The Twentieth Wife (10 page)

•   •   •

W
HEN
M
EHRUNNISA ENTERED
Ruqayya’s apartments the next morning, a game of chess was in progress between two of Akbar’s concubines. A few ladies sat around them in silence, following the game. Incense burned in gold and silver stands, swirling blue smoke around the room and perfuming the air with sandalwood. Slave girls and eunuchs stood or knelt around other women, offering wine and sherbet, plying peacock feather fans. A bird tweeted, and Mehrunnisa turned to the sound. One of the Emperor’s concubines lay on a divan, elbows propped on a velvet bolster, a yellow and red lovebird perched on her fingers. She made kissing sounds to the bird, and it promptly put its beak forward for a kiss. Its reward was a sliver of almond. The bird chirruped happily and flapped shorn wings. Mehrunnisa turned away, wondering whether she should attract the Empress’s attention.

Just then, Ruqayya noticed her and beckoned from her divan, where she sat smoking a
hukkah.
Mehrunnisa walked slowly to the Empress, suddenly feeling shy. She had not seen Ruqayya in four years; it seemed a long time. Ruqayya’s hair was now liberally sprinkled with gray, and a few more wrinkles creased her round face, but the eyes were the same as ever—dark, lively, darting around the room incessantly.

“So you are back?” Ruqayya said by way of a greeting.

“Yes, your Majesty. We returned yesterday,” Mehrunnisa replied, falling back into the relationship as though she had not left. Ruqayya possessed the talent to put everyone at ease, from the most menial servant to Akbar himself. A talent she should learn too, Mehrunnisa decided. One day Salim would value her as much because of it.

“How was Kabul? I hear your father has distinguished himself there.”

Mehrunnisa opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, a curly-haired little boy toddled into the room and flung himself onto Ruqayya’s lap.

“Ma, sweets,” he said peremptorily, stretching out a chubby hand.

Mehrunnisa looked at him in surprise. Ruqayya had no children, so who was this boy? To be sure, there were hundreds of “mothers” for every baby born in the
zenana,
but she had never before seen any child wrap the autocratic Padshah Begam around his little finger as this one had.

Ruqayya’s face was wreathed in smiles. She leaned over to the silver dish at her elbow and fed the
burfis
to the boy herself, unmindful that his sticky fingers were clutching her
choli,
smearing
ghee
all over it and her bare midriff.

“Meet my son, Mehrunnisa.” Ruqayya smiled at her over the little boy’s head. “This is Khurram.”

“Your son?” Mehrunnisa blurted out, unable to stop herself in time.

“Yes, he is mine. All mine.” Ruqayya wrapped her arms around Khurram. He squirmed in her lap. She kissed the soft curls on his head and let him go. As he ran out of the room, followed by his attendants, she turned to Mehrunnisa and said defiantly, “I may not have given birth to him, but he is nonetheless my son.”

“Of course, your Majesty,” Mehrunnisa mumbled.

“Tell me about your stay in Kabul.” Ruqayya lay back on the divan and picked up the mouthpiece of the
hukkah.

For the next hour, Mehrunnisa talked in a low voice so as not to disturb the chess players, prodded every now and then by a question from the Empress. Before she left, Ruqayya had returned to her normal good humor. She reached out and touched Mehrunnisa’s face lightly. “You have turned into a beautiful girl. How old are you now?”

Mehrunnisa told her.

“Well, it’s time you got married, my dear. Soon you will be an old maid.” The Empress waved her hand in dismissal. “Come tomorrow at the same time.”

At home, Mehrunnisa learned about Khurram from Asmat. He was Salim’s third son by his wife Jagat Gosini, and he had lived the last two years in Ruqayya’s apartments, believing
her
to be his mother. Akbar had named him Khurram, “Joy,” because his birth had brought much happiness to the court and the aging Emperor.

Upon his birth, Ruqayya Sultan Begam had demanded custody of Khurram. Akbar, unable to deny his wife anything, commanded that the child be weaned from his mother and put in the care of his Padshah Begam Ruqayya. But why this child, Mehrunnisa wondered. Salim had other sons, but Ruqayya had wanted this one, born of Salim’s second wife—the iron princess, the one who had always defied Ruqayya’s authority. Even as her mother talked on, Mehrunnisa smiled to herself. Ruqayya was cruel, merciless, and dangerous. Princess Jagat Gosini should have taken more care to appease her when she had first entered Salim’s harem. Now, for her arrogance, her child had been whisked away from her.

