Mistress of the Throne (The Mughal intrigues) (11 page)

“Jahanara, get the hakim! The baby is coming!” I ran outside to fetch him.

He shouted: “Empress, please spread your legs so I may be able to see the baby’s head!” Ami did as she was told, while I applied cool bandages to her forehead to wipe off her sweat.

“What do you see, hakim?” my mother uttered through her exhaustion. The Hakim wouldn’t answer, making Ami more nervous. Finally he looked up and said, “Your Majesty, you have not yet dilated. I can see nothing.”

“How could that be?” she yelled in exasperation. “I feel the baby descending! It
has
to come out! I can’t take it anymore!”

I began panicking as well. I’d never seen my mother so beaten and distraught. She spoke as if she knew how all this would end and was fearing the inevitable.

I said, “Can you do something to help her along?”

The hakim ignored me. He rose, pushing Ami’s knees toward one another, and said, “Malikaye, please take some more opium and rest. There is nothing more we can do right now.”

Another 30 hours – a full day and a half – passed; then Ami’s contractions began anew.

“Get the hakim!” she screamed. “Get him! I feel like I’m exploding!”

I ran out again, this time more panicked and nervous than ever, and found the hakim. He ran in and again bent down to look for the baby’s head. She cried, “Tell me you can see the head, Hakim. Tell me I’m dilated... please!!” The hakim didn’t answer, but from the side I caught a glimpse of his face. He seemed worried.

“What’s wrong, hakim?” I asked.

He wouldn’t look at me, but he said to Ami: “The baby is breech, Your Highness. We can’t pull it out this way. If we try, we risk tearing your uterus.”

Ami began weeping. During the past 30 hours, she’d come to look as though she’d aged considerably. It seemed wrinkles had formed along the lines of her cheeks as she cried and shrieked incessantly.

“Do something, hakim! I can’t take this anymore! I’ll die if you don’t do something!”

The hakim continued to apply pressure to Ami’s belly, hoping to rotate the baby in the uterus so the head would turn down. Frustrated by his inability to do so, he began to push more vigorously, causing Ami to yell out in agony.

I shouted: “She’s not a goat, she’s a human being, hakim!”

“I know, Princess,” he said wearily, “but both the mother’s and the child’s lives are at stake.” Soon more hakims ran into the room, massaging Ami’s belly as though it were some ball of dough. One of them bent down to look between Ami’s legs as another pushed from above.

“I see the feet!” one of them yelled.

“We don’t need the feet, we need the head!” interjected another.

“Well, the feet are better than the buttocks we’ve been seeing all along!” The hakims continued to ramble. Head, feet, buttocks, what were they talking about?

“I’m pulling the baby from the feet; we have no other option!”

“You’ll shear the uterus and cause bleeding.”

“If I don’t, she and the baby will die!”

I froze. Die? It was one thing when my mother was saying it (I’d assumed it was her pain talking). But now the hakim was saying it? Was it true? Was my mother really dying?

Finally I heard the shriek of the infant rend the air. Ami cried to me that this was a voice different from the voices she’d heard in her previous births. Perhaps it was due to her own dilapidated state, I reassured her, that the voice sounded different. She cried that she still felt she hadn’t given birth to a healthy baby – her weakness had prevented the child from receiving the proper nourishment.

The hakim called out, “It’s a girl!”

“Is it healthy?” she murmured.

“Yes, Malikaye, she’s absolutely healthy!”

Ami smiled as she leaned into my shoulder; she’d given birth to a healthy child after three unsuccessful pregnancies. I began to cry with joy, even as I noticed my mother’s head getting heavier. I looked over to Ami and realised that her eyes had rolled back into her head. I cried, “Ami, wake up! Hakim, look at Ami!”

The hakim sent one of his assistants over as he continued to manage the bleeding that was issuing from her birth canal. He said, “She’s losing a lot of blood, Begum Sahiba. Lay your mother flat so that blood can rush to her head!”

