The Feast of Roses (22 page)

Mehrunnisa rubbed her face and leaned sideways against a silk-covered bolster. What stupidity it was to think over and over again about the child, what he could have been, what she would have done with him. The reality was that he was not here, would never be here. Where was her resolve? Where was her strength? If she lost this, she would lose Jahangir.

She cried again, and this time, she noticed, the Emperor did not reach out to her. He sat by her side, so close, and yet they had nothing to say to each other, no words of comfort to offer. The deep trust between them seemed to have been slowly rinsed away by something neither of them could control.

Mehrunnisa heard Jahangir ask for yet another glass of wine, and suddenly, after all these days of mourning and feeling angry and sorry for herself and generally living on the periphery of life, something snapped in her brain. She sat up and put a hand on Jahangir’s arm.

“This will be your last cup today, your Majesty.”

He shook his head. “Remember that it is not your place to tell me what to do, Mehrunnisa. I am your Emperor.
You
must listen to me. If I wish to drink I will do so.” Jahangir drank the wine fast, until he was choking, and then held out his cup for more. It was filled, and defiantly he raised it again to his mouth.

Mehrunnisa grabbed the cup from him, spilling wine on the front of the Emperor’s embroidered
qaba,
and threw it against a pillar. The cup, made of white jade studded with rubies, shattered into tiny pieces, the wine leaving a stain on the marble of the pillar.

He wrenched at her shoulder until she faced him, and then his hand swung in an arc through the air and came into contact with her cheek. The slap rumbled through the room and brought on its heels a huge silence. The musicians in the balcony above stopped playing, the slaves and eunuchs froze where they stood. No one knew what to do. And neither did Mehrunnisa, for a few seconds. Then her arm went back, her fingers in a fist, moving from below to connect with Jahangir’s chin.

Within minutes, they were rolling around on the floor, yelling and screaming. They spit at each other, tried to claw each other’s eyes out, and punched one another. Mehrunnisa’s veil came off her head and her hair came undone. Jahangir ineffectually tried to ward off her blows with his hands. Shame had already come to leave its mark on him. He knew he should not have hit a woman, he had been taught not to do so, and even deep in his cups, he had never done this before. But this time . . . something had turned in his brain, had taken over his thinking. He stopped fighting, gave up, tried to shout at Mehrunnisa that they should halt, but she was too enraged and he could not stop her.

The attendants watched amazed as the couple rolled over again; this time Jahangir lay on the ground and Mehrunnisa sat astride him. She slapped Jahangir four times with an open palm.

The servants dithered in the background, shifting from foot to foot. No one had ever before hit the Emperor, either in his childhood or his youth. And here he was, meekly taking a beating from his wife. Should they go and break up the fight? The event was unprecedented; no other Mughal Emperor had fought with his wife so disgracefully before. What were they to do?

Just then, the room resounded with yells from the orchestra balcony, followed by a series of deep, skin-thumping thuds.

In the hall below, Mehrunnisa looked up in surprise. Who was dying? She jumped off Jahangir and gave him her hand. They ran up the stairs to the orchestra balcony. When they got there, one of the
sitar
players was lying on the floor, shouting out nonsense, “Save me. O Lord, save me!” He wriggled on the floor, beat himself on his chest, and screamed out each time he did so. Then he saw them and stopped, rising to perform the
taslim.
“Your Majesties, I hope the fight is over.”

The Emperor and Mehrunnisa stood panting at the top of the stairs. Now they were both ashamed. The orchestra had very effectively broken up their quarrel by creating a diversion.

“Hoshiyar, scatter gold over these men, they have done well,” Jahangir said. He turned to Mehrunnisa. “Shall we leave to take care of our persons, my dear?”

Mehrunnisa nodded and followed Jahangir down the stairs and back into the reception hall. Her hair had escaped from its plait and her scalp burned near her nape where the Emperor had yanked it. She could feel an ache on her right cheekbone, and her eye was already swelling shut. They both had wine spilled on them and were now redolent of it. Mehrunnisa’s anger had abated somewhat. Even her pain had gone, she thought, in the fighting her pain had gone.