•   •   •

A
FEW MONTHS
passed. Mehrunnisa visited the imperial harem every day after finishing her studies, eagerly leaving her books. Her relationship with the Empress had changed subtly. Ruqayya no longer treated her like a child. She let Mehrunnisa stay in the room when her stewards came to visit, bringing with them the accounts from all the lands the Empress owned in the empire. “Listen and
learn, Mehrunnisa,” she said. “A woman must not be completely reliant on a man, either for money or for love.”

Ruqayya also began to depend more and more on Mehrunnisa, especially when it came to Prince Khurram. The Empress guarded the little boy jealously and would allow no one to come too close to him in case they stole his affections. One of the noblemen’s wives was his appointed nurse. Each morning, she rose at sunrise and came to the
zenana
to start her duties, leaving only at night after Khurram had been put to bed. But some days she could not come because of her responsibilities to her husband and children. On those days, the Empress grudgingly let Mehrunnisa take charge of Khurram, and as time passed, she came to trust her more.

The usually levelheaded Ruqayya was obsessed with the child, to such a point that his mother, Princess Jagat Gosini, was permitted only brief weekly visits. Mehrunnisa usually stood to one side and watched as Jagat Gosini came to see her son under Ruqayya’s alert scrutiny. The princess ignored Mehrunnisa, as she did the other waiting women, but finally Mehrunnisa came face to face with Prince Salim’s most influential wife.

Khurram had been in a particularly boisterous mood one afternoon; he refused to take his nap and insisted on playing. The Empress’s nerves had frayed with his incessant chatter. She sent Khurram out with Mehrunnisa to the gardens attached to her apartments, with a reminder to keep him in the shade.

They sat together on the verandah, watching as the sun made rainbows around a fountain in one corner of the garden. In another corner, a huge
peepul
spread its dense branches. A few
zenana
women sat under the
peepul, ghagaras
gathered over their knees. They were piping henna patterns on their feet and legs, drawing intricate curved designs with the thin black paste. Mehrunnisa saw one woman lean over to another and bare her shoulders, pushing her
choli
down her arms. Then, using a cone-shaped leaf filled with
henna, she drew a pattern across one shoulder, curved it down into the woman’s cleavage, and drew it up the other shoulder. When the henna dried and was washed away, the woman would have a forest of red flowers glowing on her skin. She was one of the Emperor’s slaves and would dance that night for Akbar, clad in very little but henna designs. The Emperor, busy as he was with matters of state, always had time to enjoy his inventive slave girls.

For those few minutes they could be rewarded with jewels of unimaginable beauty and value, grants of lands and estates—enough to make them comfortable for the rest of their lives. They did not all have Empress Ruqayya’s advantages. Ruqayya had known Akbar all her life, for they were cousins. They had grown up together, knowing they would marry one day. The Empress never talked of her early days of marriage to the Emperor. Had he looked at her then with lust, perhaps? Had he sought her with a hunger no other woman could satisfy? Or had their relationship always been thus: comfortable, steady, strong, with an implicit trust that nothing could shake?

There was only one other woman in Akbar’s harem whose intimacy with him came close to Ruqayya’s: Salima Sultan Begam, who was Akbar’s uncle Gulrukh’s daughter, and who was first cousin to Ruqayya, too. Akbar was Salima’s second husband, and Mehrunnisa knew, from rumors in the
zenana,
that Ruqayya had given her blessings to the marriage. The relationship between the two women was one of utmost friendliness and respect.
They
had known each other all their lives, too, but there was no jealousy, no spite. They divided Akbar’s affections, with a larger part—unsaid and unacknowledged—going to Ruqayya, for she was a wife of longer standing. But unlike Ruqayya, Mehrunnisa did not think she could bear to share Salim with anyone else, no matter how well she knew or loved her.

Mehrunnisa watched as Khurram got up and went running to a
flower bed. He picked up a stick and began digging around the poppies, throwing clumps of dirt over his shoulder. She looked down at her hands, bare of henna. On her wedding day, she too would have designs on them. And one day, she would dress her body in henna for Salim. She flushed and put her hands behind her back.

A shower of dirt fell over her, and she looked up. Prince Khurram was still digging furiously in the dirt. He howled when she rushed over and tried to pick him up.

“Let me go, Nisa. Let me go! I command you.”

“Your Highness, please, you cannot play in the dirt. You know it is forbidden. Please come back to the verandah.”

