Delhi (23 page)

The Mullahs say, Mohammed rose to the skies

But I say, ‘God came to him’—the rest is lies!

Sarmad juggled with words: ‘I am absorbed in the negative and hence have not yet arrived at the positive.’ Questioned about his nakedness, he replied that the Prophet Isaiah also went about naked. We ordered him to be executed in front of the steps of the Royal Mosque in full view of the populace. It was later reported to us that his severed head acknowledged the truth by reciting the entire
kalima
.

While our father lived we decided to stay away from Agra. We had a small mosque built besides the Diwan-i-Khas so that we did not have to disturb the prayers of other Mussalmans by the screen that was provided for kings. It took us five years to complete it and we gave it the name Moti Masjid—because it did indeed look like a pearl without blemish. We spent many hours in this mosque praying and telling the beads of our rosary.

It was not written in the tablet of our fate to see our father. For many months he kept sending us letters accusing us of conduct unbecoming of a son and wickedness towards our brothers. We thought it was time to state the bitter truth. Our father, despite his predicament and his grey beard, was reported to be indulging himself in wine and carousal. ‘Kingship means protection of the realm and guardianship of the people, not the enjoyment of bodily repose or lusts of the flesh,’ we wrote. We also reminded him that after the way he had disposed of his collaterals when he ascended the throne, it did not befit him to point an accusing finger at us or threaten us with the wrath of Allah. To put an end to this pointless dialogue we wrote: ‘If God had not approved of my enterprise, how could I have gained victories which are only the gift of God?’

In January 1666, our father was taken ill and at his desire his bed was placed in the octagonal Jasmine Tower from which he could gaze on the Taj Mahal. On the evening of the 22 January 1666, with the name of Allah on his lips, he passed out of this world into paradise.

Urgent affairs of state kept us in Delhi for two weeks. Then, as soon as we were able, we repaired to Agra and with our tears washed the sacred earth in which our parents were laid.

It was not till two years after our father had been summoned to paradise that we first took our seat on the peacock throne. We then felt we should fulfil the mission that we had been charged with by Allah. We ordered our commanders Mir Jumla, Shaista Khan and others to extend the domains of Islam to the furthermost corners of Hindustan. Our victorious armies marched eastwards to Chatgaon, northwards over the mountains to Tibet, westwards beyond Kabul and southwards beyond Karnatak. In turn we crushed the Jats, the Rajputs, mischievous sects of the Satnamis and Nanak Prasthas who had raised their heads against us. We ravaged the lands of the wily Marathas and forced their leader, Shiva, to pay homage to us. We levelled temples of idolatry to dust and raised mosques on their ruins. We imposed the
jazia
tax on non-believers to induce them to tread the righteous path. In everything we did, our only guide was the holy law of the
shariat
. We forbade the distillation of liquor and severely punished those we suspected to be under its influence. It was a common saying that when we ascended the throne there were only two men in all Hindustan, ourselves and the chief
qazi
, who did not drink. Within a few years we made drink a rarity. Since drinking was often indulged in to the accompaniment of dancing and singing, we forbade them too. We forced prostitutes and dancing girls to marry or leave our empire. Once when musicians and singers carried fake biers of corpses of music and dance, and accosted us as we were going for our Friday prayers, we told them to bury the corpses so deep that they would never rise again. Our Mussalman subjects were happy with our ordinances and acclaimed us as
Zinda Peer
(a Living Saint.)

We waged a ceaseless war against the infidel. Wherever he raised his serpentine hood we crushed it under foot. Most of our later years were spent in the Deccan contending with the mountain rats that Shiva had bred. We caught his son Sambha and sent him to eternal damnation. However, we realized that the land would not be purged of idolatry in our lifetime and exorted our sons to keep up the crusade.

