Shadow Princess (31 page)

But, Jahanara thought, reflecting on Mehrunnisa’s last words to her, there must be some way for her to find and keep her happiness—if not publicly, then in private.

She forced herself to be polite, even welcoming. “It is a wonder that we have not been able to come here before. Look, Roshan”—she gestured outside the balcony—“have you ever seen the sun rise in such glory?”

“My apartments are at the back of the fort,” Roshanara said shortly as she came to lean against the parapet.

“Then you will see the sun set,” Jahanara said, dreading what was to come, for she knew just from that one curt sentence.

“Why does Bapa always give you the best rooms?” Roshanara asked. “It is unfair to treat you better than me.”

“And you ask me that? What do you expect I will say? Take my apartments?”

“Will you?” Roshanara Begam turned to her sister, her eyes alight with curiosity and eagerness.

“No.”

Roshanara grunted, her fingers moving on the fabric of her cloak. “I did not expect you to,” she said, “but thought I would ask anyhow. I . . . how does one say this, Jahan? You are more favored and get the best of everything. I am Bapa’s daughter also, but from the very beginning, he has shown his preference for you. You received most of Mama’s income when she died; the rest was to be distributed among us. Why?”

“It’s impossible for me to respond to this. Why now?” Jahanara said, feeling the weight of all that was unsaid between them come to rest upon her.

Behind them, the slave girls and eunuchs moved around on soft, padded feet, straightening the sheets, dusting the little tables, sweeping the carpets that extended from wall to wall. They heard the rattle of rocks of spent coal as the braziers were emptied, filled again, and lit. Thick smoke surged out to the balcony, and in the cool morning air, both the princesses shivered, drawing their fox fur cloaks around them closely.

“I heard about your meeting with Mirza Najabat Khan in the
chaugan
grounds,” Roshan said quietly.

“I know.”

“I went to see him; did you know that also?”

Jahanara felt a tightening about her chest. “No. What . . . did he say to you?”

“Enough to make me think that he was interested.” Roshanara clicked her tongue in exasperation. “We, princesses of the blood, are reduced to encounters with a lover in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness, like some common woman straying from her husband’s bed. It is shameful, Jahan, you must realize this.”

“When?” Jahanara asked, not paying heed to the rest of the rant, for it was self-serving. Roshanara’s disgust was more for
her,
Jahanara, than for herself, though she had doubtless met Najabat Khan on a dark night also. But Jahanara had heard the word
lover
from Roshanara’s mouth, and she cringed to think that her sister would consider Najabat Khan so . . . also.

“You must stop this, Jahan. Think of your position as Padshah Begam, as the Begam Sahib of Bapa’s harem. He adores you, thinks that you can do no wrong, and he would be crushed to hear of your dalliances, if, that is, Bapa somehow got to know of them.”

“Is that a warning, Roshan?” Jahanara asked softly. “Let me just say that Bapa knows of more than we think he does, his ear is always to the ground, and he is not a fool. How did he hear of your wanting to marry Mirza Najabat Khan?”

When Princess Roshanara moved to confront her sister—and this was the first time since Roshanara had stepped to her side that they had actually faced each other—her mouth was pinched, and a sparkle of tears glittered in her eyes. Jahanara almost reached out to her, but she held back, thinking that there was no place for affection between them anymore, no real understanding at all. In some ways, they had all been brought up to think of themselves first, and others later, because they were royal, and invested with an immense sense of self. But over the last few years, Roshanara had schemed and shouted and whispered about her in all quarters of the
zenana,
mostly out of spite, and Jahanara had no feeling left for her sister.

“I am going to send him a note,” Roshanara said. “And he will come. That, unfortunately, is all I have left now.”

“He will not,” Jahanara said without inflection, but anger raged inside her. Suddenly, it was important for her to know why Najabat had stayed away from her summons and to see whether he would indeed respond to Roshanara’s. She had thought for many long hours about him and about the time they had spent together—this was all she had, all she had based her obsession upon. If he went to Roshan, he would never be hers; it was better to know that for sure than to harbor any desires that would not find their way to fulfillment.

