A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (25 page)

In the midst of death and desolation, with replete kites and vultures arcing over the barren landscape, Shah Jahan and the fertile Mumtaz conceived another child. Mumtaz spent some of her pregnancy planning the marriage of her eldest son, the fifteen-year-old Dara Shukoh. The bride she proposed to Shah Jahan was Dara’s first cousin, the daughter of Shah Jahan’s half-brother Parvez. It was a dynastically sensible alliance and perhaps Mumtaz also hoped to heal rifts within the imperial family. Whatever the case, her husband and son welcomed the suggestion and Shah Jahan despatched messengers to Agra with instructions to his officials to prepare for a magnificent ceremony.

As she awaited the birth of her child, Mumtaz could enjoy the comforts of the palace-fortress. The three-storeyed building containing her apartments overlooked the river on one side and sunken gardens on the other. There was the diversion of her husband’s war elephants stabled in the nearby Hati Mahal on the riverbank, from which they could be led down to bathe in the Tapti. Mumtaz herself bathed in a suite of marble hammams beneath domed ceilings painted with intertwined flowers and leaves. Cool scented water ran down one marble shoot, while warm water, heated by perpetually burning oil lamps, rippled down another.

In the intense summer heat of June 1631, Mumtaz went into labour. Her daughter Jahanara was by her bedside and Shah Jahan waited in an adjacent chamber. The court astrologers were predicting the birth of another Moghul prince, but after an agonizing thirty-hour-long struggle a daughter, Gauharara, was born. Various disputed accounts, said to be based on copies of long-disappeared Persian manuscripts, relate what now occurred in these final moments of the thirty-eight-year-old empress’s life. According to one persistent tale, as Mumtaz lay exhausted in the throes of labour, she heard her baby cry out from within her womb. Alarmed by the thin, eerie sound, she told Jahanara to run and fetch Shah Jahan. The baby was born just as her anxious husband hurried to her side. Mumtaz barely had time to ask him to keep their children safe before whispering goodbye and dying in his arms. It was three hours before dawn.

According to a similar but more elaborate version, the heavily pregnant Mumtaz was playing chess with her husband when both heard the cry of a baby. Surprised, they looked around them but could see no child nearby. After a while, they again heard the sound of weeping and realized with horror that it was coming from within Mumtaz’s womb. Fearing this was a bad omen, they hurriedly summoned doctors, astrologers and other learned men to interpret the meaning. While Shah Jahan distributed money to the needy in frantic attempts to secure divine intervention, the physicians tried to save his empress, now in terrible and growing pain. Despairing of her life and with tears in her eyes, she gasped out her last words of love to Shah Jahan,
‘Today is the time of departure; it is the time to accept separation and embrace pain. For some time, I was fascinated by the beauty of my beloved, now [I] shed blood because today is the time of separation.’ As she grew weaker, Mumtaz sought Shah Jahan’s promise not to have children by any other. She also told her tearful husband that the night before she had dreamed of ‘a beautiful palace with a lush garden, the like of which she had never imagined’
and begged him to build her tomb just like it. A further account suggests yet more lyrically that the dying Mumtaz’s parting words were:
‘Build for me a mausoleum which would be unique, extremely beautiful the like of which is not on earth.’

Shah Jahan’s official court historians relate a simpler though no less touching story. The long, racking labour and final agonizing delivery of her daughter had been too much for Mumtaz. ‘Weakness overtook her to the highest degree’ and, aware that she was dying, Mumtaz sent Jahanara to fetch Shah Jahan. ‘Moved beyond control’, he rushed to her bedside for a brief, final farewell. The weeping Mumtaz ‘with heart full of pain’ begged him to care for their children and took her final leave of him. Soon after, ‘when three watches of the said night still remained … she passed on to the mercy of God’
.

According to Islamic custom, Mumtaz was buried quickly. The traditional method of preparing a woman’s body for burial was for a female washer first to bathe it in cold camphor water and then to wrap it in a shroud made of five pieces of white cotton. Next, because of a deep-seated fear of ghosts, the body was carried out head first through an opening newly made in the palace wall. This procedure was intended to hinder the spirit from finding its way back inside the building where the death had occurred. Mumtaz’s body was then borne on a bier to a walled Moghul pleasure garden originally built by Shah Jahan’s uncle Daniyal as a hunting ground on the opposite bank of the Tapti River. Here she was laid in a temporary tomb, her head pointing northwards and her face turned towards Mecca.

*
The Moghuls’ fabled power and luxurious wealth was first used as an epithet for Hollywood’s own movie emperors in the 1920s. The word ‘star’ to describe leading actors had first appeared one hundred years earlier.

*
The fact that the Moghuls did not penetrate the far south of India explains why tandoori cooking is not widely found there.

