Mistress of the Throne (The Mughal intrigues) (44 page)

O
ur time in prison passed slowly; another year, and now we were a year closer to death.

Aba didn’t enjoy the fast, simple death his brothers had enjoyed when he executed them. Indeed, his death wouldn’t be as tranquil as any Mughal emperor’s before him (or even after him, perhaps).

Aurangzeb had us under house arrest in the Samman Burj, the once imperial apartment that was home to Aba’s nemesis, Nur Jahan, as well as his beloved wife. Our once boundless empire had now shrunk to a few yards.

Though not meant to torment his aging father, Aurangzeb’s decision to imprison him in the Samman Burj resulted in giving the deposed King a clear view of the Taj Mahal, which now he could see but not touch, a brutal reminder of what once was, but never would be, again. From here Aba mourned his wife even while admiring his own architecture. Aba’s architectural pursuits had reshaped India, giving it monuments I was sure would long outlast our times. Yet for all the glamour and glory he’d brought on the empire, he couldn’t prevent the tide of dissent and calamity that had brewed in his own household.

Shortly after being crowned ‘Al-Sultan al-Azam wal Khaqan al-Mukarram Abul Muzaffar Muhi ud-din Muhammad Aurangzeb Bahadur Alamgir I,’ Aurangzeb freed me and offered me a place in
the fort – not as empress, of course – to live out my remaining days. I instead chose to stay with my father, knowing his final days would be his worst and that I couldn’t enjoy luxury while knowing he was living in a decrepit state. I would remain with him in the Samman Burj, looking at the Taj Mahal with the same haunting admiration as my father, asking both guidance and forgiveness of my mother for not being able to fend off the bloodshed she’d predicted a generation ago would consume our family.

Many years passed after the battle at Samugarh, and I spent them blaming myself for everything that had happened. Perhaps I could have done more to convince Aurangzeb I was
his
ally, and stopped Raushanara from further manipulating him. Even my affair with Gabriel had given Raushanara ammunition, allowing her to spread vicious rumours of incest about me, further pushing Aurangzeb and the orthodoxy away from me and weakening my position as empress.

During this imprisonment, Aurangzeb’s attitude towards me seemed strange. We didn’t talk; no written or verbal communication occurred. However, through guards appointed to Aba in the Samman Burj by the new Emperor, I lobbied for more amenities for Aba. I could never ask Aurangzeb directly, I’d simply ask the guards, knowing they ultimately would ask the Emperor himself.

“This place is too big for two people,” I once told a guard. “Either move us to a small cell or allow the former Emperor to have his entire harem join him here.”

Within a week, all his harem ladies, wives and concubines, were gracing the formerly majestic apartment with their presence. Another time, I asked for special dishes for the former Emperor, and a private cook; these requests, too, were rapidly agreed to. Though I was no longer empress, Aurangzeb still treated me like one in some ways.

Aba wasn’t allowed to write letters to anyone but Aurangzeb, and those letters wavered from cheap flattery to threats of outright revolt against his own son. Aurangzeb would respond in kind now that Aba had no control over him and no longer required the respect of silence and submission he’d given Aba previously all his life.

Mullah Shah Badakshi paid us a visit over a year after our imprisonment, reluctantly allowed to do so because of his ‘mullah’ status and his political connections with the orthodoxy – a group that now enjoyed unprecedented power.

I told him kindly, “You took great pains to come here, mullah.”

He replied, “The pains I may have suffered are nothing compared to the pains you, the Emperor, and the rest of India are suffering every day, Your Majesty.”

“I am no longer royalty, sir, so you need not address me as Majesty.”

Mullah Shah quickly responded: “To me you will always be royalty, Your Highness. The current Emperor and Empress cannot even wash the floors you walk on!”

The chief eunuch appointed to guard Aba, Itibar Khan, glanced over at the mullah, indicating by his disapproving facial expression caution against any language against the Emperor. But Mullah Shah, caring nothing about his own well-being, added, “I am here to partake in the mourning for Dara Shikoh’s death.”

Dara Shikoh was killed shortly after Aurangzeb had become King of India. While on the run, Dara’s wife Nadira died, and a depressed Dara simply stopped running. Encouraged by his men to keep evading Aurangzeb’s troops, he reluctantly continued his march, only to be betrayed by his own men and eventually captured.