“Call for him then, Roshan,” she said wearily. “If he comes, you can have him.”

Princess Roshanara Begam picked up the skirts of her
ghagara
to step over the doorway and into the room. She did not bid her sister farewell. They both knew that something had ruptured between them; if they had stayed quiet, it would have been hidden at the back of their minds, but now . . . they had little left. They were both inmates of Bapa’s
zenana,
both his children, both women to be cherished, treasured, and controlled, and neither had to see the other again if she did not want to—once the crown found its way onto the head of either Dara or Aurangzeb.

Roshanara went to her rooms and began a letter to Najabat Khan, inviting him that night to the Shalimar gardens on the northeastern corner of the lake. As her hand trembled over the empty page, she wondered how to word this bold invitation. Or if Najabat would even come in response to it. It was Jahan who fascinated him, Jahan who had played
chaugan
with him in the light of a winter moon. Of her, Roshan, he knew little and had only heard her voice. Once. But if he came, if he saw her . . . surely, he would forget her sister. . . . Her mind made up, she wrote with care, unused to the handwriting she was trying to imitate. She did not sign her name at the end. When she was done, she dipped a seal in ink and deliberately pressed it on the paper so as not to smudge the edges of the imprint of the rose with its six unfurled petals—for the original seal was fashioned of silver, and this, a copy she had had made a year ago, was only of wax. It was an exquisite copy, though, and encircling the rose, these words showed up clearly:
By the order of her imperial Highness, the Begam Sahib Jahanara.

•  •  •

As night descended, the muezzins’ voices rose, calling the faithful to the final
salah
of the day, the last of the five ritual prayers. Their melodies, echoing around the valley of Srinagar, were accompanied by the ringing of bells in the Hindu temples and the priests’ chanting of Sanskrit verses. The Muslims knelt where they were, facing Mecca, and the Hindus thronged in the incense-and-smoke-filled temples that were aglow with brilliant oil lamps.

At the end of his prayer, a man on the banks of Dal Lake covered his eyes with his hands briefly and then rose to his feet. He looked up into the cold and dry night sky, embedded with a thousand stars, whose light this high on earth seemed to be brighter and more radiant than it was in the thickly dusty plains of Hindustan. Around the lake, the many golden lamps illuminating the
havelis
of the
amirs
cast their speckled reflections on the calm water, the light flowing into darkness in the arms of the mountains and turning silver-blue in the stars of the sky. Najabat Khan stood at the very edge of his property, on the wooden pier jutting out into the waters, stamping his feet occasionally to keep the chill away from his ankles and toes. His hands were now in the fur pockets of his coat, its collar pulled up about his face so that only his nose and his eyes showed. He searched in the right-hand pocket and found the slip of paper he had been looking for. He did not need to read it again; every word was known to him as though it had come from his own hand, but his fingers curled around the paper, holding it tight. He remembered her very well from that night, the flush on her face, naked and boldly presented to his gaze, the strength in her arms as she swung the
chaugan
stick, that laughter. The yearning that had beset him that night had never really waned. And then, a few months later, still in his state of happy delirium, the repugnance he had felt when he had heard the rumors of her . . . connection with her father that was so unnatural as to make him flinch. It must have been true, he had thought, for there was never talk that abhorrent that could not find its inception in a little crumb of truth. When Princess Jahanara had written again, he had crumpled the letter in his palm and set fire to it with a burning chunk of coal from his
hookah,
without reading it. In a few months, he had begun to doubt what he had heard, for with those rumors came the gossip of the Emperor’s fancy straying once more to the women of his
zenana
—slave girls and concubines—and also the wives of the nobles at court. Again, there was truth to all of these reports, for there was nothing secret in the Empire from the Emperor himself or from the
amirs
at court. One of Najabat’s wives had visited Jafar Khan’s wife and found her adorned in a splendid emerald and diamond necklace which could only have come from the treasury’s coffers. So then, Najabat Khan had realized that all of his previous surmises, rushed into being because of his fascination for the Emperor’s oldest child, were mistaken, since the one could not exist while the other did. He had also been misguided into believing something other than what he knew to be true of Emperor Shah Jahan’s character.