I didn’t know what to do. I ran to fetch Aba; I needed him now more than ever. But the hakim asked him not to enter, as he needed space to work.

After three hours’ work, the hakim walked out of the apartment and told Aba about his wife’s dire condition. “Here in Burhampur, Your Majesty, I simply don’t have the instruments and tools to help the queen.”

“Hakim, what are you saying? Make sure you think before speaking. I want the truth. Is my wife well?”’

“Your Majesty, your daughter is healthy, and your wife is alive. But I couldn’t stop the bleeding. I’ve packed her bleeding in hopes that it will eventually stop on its own. The body has a way of healing itself. But…”

“But what?” Aba’s voice was wary.

“The Queen’s blood was thin to begin with,” replied the Hakim. I don’t know if she has the energy to hang on long enough for her body to heal itself. If this were Agra, I could stop it. Here I cannot.”

Aba squinted and bit his lips. He looked up to the sky. “Why did I let her come here with me? Why did I allow her to get so weak?” He paused. “May I see my wife? Is she awake?”

“Please, Your Majesty, go in quickly and stay as long as you like; she may not have much time left.”

Aba and I entered the room. We each grasped one of Ami’s hands with tears in our eyes.

“I need you to get through this, Arjumand,” whispered Aba.

Ami opened her eyes and smiled at her torn husband, his eyes red and his face dripping with tears. She breathed feebly, “I’m very comfortable, Khurram.” They were now addressing each other by their original names, as if the time for ceremony and tradition needed to be halted. Right now they weren’t the King and Queen of India, but just Khurram and Arjumand, two people who’d loved each other as soon as they met and had never stopped loving each other since.

“We really didn’t need another child, Arju,” Aba said, smiling.

“Yes, we did, Khurram. You told everyone you wanted children only from me. So I needed to make up for all your other wives.”

“No, you didn’t,” claimed Aba. “We had six already. Who needed more?”

“We would be here, Khurram, just as we are, you there and me here, regardless of the pregnancy. This is how it was meant to end for us.”

“Please don’t say that,” Aba pleaded. “I can’t live without you, Arju. I’m like the moon, and you are my sun. The moon has no light of its own, it’s all reflected light from the sun. Were it not for the sun, no one would ever see the moon.” Ami kept smiling at Aba’s analogy. “I draw my strength from you. I draw my light from you. Were it not for you, no one would ever see me. I am the moon, and you are my sun.”

Ami briefly lifted a hand toward him. “Our love was the light that allowed the world to see you. Our love doesn’t have to die with me.”

“Not like this,” insisted Aba. “Who is going to help me take care of all of these kids?”

“Jahanara will.” Ami turned her face toward me and said, “Jahanara, from this day forward, you are both their sister and their mother.”

I began to weep relentlessly, and I begged my mother not to leave us and to fight harder. I wanted her to stand still and transform this
moment into an eternity, for her doing so would prevent the passage of time to a world where my mother was no longer alive.

Aba wept openly now. “How am I supposed to keep our love alive without you, Arju?”

Still smiling, yet getting weaker by the moment, Ami said, “Keep our love alive by doing whatever it is that you like that’s inspired by our love. If you wish to sing, then sing about it, if you wish to paint, paint a scene from it, and if you wish to build, build something that allows the whole world to see how we felt about each other. As long as you remember it, it will give you the light you need to shine, my love. It will be your light.”

In her dying moments now, she uttered the religious words every Muslim must say before dying. Aba and I stared at her and watched her release her final breath.

Instantly as she died, Aba led out a loud cry, screaming
“No!”
multiple times in horror, his voice only silenced by desperate, noiseless cries that followed before he could gain his breath and repeat the sequence. As though forgetting he was a king, he began tearing hairs out from his own beard.

