Authors: Indu Sundaresan
“You have a fever, Bapa,” she said firmly, dipping the towel into the water and wringing it to damp, not dry. Then she folded it lengthwise and placed it on his heated forehead. The cloth warmed alarmingly soon, and Jahanara realized, after a moment of panic, that the temperature in the room was as much to blame as the fever ravaging her father’s body. Twenty minutes later, the Emperor’s breathing slowed and he fell asleep, his hand on his daughter’s shoulder so that she could not move without waking him again.
She leaned back against his bed, as she had done for so many nights, whether he was well or not, and closed her eyes also, her heart heavy with foreboding. When Shah Jahan had fallen ill—almost from the next day, when he had been forced to cancel all of his public appearances—the Empire had begun to hum with dissatisfaction. Though she was confined to the sickroom nursing her father, these comments had reached even her ears, fractured, splintered bits of words and phrases of information.
The Emperor was dying. The throne would be vacant. Who would be the next king?
In the twenty-nine years that Emperor Shah Jahan had ruled, he had only once missed
jharoka
appearances or not presented himself at court—and that time had been because of a death, his wife’s. Even during the previous attacks of strangury, with an uncertain carriage, pain that bent him double, a whitening around the corners of his mouth and at his temples, Bapa had stood before the people in the morning
jharoka,
dragging himself to bed afterward and sleeping the day away. But this time he had refused, and it had been a long ten days that there had been no sign of Emperor Shah Jahan at the Shah Burj of the Delhi fort.
Jahanara watched the Kashmiri guards change shifts sometime during the third
pahr
of the night, exchanging muted talk that did not reach her ears, and their weapons—spears, daggers, shields.
Word had also come to her that Aurangzeb had gathered his army in the Deccan and was making his way north in response to his father’s poor health. What did he mean by this? And Aurangzeb had been made powerful by
them
—all of them—recently. Inadvertently perhaps, but still . . .
A few months ago, Mir Jumla, prime minister in a Deccani kingdom, had proposed to defect to the Empire if Shah Jahan would provide him with protection. In return, he had offered a bag of diamonds that he claimed were mined in Golkonda. Aurangzeb had assumed the governorship of the Deccan again, and Shah Jahan had sent him orders to allow Mir Jumla safe passage into Mughal land, and then to provide him with an escort to court so that the Emperor could see these brilliant stones for himself and judge their worth. If there was an abiding fault in her father, Jahanara thought, it was his intense love for these inanimate things—to her the diamonds were simply stones, doubtless of immense value, and their cool luster had lit her arms and neck many times, made her feel beautiful, wanted, desired. But she had felt so even clad in only a string of flowers, freshly picked, dewy from the night. When the stones had come, she almost changed her mind. For Mir Jumla had held out the best stone in his palm in open an
durbar
—as massive as his large fist, ablaze like the sun at high noon, seeming to draw all the light of the Diwan-i-am into its brilliant heart. It had appeared alive and throbbed in the hand of the man who had brought it.
The next day, despite Dara’s and her repeated cautions, Emperor Shah Jahan had sent a fifty-thousand-strong army to the Deccan to be under Aurangzeb’s command and given him orders to invade Golkonda. If there were more diamonds to be found in the Golkonda mines, they had to belong to him, first and last. What of strengthening Aurangzeb in the Deccan? they had asked their father, and he had laughed, saying only that his third son was a fool and would not know how to rebel against his father even if he tried. The fever of greed had caught Emperor Shah Jahan firmly, and he thought of all the monuments and forts he had built so far, the immensely rich Peacock Throne (though it was only one of seven upon which he gave audience), and decided that possession of the world’s most magnificent diamonds—which were to be found in Golkonda if that one diamond was any indication—would make him the world’s most potent monarch.