I looked down sorrowfully as the mullah spoke, unwilling to think of what Dara must have endured at the hands of his vengeful brother. Dara’s head was presented to Aba and me at our dinner table by Aurangzeb’s instructions; he’d committed this heinous act at the behest of Raushanara.

Mullah Badakshi told me Dara’s final moments were also his finest. After his capture, the Prince was paraded down Chandni Chowk on a weak, miserable old elephant covered in filth. Robbed of any jewellery or riches, he simply wore a coarse-textured garment and a turban wrapped in a Kashmiri shawl.

The intent was to humiliate the Prince and show the triumph of the Emperor; but in every quarter of the city where he was paraded,
the people wept as if their own king had been killed. The crowds that gathered in his honour were immense, and people cried out his name, tears flowing down their faces. Not only Hindus, the land’s Muslims also wept, as if the glory days of Islam in India were now over.

Finally Dara dismounted the filthy elephant and was brought before the Red Fort in chains. Just then, a crazy fakir who was known for standing in that particular spot began taunting the Prince: “Oh, Prince Dara, as a master you always gave me donations. But today you have nothing to give me, do you?”

But then the crowd turned quiet, and Dara looked directly with his bloodshot eyes at the fakir. All those present watched, as he lifted his hand to his shoulder, pulled off his dingy shawl and threw it to the fakir.

The fakir fell to the ground and begged Dara’s forgiveness. Then the Prince was taken immediately to a secured location, where he was subsequently executed.

We continued to stare at the ground, unable find words. At last Badakshi looked towards Aba, who sat in the corner staring at the Taj Mahal. He said, “How is the King, Your Majesty?”

I turned my head towards Aba and smiled, “He’s fine, given the circumstances. He likes to stare at my mother’s tomb. It reminds him of her, and of the love they shared.”

“Love has no place in India anymore, Your Highness.”

“It still does, I’m sure, just not in the open as before,” I said. “Aba became immune to news of death after Dara’s. When they told him how Aurangzeb killed Murad, Aba didn’t react.”

“There’s still hope, Your Majesty; Shuja still evades capture.”

“Shuja won’t last long, Mullah. We’ll hear of his death, too, one day soon.”

We spent these years waiting – to live, to die, for a liberation that seemed would never come. We never spoke of the future because it was unclear if we even had one. I grew in spirit, too, during this time, realising that self-guilt and shame were consuming me and stopping me from doing what I’d always sworn to do – take care of
my family. Though I’d aged well my whole life, for the next seven-and-a-half years my age would catch up with me. Wrinkles began to form, my face began to sink in, and my hair started to turn white.

I’d learned that Dara’s orphaned daughter, Jani, was being mistreated in the Red Fort at Delhi. Frequently taunted by Raushanara and not allowed proper schooling, her life was slowly turning into a waste as she was becoming the primordial example of what inevitably becomes the life of a Salatin. I implored my father to write to Aurangzeb and request that she be sent to the Samman Burj in Agra, to spend her days with her grandfather in imprisonment, where at least she’d be safe.

I don’t think Aurangzeb harboured any ill will against Jani or any of Dara’s other children, but he gave full freedom to Raushanara to torture them, a role she relished greatly. When the new King received the request for Jani’s extradition to Agra, he promptly fulfilled it and allowed her to join us in captivity.

With Jani now living with me, I found a new purpose in life. I began raising her as my own daughter, tutoring her and teaching her Persian, Arabic and even a little English. I taught her about the Koran, architecture, music and arts – an education even Aurangzeb’s children were being denied because of strict orthodox rules banning poetry and music in the court. I never understood how men who claimed to love God could have such a rigid, narrow vision of him.

Aba saw reflections of Ami in Jani’s smile, once we finally got her to laugh after several years of verbal and emotional abuse by Raushanara. This was my new family – Aba, Jani and me – living together like a seemingly normal family, but haunted by the harsh truth that our loved ones had been slain by our own relative, Aurangzeb.

I now found myself abandoned on this rudderless raft slowly drifting into oblivion. All the good we’d done, the change we sought to bring, was being slowly reversed by my ruthless brother. The love we shared among ourselves was all the magic we could experience. Enfolded in our self-contained universe, we took our only solace in being invisible to this new world Aurangzeb was creating.