Jahangir was limping, and she asked, “Did you twist your ankle, your Majesty?”

He turned to her. “It is best you go to your apartments, Mehrunnisa. I will take care of myself, and you must get Hoshiyar to look after you.” When she opened her mouth, he cut her short. “We should not have forgotten who we are. Fighting like animals, with no sense of decorum . . . what are people in the empire going to say about this? Come to me, Mehrunnisa, only when you wish to ask pardon, and no sooner than that. I will wait for your apologies. But only for so long.”

She stood mute, stunned, disbelieving that Jahangir would talk to her like this in front of all the servants. She walked away slowly and went to Ladli’s room. Her daughter slept slanted across the divan, the silk sheet thrown off, her pajamas riding up to her knees. Mehrunnisa climbed onto the divan and put her head next to Ladli’s. The child’s hand came up to touch her hair.

“Mama?” she said wonderingly, half-asleep.

“Yes,
beta.
” She gathered her into her arms, and Ladli sighed. She did not ask why her mother came to her like this at night after so many nights away. Mehrunnisa was tired, so shattered by everything that had happened lately.

One evening, as Mehrunnisa had lain recovering on her divan after losing the child, Hoshiyar had brought Ladli to see her. Ladli had stood at the door to her apartments, eyes luminous with fright, tears trembling just behind, until Mehrunnisa had called to her. Then, she had run in to cling to her mother, so tightly that Mehrennisa could not breathe until the embrace ended.

“I am sorry, Mama,” Ladli had said. “You really wanted this child, did you not?”

“Yes,” Mehrunnisa had said, “Yes,
beta.
I wanted him very much.”

With her face still buried in her mother’s neck, Ladli had said, “And would you . . . have loved him more, Mama?”

“No,” Mehrunnisa had said automatically, only half-listening, starting to weep again.

Her daughter had swabbed gently at Mehrunnisa’s face with her little hands and said, “Better to have a girl, Mama. A boy . . . he would have to fight for many things when he is older. Boys always fight, don’t they?”

Mehrunnisa remembered now how she had turned from Ladli and called to Hoshiyar to take her away. And those words she had paid so little heed to—
and would you have loved him more, Mama
—came to crush her. She had thought Ladli not important, what kind of a mother was she? What kind of a person was she? No matter what happened now, she would always have Ladli. She started to cry, and in sleep Ladli patted her, reacting instinctively. Mehrunnisa closed her eyes after a long time, terrified and lonely. She was comforted by Ladli, but she also wanted the comfort of Jahangir’s presence.

What was happening to them?

•  •  •

The eunuchs and slaves stayed in the reception hall only long enough to sweep up the shards of the wine cup and straighten out the divan and the carpets. They blew out the oil lamps and left the room in darkness. Then they ran through the palaces of the
zenana,
waking the women to tell them of what had happened. The story fled from ear to avidly listening ear, brought laughter and glee to faces. With each telling it took on horrific proportions, Mehrunnisa had slapped the Emperor, she had punched him in the stomach, he had hit her back—true, of course, but the tale became cheerfully embellished. They had said bitter things to each other. Jahangir never wanted to see her again. She was expelled from the harem, sent to live with her father and mother. The horse hooves heard in the street outside was the carriage carrying her away.

The rumors found their way to Prince Khurram’s apartments also, where he lay in bed with Arjumand. They were to have their first child in two months, and unlike Mehrunnisa, her niece had no trouble keeping the baby inside her. Her stomach was hugely rounded, and she had all the satisfying symptoms of a healthy pregnancy—the bloated face, the heavy feet, the loss of hunger as the child grew within to compress her stomach.

Arjumand woke to the voice of the eunuch who bent to fill Khurram’s ear about the fight before padding out of the room. She was turned away from her husband, her back to his, but she was listening nonetheless. Khurram put his arm around her and rubbed her stomach lightly.