Dara and Jahanara had talked for long hours, knowing that their father was aging, that, in some senses, he was losing control of his mental faculties. When Jahanara thought of these discussions, she cringed. If she had not agreed with Dara all those months ago, perhaps he would have behaved better when their father had fallen ill this time. In the ten days that had passed, Dara had closed down all the roads leading into Shahjahanabad, not allowed any news to seep out, and taken over the role of sovereign. He gave all the orders at court, and, because of his lack of tact, he had offended too many of the old and powerful nobles at court. When they had come hesitantly to beg information about their king, Dara had had his eunuchs drive them away from the Lahore Gate that led into the fort. Before he had shut the doors, Roshanara Begam had slipped away, and Jahanara heard later that she had gone down the Yamuna to Agra and established herself in Aurangzeb’s house there.
All these years Roshanara had been sending secret missives to Aurangzeb, this Jahanara knew well, since she had intercepted and read some, but they seemed harmless—spiteful, vituperative letters insulting her father and her sister, sometimes Dara, always ending with a profession of deep love for Aurangzeb. Jahanara had been too disgusted to read more than a few, and if Aurangzeb replied to Roshan, she did not know about it, and so she suspected that he did not. He, on the other hand, had been deeply involved until now in a . . .
love
affair.
The girl, for she was barely seventeen years old, was a concubine in her uncle Saif Khan’s harem, called Hira Bai. Aurangzeb had seen her in Zainabad Bagh, when he had gone there to pray at the
baradari
where their mother had initially been buried, and a variety of tales had reached Jahanara’s ears about the beginnings of this silly affair. Hira Bai had been holding down a branch of a flowering mango tree, the blooms framing her pretty face, and Aurangzeb had fallen into a faint upon first seeing her. There were reports also that Saif Khan had declined to let her go, but it was not so, Jahanara knew, for the two men had exchanged women from their respective harems—Aurangzeb giving up some concubine for Hira Bai, whom he titled Zainabadi Begam after the place where he had first seen and so precipitately fallen in love with her. He had spent hours at her feet, singing songs to her, reading poetry, or watching her sleep—neglecting all of his other duties. Already in trouble with Bapa about his handling of the Balkh and Qandahar affairs, Aurangzeb had further ignored his father’s commands and laid himself out in the service of an insipid, though supposedly beautiful, concubine. Jahanara had written to him then, for the first time voluntarily.
You have had the temerity to stand in judgment on my love for Mirza Najabat Khan, and what do you do now—moon about a child young enough to be
your
child? Younger, in fact, than your own children? Does she even have the capacity for conversation, Aurangzeb?
He had not replied for a long while, and when he did, it was to say simply that she had hurt him profoundly, and if she could only know Zainabadi as he knew her, she would come to love her also. Besides, he was a man, with a man’s needs, and she was a woman in
purdah
who should have had the prudence to remain behind the veil and not attempt to besmirch all of their reputations.
It was this affair Bapa had referred to when he called Aurangzeb a fool, but Jahanara was afraid that her brother was a fool no longer. The woman, that girl child, had died recently of consumption, and Aurangzeb had no further distractions to take his mind away from his early ambition. With Dara being so stubborn, perhaps Aurangzeb had no other alternative than to be aggressive. But they were both behaving as though Bapa was on his deathbed.
When Shah Jahan woke to his daughter’s touch the next morning, she said to him, “Bapa, you must show yourself at the
jharoka
this morning.” She would not listen to any more protests from him or, surprisingly enough, from Dara, who ought to have known better—for if his father was shown to be alive he still had some standing at court, even as the heir apparent. If the
amirs
at court thought Shah Jahan dead, Dara would not find many of them supportive of him.
They carried Emperor Shah Jahan to the
jharoka
balcony, and two eunuchs propped him up below the balustrade. Hidden behind his back, Jahanara lifted one of his arms so that he could wave to the crowds below. The men roared out their greeting, “Padshah Salamat!” But they fell quiet too soon after, and a forest of murmurs rose and buzzed along the banks of the Yamuna River as Shah Jahan stepped back and disappeared through the silk curtain because he could not stand anymore. By that night, rumors droned from one mouth to another that the Emperor was dead and that a substitute had been found for the
jharoka,
but that no one who had seen the man had been deceived for an instant.