“No!” he yelled again, screwing up his small face to cry.

Mehrunnisa set him down hurriedly. Khurram’s cries would wake the whole
zenana
. “All right, let us do something else. What would you like to do?”

“Play a game with me, Nisa.”

Anything to keep him from bawling. “What shall we play, your Highness?”

“Hide-and-seek,” Khurram said promptly. “I go hide.”

Mehrunnisa groaned. Khurram’s idea of hide-and-seek was to crawl behind the short hedges lining the stone pathways or climb the big
chenar
trees in the courtyard—anything that would get him dirty. And would get her dirty too, she thought ruefully, glancing down at her impeccably washed and ironed
ghagara
and
choli.
But she had to obey him. He was the prince.

“I shall count to fifty. Go hide, your Highness.” Mehrunnisa turned to one of the pillars, leaned her head against the cool marble, closed her eyes, and started counting.

“. . . Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. Ready?”

“Yes,” a little voice piped up.

Mehrunnisa smiled when she saw the heron’s feather on Khurram’s turban bobbing along the hedge to her right. She went
down on her hands and knees on the opposite side and started crawling, calling out as she went, “Where are you, your Highness?”

A few minutes later she was hot and filthy. Her
ghagara
had grass stains; her hair had escaped from its pins and clung damply to her forehead. Mehrunnisa wiped her sweating face, leaving a streak of dirt on her cheek. She would have to pretend to search for him a little longer, she thought, dragging herself along the damp grass.

Khurram giggled, and Mehrunnisa turned to peer at him through the hedge. When she turned back, she first saw a pair of feet clad in jeweled kid-leather slippers. Her gaze traveled slowly upward, taking in the pearl-studded pale blue
ghagara,
jeweled hands clasped in front, thin muslin veil billowing in the breeze. The woman’s face was classic in its beauty. Her complexion was a rich brown, her eyes a glittering ebony under bow-arched eyebrows, her mouth well formed; the whole was set off by high cheekbones.

Mehrunnisa scrambled to her feet in a hurry, almost tripping over her long skirts. “Your Highness, I did not see you coming.”

“Obviously,” Jagat Gosini said. “Who are you?”

“Who are
you?”

Both turned to see Prince Khurram standing up on the other side, his plump arms resting on his hips. Mehrunnisa smiled involuntarily; it was a pose Ruqayya often adopted when she was irritated. She turned to look at Jagat Gosini.

A look of pain crossed Jagat Gosini’s face for an instant. Then she drew herself up and said, “I am Princess Jagat Gosini.”

Princess Jagat Gosini, not your mother, Mehrunnisa noted wryly. What was she doing here, anyway? Ruqayya would be furious to hear of an unannounced visit.

Khurram, absolutely indifferent, pointed imperiously to the arched exit of the gardens. “Go away. I am playing with Nisa.”

“I have come to see you, Khurram.” Jagat Gosini lifted her skirts
and skipped over the hedge. When she had crossed the stone pathway, she put out a hand.

Khurram dodged her outstretched hand and ran across to Mehrunnisa. He clutched the skirt of her
ghagara
and said, “Go away, or I shall tell my ma.”

“No, please . . . I shall go.” Her eyes lifted with a malevolent glance to Mehrunnisa. “You are to say nothing of this to the Empress, do you understand?”

“Yes, your Highness,” Mehrunnisa murmured.

“Who are you? Where is Khurram’s nurse?”

“Mirza Ghias Beg is my father, your Highness.”

“Oh?” The well shaped eyebrows lifted. “I have not heard of your father. Send for Khurram’s nurse immediately.”

Mehrunnisa’s face grew hot. She took a deep breath to steady herself and chose her words carefully. “Your Highness, the Empress will send for us as soon as her nap is over. We must go inside now.”

Jagat Gosini nodded. “Remember, not a word to the Empress.” She held up a warning finger. “If you say anything, I will make your life miserable.”

“I can only obey your Highness’s commands,” Mehrunnisa said. She let her hand fall to caress Khurram’s curly head and watched warily as Jagat Gosini’s face twisted with hatred and grief. Any brief sympathy she might have felt for Jagat Gosini had vanished with those unfeeling words. The princess might not know who her father was, but she would remember Mehrunnisa. Khurram clung even tighter to her legs, and Mehrunnisa bent to pick him up. He put his head on her shoulder and watched his mother with curious eyes.