Other kings would have treated the state treasury as their personal property and wasted it in extravagant living, women, wine, jewels and monuments. We looked upon ourselves as God’s chosen custodian to use it for the good of the people. On ourselves we spent no more than the poorest of our subjects. We sewed prayer caps and made copies of the holy
Quran
: whatever we got for them in the market we spent on our food and personal raiment. How many monarchs who ruled empires as large as ours could claim to have lived like
dervishes
as we had done?

We had only three sisters left in our world. Roshanara, who had been closest to us, had of late shown indifference to our wishes and had been indiscreet in her behaviour towards strangers. Before we could fully remonstrate with her, Allah summoned her to His court. She had in her lifetime designed her own resting place. She used to spend many evenings in this garden and had a variety of exotic, fragrance-emitting shrubs planted alongside water channels and tanks. She had desired that her tomb should have the sky as its vault so that the dew and the rain that Allah sent down could refresh her remains. Her wishes were carried out.

We turned to Jahanara Begum and pleaded that now the people who had come between us had gone, she should show us the affection due from an elder sister to her brother. On the anniversary of our coronation we presented her with 1,00,000 gold pieces, fixed a pension of 1,700,000 rupees and invested her with the title of
Padshah
Begum. She agreed to share our loneliness and guide us with her counsel. When she was summoned by Allah we commanded that in all historical documents she should be referred to as
Sahibat-uz-Zamani
, because she was indeed the mistress of the age. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried near the tomb of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. On the tombstone we had inscribed a Persian couplet she had composed:

Let green grass only conceal my grave:

Grass is the best covering for the tomb of the meek.

In the spring of the year ad 1706 when the last of our brothers and sisters, Gauhar Ara Begum, was summoned by Allah to His presence we knew it was our turn to fold up our prayer mat. We were in Ahmednagar when our health began to deteriorate. We realized that Ahmednagar was to be the end of our travels. Our beloved daughter Zeenat-un-Nissa, to whom Allah had given the gift of prayer (which she had translated into a large mosque in Delhi) and our ageing wife Udaipuri Begum ministered into needs. A hundred
hakeems
felt our pulse every day; but what can mortals and medicaments do against Allah’s decrees? We divided our time between re-reading the tablet of our deeds in our mortal’s existence of ninety lunar years, and what rewards and penalties awaited us on the day of judgement.

What now sorrowed us most was the treacherous path taken by the progeny of our own loins. Mohammad Sultan had earlier blackened his face by joining his uncle Shuja against us, and now Akbar went over to the infidels. Azam, to whom we had given Dara’s daughter as wife, turned out to be a worthless braggart. We had to put him in prison for a year to keep him away from wine and to teach him to govern his temper. Our youngest, Kam Baksh, had neither ambition nor competence, but of all the slights that our children had aimed at us, none hurt us more than the conduct of our gifted daughter Zebu-un-Nissa to whom Allah had given the gift of poetry (she composed verse under the pseudonym ‘Makfhi’). She encouraged her brother Akbar to carry on treasonable conduct against us and with a heavy heart we were constrained to order her to be detained in Salimgarh fort. She aimed her last barbed shaft at us:

I have experienced such cruelty and harshness in this land of Hind,

I shall go and make myself a home in some other country.

Saying which she went to the land of the dead.

We had reposed faith in our eldest-born, Muazzam. Even he betrayed our trust during our victorious campaigns against Bijapur and Golconda by treating with the enemy. We did not let our affection stand in the way of justice and had him put in prison and forbade him to either cut his hair or pare his nails or drink anything except water. We kept him in confinement for seven full years.

Came the summer of 1705. As we camped in village Devpur, on the banks of the river Krishna, a severe fever seized us. In our delirium we recited a quatrain of Shaikh Ganja:

When you have counted eighty years and more,

Time and Fate will batter at your door;

But if you should survive to be a hundred,

Your life will be death to the very core.

A nobleman attending our sickbed added the last lines:

In such a state lift up your heart:

remember

The thought of God lights up a dying ember.