Now this command from her. A eunuch unknown to him had brought the letter in the afternoon and slipped away into the sunshine before he could open or read it.

Najabat Khan snapped his fingers in the cold, and the boatman of his
shikara
nudged his craft closer to the pier until it bumped against the wooden planks. He steadied the
shikara
as his master climbed in and then used his oar to push away into the water.

“Shalimar Bagh,” Najabat said, and settled down against the cushions, a woolen rug about his knees, as they glided through the still waters of the Dal, east and north to the slim canal that led to, and was the only entrance to, the gardens Emperor Jahangir had built for his beloved wife Mehrunnisa and on which Emperor Shah Jahan had recently constructed a series of pavilions for work and for pleasure.

By the time they reached the entrance to the Bagh, some forty minutes later, clouds had blanketed the sky and the blue light of the stars had been extinguished by a pall of grays. The air had turned more crisp, more biting, and a thin wind swept through the length of the canal, rocking the
shikara
from side to side. Najabat Khan shivered, wrapped his arms around himself as he stood in the glow of
diyas
that flickered on the first, public terrace of Shalimar Bagh.

The gardens were built in a series of three terraces, one above the other, each more than the height of a man from the ground so that, standing on one level looking up at the next, a person would see only a carved stone wall inset with niches and, in the middle of the wall, the fluid drop of water from the upper level to the one below. The first terrace was the Emperor’s Diwan-i-am, not so much the Hall of Public Audience as in the forts at Agra and Lahore but the only place where the
amirs
of the court could assemble when they came to a
durbar
session. It was long and flat, cut through the center with the
charbagh,
and its main pathway was cleaved with a long pool of water that flowed into the canal below. Against the land end of the first terrace, Emperor Shah Jahan had commissioned a black stone throne set in a square pool, and here he had sat a day before in audience, the nobles crowded around the edges of the pool, fountains playing softly in the waters, the Emperor himself, unreachable, across the expanse of blue.

The second terrace, unseen from here, was the Diwan-i-khas, again not the Hall of Private Audience as such but a garden for Shah Jahan to meet with a few privileged nobles. A eunuch came forward from the shadows of the large aspens along the pathways and motioned to Najabat Khan to climb to the second level of the bagh. Najabat followed behind at a distance. Najabat, who had not yet been invited to the Diwan-i-khas, looked around him as he came to stand on the border of the garden after climbing the stairs. The garden was still bare, slender tree trunks, uncovered branches, the brown lawns jeweled with early crocuses in white, which glowed like pearls in the darkening night. There was a small pavilion here also, a meeting place for the
amirs,
and water in the main long pool, its fountains silent in the cold. To his right, along the path, there were oil
diyas
in terra-cotta shades, lighting the way upward to the final terrace, where no man not connected to the imperial family had ever been allowed—for this last and highest piece of land in the Shalimar Bagh was the
zenana
garden.

The steps were steep here, almost at thigh level, but Najabat ran up them quickly and stood panting at the very top, unable to believe what he saw. The cold of the night was dispelled by a hundred coal braziers in the open air, smoking gently with the warm perfume of aloewood. There was light everywhere, along every pathway, set atop the broad and unusual eaves of the pavilion at the far end, scattered along the polished marble floor inside the pavilion like the night sky come to rest upon the earth in all of its brilliance. Here, the water flowed in a cold rush over the walls, and inset in the walls behind the water were niches filled with the glimmer of more
diyas
—turning the whole cascade of water into a sheet of gold. The woman stood in one of the central arches of the
baradari,
her back to him. Najabat waited until the pounding of his heart from running up the stairs had subsided, laid a hand on his chest, and ran lightly up the pathways, skipping over the
diyas
strewn in his way until he reached the bottom of the three small steps leading up. He stood there waiting for her to turn and acknowledge him, for she must have heard the sound of his footsteps. A moment passed, and then another, and the fine sheen of sweat on his brow cooled and froze on his skin.