*
Jahangir travelled with a five-foot-high, six-foot-wide bath shaped like a giant teacup and carved from a single lump of rock. When he wished to bathe, his attendants filled it with warmed rose-water. Steps up the outside and down the inside helped him climb in and out. Today the bath sits in a courtyard of the Agra fort.

9

‘Dust of Anguish’

M
umtaz’s sudden death crushed Shah Jahan. For nineteen years she had been the ‘light of his nightchamber’ from whom he could never bear to be apart. Yet their transcending passion and her remarkable fecundity had been their undoing. As one of Shah Jahan’s historians wrote, Mumtaz had been ‘the oyster of the ocean of good fortune, who most of the years became pregnant’ so that:

She brought from the groin of the exalted king
Fourteen royal issues into the world
.

Of these, seven now adorn Paradise,
The remaining seven are the candles of government
.

When she embellished the world with these children,
She waned like the moon after fourteen
.

When she brought out the last single pearl,
She then emptied her body like an oyster
.

In other words, fourteen pregnancies in nineteen often itinerant, sometimes perilous, years had simply been too much for Mumtaz.

The court historians also captured Shah Jahan’s despair at the fleeting nature of human happiness, even for emperors: ‘Alas! This transitory world is unstable, and the rose of its comfort is embedded in a field of thorns. In the dustbin of the world, no breeze blows which does not raise the dust of anguish; and in the assembly of the world, no one happily occupies a seat who does not vacate it full of sorrow.’ According to their accounts, Shah Jahan lamented the futility of his privileged existence without Mumtaz: ‘Even though the Incomparable Giver had conferred on us such great bounty … yet the person with whom we wanted to enjoy it has gone.’ In the first throes of grief, he even contemplated renouncing the throne, telling his courtiers, ‘If the World-Creating God had not charged us with … the custodianship of the world and the protection of all humanity … we would have abandoned kingship and taken up sovereignty over the world of seclusion.’

Shah Jahan went into deep mourning, exchanging his
‘night-illuminating gems and costly clothes’
for
‘white garb, like dawn’
, which he would wear for the next two years and thereafter on every Wednesday – the day of Mumtaz’s death. The most celebrated poet of Shah Jahan’s reign wrote:

running tears turned his garments white
In Hind, white is the colour of mourning

Black and blue had been the mourning colours of the early Moghuls but by Shah Jahan’s time they had adopted the symbol of austerity and mourning of their Hindu subjects – white. The rest of the court –
‘all the fortunate princes, illustrious amirs, pillars of the government, grandees of the kingdom’
– followed suit, donning plain white clothes in place of their brilliant robes. The emperor also renounced ‘all kinds of pleasures and entertainments, particularly listening to songs and music’. He struggled to control his emotions, but
‘there constantly appeared involuntary symptoms of grief, sorrow and distress’
on his face, while
‘from constant weeping he was forced to use spectacles’
.

Mumtaz’s death very visibly marked the end of Shah Jahan’s youth. His historians recorded that
‘his auspicious beard, which before this grievous event had not more than ten or twelve grey hairs, which he used to pluck out, within a few days turned more than one-third grey: and he gave up the practice of plucking out grey hair. And he used to say the fact that at his age the august beard had become white so quickly was due to the excess of affliction and pain on account of this soul-consuming event.’

For a full week the emperor made neither his customary appearances on the
jharokha
balcony nor in the halls of private and public audience. At the end of that week, on 25 June 1631, he took a boat across the Tapti River to the gardens where Mumtaz was buried, where he
‘poured oceans of lustrous pearls of tears’
over his wife’s grave. A few days later, on 4 July, the usually joyous Rose-water Festival took place but, although he presented the traditional jewelled flasks of rose-water, essence of hyacinth and essence of orange flowers to his and Mumtaz’s children and her father Asaf Khan, the celebrations were curtailed and the mood sombre.

Mumtaz had died an immensely rich woman. Her personal estate was valued at over 10,000,000 rupees in gold, silver, gems and jewelled ornaments. Shah Jahan gave one half of this fortune to their eldest daughter, the seventeen-year-old Jahanara, and distributed the remainder between the other surviving six children. (Their youngest son, Daulat Afza, had died some months previously.) Despite her youth, tellingly it was the beautiful, clever, accomplished Jahanara, and not one of Shah Jahan’s other two neglected wives, who now assumed Mumtaz’s place as first lady of the Moghul Empire with the title ‘Begum Sahib’. Several months later, Shah Jahan ordered Jahanara to take charge, as her mother had done, of the imperial seal so that,
‘from that date, the duty of affixing the great seal to the imperial edicts devolved upon her’
. As her mother had also done, she soon began issuing orders in her own right.