“Did you hear?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” she replied. “I have been awake.”

“This is disgraceful,” Khurram said. “If you fought with me like this, I could not bear it, Arjumand.”

She turned around, but laboriously, rising first to sit, then to turn, and then to lie down facing her husband. She touched his face in the dark with her fingers. “We are different, your Highness. You must know that I would never disrespect you like my aunt does the Emperor. My aunt does not do her duty; she is in the
zenana
to bear children, now they say there will be no more. I would never do this to you. I know my place.”

“Yes, and this is what I love about you, my darling. Mehrunnisa emasculates my father, makes him less of a man by insisting that she play his role.” Khurram gathered her closer, as close as her distended stomach would allow him.

Arjumand did what Khurram wanted her to do, what she had been taught a woman should. It was her duty to follow her husband’s commands, to be what he wanted her to be. It had surprised her at first that her submission was such a novelty for him. Then she realized that all the women around Khurram before her—Ruqayya, his mother, and Mehrunnisa—were used to demanding things that strained the binds of convention. He had thought this behavior natural, until Arjumand had taught him otherwise. She put Khurram on a pedestal, deferred to him, touched his feet every morning for his blessings on her day. Arjumand would never trample over her husband, this she had decided many years ago, for she saw what this did to a woman’s reputation. No one thought of Ruqayya or Jagat Gosini or Mehrunnisa as feminine, they were strident, troublesome . . . almost man-like. This, Arjumand decided, she would
never
be.

“Khurram,” she said. “I do not like that you spend so much time in conversation with my aunt. Forgive me for saying this, but you must rely upon my father and my grandfather. They are men of experience and wisdom, they will definitely know how best to advise, much better than the Empress. Do you not think so?”

“Of course,” he said. “But the Empress is in distress right now, Arjumand. The fight with my father cannot be very pleasant. What will happen to them? I wonder if this news is true, that she has been sent away. I cannot believe his Majesty will allow her to go, he was so anxious when she was unwell.”

“Do not talk of her, Khurram.” A terseness came to Arjumand’s voice.

“But she is your aunt, Arjumand. Don’t you care for her?”

“Of course,” she said hastily. “I do worry about her too. But this predicament is of her own making. Had she respected the Emperor as she should have, this would not have happened. If she insists upon making trouble for herself, we can do nothing about it. Remember, my lord, that if she had the child, and if it had been a boy, she would not have been so pleasant to you.”

Khurram laughed. “Arjumand, you worry too much. No one can take away my right to the throne after my father.”

“It is not just your right anymore, Khurram. Think of the son I am carrying, your first son, the child who will be Emperor after you. I do not feel that the Empress would have taken either you or our son into consideration if she had one of her own.”

He was silent, thinking about what she said. Arjumand’s breathing evened as she fell asleep. But for Khurram, rest did not come that night. It was all very well for them to form a
junta,
all very well to have Mehrunnisa at the head of it . . . until now. His own father had been held up to derision because of her. How long would it be before that extended to him? And the crown
was
uncertain, as much as he tried to convince himself otherwise—if the nobles at court thought him easily led by a woman, they would not support him. At least his father had the advantage of already holding the title of Emperor. Arjumand was right—she was an unnatural woman.

So Khurram allowed himself to be led by yet another woman, but the hand was soft, the tug gentle, and he did not realize it was happening. Arjumand was outraged that Mehrunnisa would have so much power and authority despite being childless for the Emperor. Only the mother of the future heir could, and should, have any domination in the empire. So she told Khurram this, and neither of them remembered that had it not been for Mehrunnisa, that at one word from her, their own marriage—that gave birth to such ideas and the future sons for the empire—would not have taken place.

During the next two weeks, just as there had been a hush during Mehrunnisa’s illness, mouths now flapped energetically. Jahangir did not visit his wife, and the Empress made no move toward an apology. It gave the gossips something to talk about, and it gave them hope that there would be a shift of power in the harem and more excitement in their lives.