• • •
In the Deccan, the news of Shah Jahan’s illness came to Prince Aurangzeb one morning after he had finished his first prayer of the day. He stayed kneeling on his prayer rug, facing west, toward Mecca, the tight roll of the letter in front of him. Over the past few years, he had taken to writing to everyone he knew, and then some others he did not—letters of mere salutation, of respect when the
amir
at court was barely known to him and greater in years, of humor to his peers (in age, for in status there were none). And finally, he had been writing to his brothers, Shuja in Bengal and Murad, who had been sent back to govern Multan. So their missives had crisscrossed the Empire for a while, frequent enough to set up special runners for this imperial purpose and to construct
sarais
for these runners, who were kept on a permanent salary, which Aurangzeb willingly paid.
Murad was six years younger than he, Shuja two years older, and though they had come together originally because of their intense, and so naturally unspoken, dislike of Dara, Aurangzeb did not think either of them was capable of ruling the Empire. But then he had never thought so. He had made sure that each wrote to the other
through
him—he told Murad that he wanted to read all of his letters to Shuja, just for the news, and so that Murad would not have to repeat the same in another letter to him, and that he wanted to add postscripts to Murad’s letters so that Shuja would receive news from both Multan and the Deccan at one time. His two brothers had believed him, so they had but little contact with each other directly.
To the nobles at court, whether they openly supported him or not, Aurangzeb penned noncommittal notes, merely to keep in touch, he said, and every bit of information in the Empire was valuable to him, so if they chose to share it with him he would be honored. He sent presents of silks and jewels when their children were married and when their grandchildren were born, or ivory and silver figurines when they built new homes and sent him invitations to their housewarmings. To most of these matters, he attended himself, asking the advice of none of his ministers or nobles, keeping his own counsel.
Now this. Prince Aurangzeb had been visited by a vision this morning while he prayed—a flash of radiance had filled the darkness under his eyelids and set his limbs quivering. The letter, he thought, had something to do with it. He willed himself into serenity, wiped his face with his hands, rolled the prayer rug and handed it to an attendant eunuch, then sat cross-legged on the floor to open and read the news of his father’s illness. He set the paper down with shaking hands. How old was he this year? Thirty-nine. If he became Emperor, he would have at least thirty years to rule.
For the next week, Aurangzeb moved patiently through his duties in the Deccan, never seeming flurried or flustered. Because his fingertips were constantly stained with the ink from his quill, and because he wore white—a noncolor more in keeping with his asceticism—he held his hands away from his
qaba
and his person awkwardly, as though he was reaching out to something. He wrote letters late into the night, every night, and woke in the mornings with dark circles around his eyes. But his energy did not flag; it was quiet and burned with a relentless flame. In carrying the letters, the imperial runners zigzagged over almost every established route, and some new ones, patterning the map of Hindustan with sets of lines, but they did not touch the heart, the city of Delhi. For Dara had closed down all the arteries into Shahjahanabad, and for what Aurangzeb wanted to achieve, he did not need to reach out to Delhi.
To each of his other two brothers, he offered his backing, indeed, his ardent wish for
them
to be Emperor, and he told both of them to wait for a short period to assure themselves that their Bapa was dying, or dead, and read the
khutba
in their names in their provinces.
There were three bastions of sovereignty in Mughal India—the
khutba,
the ability to issue imperial
farmans,
and the minting of coins in the name of the Emperor. In the vast and far-flung Empire, where communications between provinces and states took days if not weeks, the muezzins in the mosques sang out the official proclamation of sovereignty, the
khutba
—“All hail the mighty Emperor, Lord of our lands.” This they did every Friday before the noon prayers, so that the populace would know on a weekly basis toward whom they should be bowing their heads.
Murad and Shuja proclaimed themselves kings in Multan and Bengal, and at the same time, Prince Aurangzeb brought together his men, including the mammoth army his father had so providentially sent him to conquer Golkonda, and spoke to them of his designs. They were to leave for Agra the next day. He did tell his commanders and generals that his father was dead—nothing else, certainly not the idea of a coup, would have persuaded them to move—and that there was a danger that Dara would become king.