We had little will to tarry longer in the world and the succession of fevers that ravaged us confirmed our hope that before long Allah would summon us. In one of these feverish bouts we composed another couplet:

A moment, a minute, a breath can deform,

And the shape of the world assumes a new form.

We thought it proper to address words of counsel to our errant sons. To Azam we wrote: ‘I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing. The instant which has passed in power has left only sorrow behind it. I have not been the guardian and protector of the empire. Life, so valuable, has been squandered in vain. God was in my heart, but I could not see Him. Life is transient, the past is gone and there is no hope for the future...I fear for my salvation, I fear my punishment. I believe in God’s bounty and mercy, but I am afraid because of what I have done...’

And to Kam Baksh: ‘Soul of my soul...I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness; but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry its consequences with me. Strange that I came into the world with nothing, and now I am going away with this stupendous caravan of sin! Wherever I look, I see only God... I have sinned terribly and I do not know what punishment awaits me...’

These were not words written by an old man who feared death when he knew his end to be near but who feared that he was taking leave of life without fulfilling his mission. We saw the infidel Marathas, Rajputs, Jats and Sikhs rising in arms all over Hindustan. And we saw how feeble of mind and purpose were the progeny we were leaving behind us. We knew that after we were gone the empire of the Mughals founded by Babar would begin to totter to its fall and only tumult remain:
Azma hama fasad baki
.

We had already chosen our place of rest, a simple, unadorned grave in the courtyard of the tomb of the saintly Shaikh Zainuddin at the foot of Daulatabad fort.

We knew our end was near. Our companions also understood that the time for farewell was nigh. They asked us if we would give away our elephants and diamonds in charity to ward off the final hour. Our tongue had lost its speech but we scribbled on a piece of paper that such practices were not becoming to Muslims. ‘Give all you want out of the treasury to the poor. And build no mausoleums over my body,’ we wrote. ‘And carry this creature of dust quickly to the first burial place and consign him to the earth without any useless coffin.’

All my life I have been tormented by ghosts. Since Delhi has more ghosts than any other city in the world, life in Delhi can be one long nightmare. I have never seen a ghost nor do I believe they exist. Nevertheless for me they are real. I have tried to overcome this ‘ghostophobia’ by exposing myself to the dying and the dead, visiting cremation grounds and graveyards. It has not helped very much. I come back feeling at peace with myself and imagine that I have exorcised the fear. But no sooner does the day begin to die, than spirits of the dead come alive. Doors open by themselves, curtains rustle without any breeze and I feel the invisible presence of dead people around me. The only one to whom I have confessed these fears is Bhagmati because she believes in ghosts. She is not sympathetic. She laughs and calls me
baccha
(child) and adds, ‘When I die, I will come to lie with you. Then you will be free of this childish fear. But if I catch you making love to someone else, I will never let you have one night of sleep.’ (She has not yet forgiven me for fucking Kamala, the Brigadier’s wife. But Kamala is gone now with her husband to a family posting so Bhagmati is no longer as angry with me!).

Of the many encounters I have had with ghosts, there is one I can never forget. This was some years ago. I was rung up and told that my uncle was very sick and I should see him before he died. This uncle had been dying for many years. Asthma had reduced him to a bearded skeleton with large, fiery eyes. He had been a kind of living ghost for a long time and something told me I should keep away from his bedside. But my morbid fascination with death, and wailing over the dead, made me ignore my inner promptings and so presently I found myself in a room full of solicitous relatives seated round the sick man’s bed. Some were praying, others whispering to each other. He was reclining against a bolster with his head tucked between his knees. His wife sat beside him holding a spittoon full of phlegm. He began to cough— a long never-ending gurgle—then raised his head. His wife held the spittoon under his chin and yellow, pus-like phlegm drooled down his black beard into the receptacle. The wife wiped his beard with a towel and told him I had come to see him. He fixed his large eyes on me without a trace of recognition. Then he lowered his head between his knees. A minute later he fell sideways with his eyes and mouth wide open. He was dead.