On 7
^th
January, 1666, Aba again turned very weak and ill. Again his legs began to swell, and he developed a high fever. He kept growing weaker, and I knew now that nothing I could do would save him. Still, Jani and I hovered over him around the clock, applying cool bandages to his forehead to lower the temperature, making khichdi to help him regain his strength, but to no avail. Hakims and European physicians came, but nothing seemed to work.

Almost two weeks later, Aba lay on the balcony off the Samman Burj with his head on my lap, staring straight at the Taj Mahal; close by Jani held her grandfather’s hand. As the sun set for the night, the white Taj Mahal seemed to radiate a golden hue, and Aba began telling me of the age-old saying Akbar left about his famed city of Fatehpur Sikri: “The world is a bridge; walk over it, but do not make the mistake of building on it.” Aba was about to cross the bridge, and yet what he’d built would live on for centuries after him, reminding the world of what he’d felt for his wife and what love meant to him.

He recited words from the Koran, gave thanks for a thousand gifts, but also asked forgiveness for a thousand sins he may have committed in his life. Only now, as he lay dying, did the screams of Shahriar and his nephew ring in his ears.

“I’m sorry, Aba,” he cried violently as I tried to console him. “I’m sorry I killed your sons and grandsons! I’m sorry! This is all my fault! Allah, please have mercy on my children. Please don’t punish them for my sins!”

It was, of course, Aba who despite his many good attributes, had begun the sinful tradition of massacring one’s own family in quest of the throne. He’d even rebelled against his own father. Was Aurangzeb his punishment for these sins, or was further punishment waiting for him in the next world?

He saw ghosts of a leprosy-inflicted Shahriar standing on the balcony staring at him. Frightened, Aba moved his head away, this time claiming to see his young nephew Dawar Baksh, who was just a boy when Aba ordered his execution.

“Jahanara, my child, help me, I see ghosts!” he cried as the life drained from him. “How could I have been so cruel as to kill a man already sick from leprosy? How could I have killed a child… my own nephew… just for the throne? Jahanara… give me a path to salvation, my child! Please, show me a path!”

He sobbed in panic, truly believing the ghosts of the dead had arrived to haunt him and demand answers for sins he’d committed.

I remained calm, cradling his head in my lap. I then whispered something in Aba’s ear, so softly no one else present, not even Jani, heard what I said. I then wrote something on a sheet of paper and had Aba put his imprint on it. I tucked it in my blouse and held my father’s head on my lap, and we watched the sunset together. Now Aba was at peace.

Aba stared smiling at the Taj Mahal. I was keenly aware that he’d not see the next sunrise, and quite frankly, I hoped he’d die at that time and suffer no more. I knew it tortured Aba to see how death always evaded him, instead visiting his loved ones: Dara, Nadira Ami and – for a brief moment – me. No longer able to watch death from a distance, it seemed he decided to pull death into his own embrace finally, to escape his own misery.

He slowly spoke, still staring at the inviting golden Taj Mahal: “You know something, my child? Everything I did since your mother died, I did because of her. I built in hopes of celebrating my love for her through architecture, but it was never enough. From sarcophagus, to buildings, to entire cities, every time I was finished, I felt alone again. I even bedded many women hoping that perhaps one of them, just one, would be able to make me feel the way your mother had, but it never happened.”

Jani and I just listened, giving our dying loved one the opportunity to say his last words in peace: “True love really does come only once. You can’t reproduce it. It can’t be bargained for or compromised. Once you find it, nothing else will suffice. Anything else you see or try will fall short of expectations.”

I thought of Gabriel. Had I moved with him when he wanted, I’d be in the arms of my true love today. I might even be someone’s
mother or grandmother, but alas, I’m living here in penury. The previous year I’d received word that Gabriel died in England in the Black Plague in London. While everyone else fled London, he stayed to help the people and died in the process. Having no more tears to shed, I now merely remembered and mourned his passing in my own, private way.

Aba was breathing hard through his mouth now, panting as if desperately trying to hold onto life. But true to his intuition, Aba breathed his last that night, a smile frozen on his face, his eyes still open. He was 75.