I beat the bed and cried out, “Ami!” I couldn’t control myself, and I eventually started to pound my own chest; I felt I didn’t want to live in a world without my mother in it. She’s not been just my mother, but my best friend and confidant. My agony turned to incoherent screams of horror and disbelief. The hakims and the harem women ran into the room, and joined us in our mourning.

Ami exhaled her final breath shortly before dawn on Tuesday, 17
^th
June, 1631. She was 38 years old. During her short life, Ami had become unquestionably the most popular Empress of India. She had initiated multiple reforms in the kingdom to help the poor and needy and continued to serve her husband with the utmost loyalty.

Though born into a family where political posturing was practised more than anything else, she treated Aba’s plight as her own, and lived however he kept her. On endless journeys with swollen bellies, she’d accompanied him from one military campaign
to another. No one, not even Nur Jahan, who hated everyone in the royal household, had anything negative to say about her. Her brief four years as empress gave the country a much needed figure of imperial decency and charity. The days of mourning to follow would be uncharacteristic of any royalty in that time, save for possibly the King.

It was as if India had lost its first ever ‘Mother India’. A true embodiment of beauty, grace, tolerance, and modesty, she represented all India aspired to be. It was she who taught me to wear my title of Begum Sahiba like a medal and use it to further those causes I believed in. By the time she died, she’d already raised me to be independent and free thinking. Her son was multicultural in the spirit of the legendary Akbar, the most popular Mughal king. Her other children were too young to have learned this, but her counsel had started Aurangzeb on a course of reconciliation and service. She treated all of her husband’s wives with respect and candour, not cruelty as had been the practice of other empresses. Never before, and perhaps never again, would India fall in love with such a figure as my mother, the legendary Mumtaz Mahal, and no Mughal king would feel for his empress what Aba had felt for his. A remarkable human being in every sense, Ami thoroughly deserved the timeless monument Aba would one day build in her honour.

7

HEALING BROKEN HEARTS

18
^th
June, 1631

O
ne of the Muslim nobles began reading the Koran’s ‘O Man’ chapter as Ami’s body lay beside him. Another mullah turned her head towards Mecca. As the mullah spoke the Koranic verses, her body was cleaned and washed by a female washer and wrapped in a white shroud consisting of five pieces of white cotton.

The mullahs continued to chant in unison: “I bear witness that there is no God but God, who is One and has no co-equal. I bear witness that Mohammad is His servant and is sent from Him.” All around me women cried while the mullah chattered: “Say God is One! Say I seek protection of the Lord of Daybreak! Say, I seek the protection of the Lord of Men!”

Kandari walked up to me and said, “Jahanara, we need to gather at the entrance of the fort to begin the procession.” I willingly left the room, not wishing to see my mother’s lifeless body anymore.

As we congregated, all the zenana women continued to weep, some out of obligation, I thought others with genuine grief. I joined them in their mourning, still both stunned and devastated. The tatars then motioned us to stand at the side as the mullahs escorted Ami’s remains to the entrance.

Ami’s body was then removed from the fort, head first so as to prevent her ghost from finding a way back to the fort. All this was customary.

The chief hakim then approached me. “Begum Sahiba, we must now go to the banks of the Tapti river. The mullah has chosen that location for the burial.”

The entire day continued to feel like a surreal experience, and I often felt like I was in an alternate reality. I felt dizzy, and my vision was foggy all day.

Aba looked less like the king of a vast empire and more like a fakir, a street wanderer, crying and chanting religious verses. The zenana ladies continued crying the loudest, as if their own child or mother had been taken from them.

I don’t think I ever stopped crying. From the minute Ami died to now, I think I’d been crying all along, so much that it didn’t even seem abnormal anymore. My tears flowed down my cheeks like water flows down a snowy cliff on a warm day. I began to feel my throat closing, and I began gasping for air as the procession marched on.

“Begum Sahiba, take long deep breaths!” The zenana women tried to help me catch my breath. My cheekbones began to ache from weeping. Yet I felt the need to cry more. “My head is going to explode,” I said, gasping for air, my mouth wide open.