The Feast of Roses (37 page)

M
andu was in the district of Gujrat and had the reputation of being the most impregnable city in the world. It sat atop a mountain, within a fort. There was no necessity for a moat, since the walls of the mountain fell away steeply from the fort’s edge and plunged into a forested ravine whose depth had never been gauged. There were only two gates to the fort—a southern one called the Tarapur Gate, and one on the north, the Delhi Gate. The roads to both entrances climbed sharply from the bottom of the mountain, and in fact, only the Delhi Gate was accessible at all. Horses and camels found the climb strenuous, humans on foot had to claw their way up and rest every half mile to draw dwindling air into their lungs, elephants lumbered up only with the greatest difficulty, their bulk pulling them ever downward with each step. The only way to storm the fort at Mandu was to cut off supplies at the bottom of the north and south roads and wait until the inhabitants starved. Trying to besiege the fort any other way was an invitation to death—Mandu’s defenders would simply pick off their tired targets one by one from the fort’s ramparts and send their bodies careening down into the patch of green in the ravine.

The fort itself was two hundred years old, built in the middle of the fourteenth century by Dilawar Khan Ghori and added to by his son—all of this long before the Mughals came to India. So far into the sky, the rains tumbled generously into Mandu and filled the sixteen huge water tanks dispersed over the city. The Ghoris, father and son, had built massive palaces, mosques, cobbled streets, bazaars, colleges, schools, tombs, and lush gardens. Mandu was a thriving, flourishing little jewel for over a hundred years. Then its fortunes changed as its owners changed. Battles were fought, although Mandu resisted invasion, kings died, treasuries emptied, people fled down the steep slopes to find habitation in the plains. And Mandu slowly died. Its fortunes changed yet again, when Emperor Akbar conquered the city and added it to the empire, but he did not visit here. Jahangir and Mehrunnisa gave orders for the city to be rebuilt again while they were at Ajmer.

They moved from Ajmer to Mandu once the restoration was complete. The city took on life when palace walls and floors were replastered, smoothed, and polished, when the ghosts who had lived there for a hundred years were banished, when the trees, bushes, and grass were hacked back to obedience, and the water tanks were cleaned and filled with sweet rainwater.

The skies darkened over Mandu the night of Nizam’s death. Mehrunnisa and Jahangir slept outside under an inverted dome of confetti-like stars, all pressing close from the heavens.

The next morning, before sunrise, a terrible jangling sounded all through the palace. Jahangir groaned and buried his face into the mattress.

“Who is doing that?” He put a pillow over his head.

The din grew around them, unceasing, until they could ignore it no longer. Mehrunnisa pulled at the pillow. “You must rise, your Majesty. It is the Chain of Justice that makes this noise.”

The Chain of Justice was a thickly linked gold chain hung with sixty bells. When Jahangir first became emperor, he thought much about his duties and responsibilities to the empire. So he drew up the twelve rules of conduct, the
dasturu-l-amal,
edicts meant to be followed by all his realm’s inhabitants. Some were based on practicalities—like the law of escheat, which said that upon a noble’s death, his property would not revert back to the crown but fall naturally upon the man’s heirs, his sons. Some were moral; the Emperor imposed a wide and sweeping prohibition on consumption of liquor in the empire. Jahangir did not follow this last rule himself and charitably disregarded its ill usage either at court or in the imperial
zenana.
His only condition was that no courtier should come before him at the
Diwan-i-am
or the
Diwan-i-khas
with alcohol on his breath. Thus the guards checked their mouths each day, along with their passes. There was one rule Jahangir imposed on himself, the Chain of Justice. It was strung first on the battlements of the fort at Agra, its other end tied to a wooden stake on the banks of the Yamuna. It was another way for Jahangir to meet with the people of his empire, the commoners who did not have access to his court. Anyone who had a grievance and felt that the
qazis
had not properly addressed it in the law courts could come and shake the chain, and they would have the Emperor’s ear. The chain accompanied Jahangir when he traveled and was strung up wherever he stayed.

Over the years, without his knowledge, an etiquette grew around the Chain of Justice. