Shadow Princess (9 page)

He smiled wryly. His grandfather
had
married for love, a twentieth wife who was both Dara’s stepgrandmother and his grandaunt. But these two intimate relationships had been only trouble for Bapa and Mama—and a lesson to all of them in consanguinity. Much better to stay with the dictum that politics and love did not mix well.

Dara took Nadira’s hand in his and kissed the fingers. Her skin gave off the aroma of sandalwood, and the hand lay soft in his large ones. She was trembling.

“Did I do well in telling you, Dara?”

“Brilliantly, Nadira.”

He rose abruptly and backed out of the
baradari
without a word of farewell, leaving Nadira to find her way back to the palaces across the river. This time, Dara allowed himself to be rowed across the pond and pondered as he went to the boat that would take him across the Tapti. Once on the other side, he went to Jahanara’s apartments and, when he did not find her there, sent word to her in their father’s apartments for her to come and meet him immediately. She did, and they talked together for three hours, until the Emperor roused himself and asked for his daughter again.

She went back to her father with an ache in her heart. The Empire would be Dara’s, this they all knew well already—but how could Bapa even think of giving it up now? When Jahanara neared the door, Aurangzeb came up to her. “Have you heard, Jahan?”

At her nod, he said, “I wanted to be the first to tell you.”

She frowned. “This is not a race, Aurangzeb. Bapa is in there, dying slowly and—” She looked hard at him. “What do you care if Bapa . . . Why is it important to
you
?”

He took a step back and flushed, his neck and cheeks stained crimson, his face mutinous. “Yes, why to me? Dara is the one who would care, who should care. Isn’t that what you think?”

Jahanara turned away, disgusted. Surely her other brothers could not be salivating over the throne already. Was this an indication of things to come? Had Mama’s death changed so much in their lives? She stayed at the door, pointedly ignoring Aurangzeb until he stumbled, spun around, and then ran to his apartments. When his footsteps had faded away, Jahanara opened the door and went inside, suddenly terrified that if her father took this decision he could plunge them into a civil war.

And the Empire would disintegrate.

The Luminous Tomb

Nur Jahan’s great monument to her father is important . . . because it reflected architectural transitions . . . that were to achieve full flower in the tomb of Arjumand Bano . . . against the extraordinary visual success of Itimaduddaula’s tomb, the . . . use of white marble was . . . already a foregone conclusion by the time Shah Jahan began to plan for the Taj Mahal.

—
ELLISON BANKS FINDLY
,
Nur Jahan, Empress of Mughal India

Agra

Thursday, June 25, 1631

26 Zi’l-Qa’da
A.H.
1040

G
hias Beg died in 1622, forty-five years after he had fled his homeland of Persia in shame, dogged by debts unpaid. He had arrived in India with four children, a wealth of nothing, and a reputation that could not bear close scrutiny. For all his faults—and these were mostly related to his appetite for money—he was a man who made friends with ease and kept them firmly by his side.

Prince Dara’s paternal grandfather, Emperor Jahangir, exercised his right of escheat when Ghias Beg died and took all of his immense property—his lands on the banks of the Yamuna River at Agra, his mansions, the jewels in his safe house—and bestowed it upon the woman who had come to mean more to him than anything else in the world, his wife Mehrunnisa. It was an expected move on his part, but not a very politically correct one. Mehrunnisa was already Empress, supreme in the harem, formidable in court dealings, and possessed of a vast income of her own . . . but she was, in the end, a mere woman. When Ghias Beg died, his oldest surviving son was Abul Hasan, Dara’s maternal grandfather, and it was to Abul that all of the father’s property ought to have gone, not to the daughter, not to a woman, even if she were an Empress. Besides, Abul’s daughter was married to Prince Khurram, and both Khurram and Arjumand had been sent into exile by Mehrunnisa while Abul himself was at court, at his father’s deathbed, and mocked subsequently for the loss of his father’s property to his sister.

Jealousy flamed through Abul at the thought of this injustice, and then he heard that Mehrunnisa intended to convert the gardens that their father had owned on the Yamuna’s eastern bank into a tomb for him and for their mother.

The tomb took a mere six years to build, and politically for Abul and Mehrunnisa those were turbulent years—Mehrunnisa was still Empress and her word held sway, but Abul clung to her side, determined that, when Jahangir died, it would be Khurram, the third son, who would become Emperor next, not a puppet of Mehrunnisa’s manipulations. And so it came to be in 1628, the year Ghias Beg’s tomb was completed. Abul imprisoned his sister and any other man who would dare to claim the throne, sent word to his exiled son-in-law and daughter, held a fierce and tight grip over the Empire until Khurram could be crowned Emperor Shah Jahan and he could finally become hugely powerful himself—as the father-in-law of the fifth Emperor of the Mughal dynasty.

But Abul did not know then that the sister whom he had once adored, whom he had grown to loathe in later years, would leave a legacy in the shape of the tomb for their father, which she commissioned, which she designed, and for which only she could pay with her wealth. When it was completed, Abul knew that his hand could neither have shaped this graceful building nor reached into his purse for the money required—only Mehrunnisa had the incalculable elegance, the determination to succeed, and the imagination to raise a building over their parents’ remains that was an oddity for its time.

The tomb, Itimadaddaula’s tomb (for this was the title by which Ghias would always be known), was built in the traditional
charbagh
style that the Mughal kings had brought into India from Persian gardens. The main garden was walled on four sides to keep out heat and dust and prying eyes. When she first looked over Ghias’s gardens after his death, Mehrunnisa decided to keep the
charbagh
that her father had built—the garden crossed over with two raised stone pathways that bisected at right angles in the center, where was housed a
baradari,
a small pavilion. The bisecting pathways created the
charbagh
—or the four compartmentalized gardens. Mehrunnisa had the center pavilion demolished, for there the tomb would rise. And at the center of each wall, where the pathways began, she constructed four ornate gateways of red sandstone inlaid with marble, each identical to the others, and had three of them bricked up, so that the only entrance to the tomb was from the eastern gateway, and the western gateway would overlook the riverfront.

For six years, a fine powder of marble and sandstone clotted the air around Ghias Beg’s gardens, and the chink and click of chisels and hammers on stone plagued many a child’s dreams in the stonemasons’ huts that sprang up around. When the dust subsided, the tomb radiated charm and allure, but Mehrunnisa was never to see the finished product of her creation—by 1628, she was already deposed as Empress, her brother had imprisoned her, and when Khurram became Emperor, he sent her into a semiofficial exile to Lahore, three hundred and seventy-five miles from Agra.

The elevated stone pathways that created the
charbagh
met in the center of the garden, and here was another raised red sandstone platform, on which the tomb stood. The platform itself was unornamented, simple slabs of stone mortared to one another, but the sides were inlaid with hexagonal patterns in white marble. The tomb was wholly built in the white marble that came from Raja Jai Singh’s quarries in Markana. At one point during the construction, Mehrunnisa had thought of covering the walls of her father’s tomb with beaten silver sheets that would glow in the sun and smolder under an overcast sky, but her architects persuaded her otherwise, citing the weather, the wear on silver, the fact that stone would be more enduring. And what stone? Until 1622, none of the Emperors’ tombs—those of Babur, Humayun, or Akbar—had been built in anything other than the red sandstone that came from the quarries near Fatehpur-Sikri. Marble was used as an inlay, but in small quantities, sparingly; it was expensive, it had to travel many miles from Markana and arrive intact at Agra.

Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, was disdainful of the price; by the time she came to build her father’s tomb, it meant more to her than just a memorial for her parents, it symbolized her power, her authority over the Empire, her immense wealth (which was why she wanted to adorn the walls with silver sheets)—it also meant that she, and not Abul, had the opportunity of leaving something for posterity to wonder at. Thus far, only the Mughal Emperors had had the privilege of raising a marble dome over their remains, but Mehrunnisa decided to build one for her father—who, not so many years ago, when appointed treasurer of the Empire because of his merit and reputation, had almost wiped himself and his family’s name from Mughal documents by embezzling fifty thousand rupees from the imperial treasury. But then . . . his daughter married Emperor Jahangir, his granddaughter married Prince Khurram . . . for all his greed, his teetering on the edge of honesty, Ghias Beg was an extremely fortunate man.

The tomb was designed after a jewel box that Mehrunnisa owned. It was square, sixty-nine feet long on each side. Each corner had an engaged minaret, which was octagonal until the flat roofline and circular beyond, topped with a rounded cupola. On the center of the flat roof was a square
baradari,
its walls punctured by marble
jalis,
and inside were two cenotaphs in white marble signifying the resting place of Ghias and his wife Asmat. Their actual remains were in the central room on the ground floor. Here also were two cenotaphs in the center of the room, this time covered with a polished
chunam,
a lime plaster that had been dyed yellow with limestone. The floor here was marble inlaid with semiprecious stones; the
jalis
on the ground floor were again delicately fashioned out of lightweight pieces of marble.

But it was the outside surface of the tomb that was designed to awe a visitor. Every surface,
every surface,
was covered in a profusion of precisely rendered patterns of stars, hexagons, squares, flowers, curves, and arches, all this display inlaid into the base of white marble so that it seemed more inlay than base.

When she had thought about the color scheme for this
pietra dura
inlay, Mehrunnisa had spread out chips of semiprecious stones on the carpet in front of her and pondered for a long time. In the end she had opted for muted colors—sard for brown, yellow limestone (the brightest of her choices), a dull green jasper, and the sharp black-olive of bloodstone. The reds, the blues, the pinks were left on her carpet. Abul had participated even in this choice and had laughed at her, but she had been resolute. “You will marvel at it, Abul,” she had said.

And a marvel it was. A passerby strolling on the western bank of the river and looking east toward Itimadaddaula’s tomb would see the sheer red sandstone walls of the gardens rising from the bank and in the center of the wall the western gateway, embedded into the stone, its detail picked out in white marble. And behind the arches of the gateway, there would be a little glimpse of a hushed white marble tomb, with its four minarets, its flat roof, its square, domed pavilion on the rooftop. But when the passerby crossed the river and entered the tomb from the eastern gateway, he would be confronted with a spectacle his eyes would not at first be able to believe and his mind would never forget. A serene tomb in translucent white, daubed in ochers, blacks, and greens, perfectly framed by the gateways of its gardens, a glimpse of the river beyond the tomb, the dark of the cypress trees on the lawns, the gray of the monkeys romping along the stone pathways. Mehrunnisa had thought of everything in planning the tomb for her father, and in the end nature and artifice collided to bring her imagination to life.

And so, Emperor Shah Jahan would see this tomb that the woman who had sent him into exile had built and use it as a model for the one he was thinking of building for his wife at Agra.

On the other bank of the river, and south of Itimadaddaula’s tomb, Raja Jai Singh had received the imperial
farman
from his Emperor with the royal seal at the top and, by its side, the imprint of Shah Jahan’s thumb dipped in a saffron dye. It was midafternoon, the air blighted of moisture; heat hazes wavered over the placid waters of the Yamuna, and Jai Singh sat under the shade of the tamarind at the very edge of his property, the
farman
on his lap. Behind him, he could hear the muffled breathing of the runner who had brought the Emperor’s orders as the man wiped his forehead and splattered sweat on the dry ground.

Jai Singh put a hand up in dismissal.

“An answer, Mirza Raja?” the man asked in a low voice, his head bowed in deference. “I am to bring back a letter to his Majesty.”

He would not himself, of course, but his orders were to take a missive from Raja Jai Singh and run with it to the next stopping post—nine miles away—where another fleet-footed messenger waited night and day, hand held out for the bamboo tube that enclosed the letter, his legs moving into a run even before this man would have come to a halt. In two and a half days, perhaps just a little more, Jai Singh’s response would be in his Emperor’s hands in Burhanpur—some four hundred and thirty miles away. This system of communication, wrought in Emperor Akbar’s fertile mind, had reached an efficient peak in his grandson’s rule. In the Emperor’s service, distances evaporated under the runners’ feet; they had smooth roads carved out for them that spun through the entire length and breadth of the Empire, so that an event had only to occur in one corner of Shah Jahan’s lands and it would be breathed into his ear before a week had passed.