taj Mahal, they set up their shacks and shanties to settle in for a few years of toil.
And so Jahanara returned to her place in the imperial
zenana
and her tasks as though nothing much had happened in the months she had been gone. But she had left a part of herself in the child she had borne, and she came back carrying a huge, painful void within her. Bapa had not noticed anything amiss, she had thought when she watched him at Aurangzeb’s and Murad’s weddings—the laughing and joyful father of the grooms, a patronizing hand on their father-in-law’s shoulder, which the man accepted gratefully as a token of his Emperor’s esteem. There was color and light around her from the celebrations and a small pinpoint of darkness where Antarah lay in her memories. Roshanara commented once upon how emaciated she had become during her pilgrimage, how the flesh had wasted from her bones. “Quite swiftly, is it not, Jahan?” she had asked in front of Aurangzeb and his wife Dilras Begam.
The prince, intent on his meal, had lifted his head at the statement and gazed long and thoughtfully upon Jahanara, and she had met his eyes unflinchingly. A shadow crossed his face, something akin to disgust, and Jahanara felt a wave of hatred wash over her. For she had heard another story about this brother of hers, whom she was being forced to fete on the occasion of his marriage—that he had dissuaded their father from thinking of a marriage between Jahanara and Najabat Khan. She knew, in her heart she knew that Bapa had come to that decision himself . . . and her father she could not fault, but Aurangzeb had no business interfering
in anything to do with her. The story also went that Aurangzeb had been clever enough not to talk with Shah Jahan himself but had persuaded their uncle Shaista Khan—a man to whom the Emperor was more likely to pay heed—to do so. Now, when she ached for her child every day, when she turned her face away from the children in the
zenana
because none of them was hers, she fantasized about a marriage to Najabat, Antarah with them always. . . . It was because of Aurangzeb, she thought bitterly, that Antarah lived in Najabat Khan’s
haveli
on the other bank of the Yamuna River. Perhaps not more than a mile away, but she could not see her child, touch him, breathe his essence, and he could just as well have been on the far corner of the world.
She bade farewell to Aurangzeb and Dilras when they went back to the Deccan, where he was governor, and turned away almost at once, so she did not see him look back time and again and did not see jealousy map his wife’s young and pretty face. When he wrote, Jahanara did not reply. Antarah was brought up as Najabat Khan’s son; who his mother was, no one cared about or asked, since every
amir
in the Empire assumed that he was born of some woman—wife or concubine—in Najabat’s
zenana
. It was his father’s name that was important. And that was why Princess Jahanara stayed away from Antarah, and her siblings followed her lead. Dara, at court by her side, never mentioned her absence or the fine lines of pain drawn upon her forehead. Shuja and Murad were away ruling their own provinces. Roshanara smiled and raged alternately, unable to do anything to her quietly powerful sister.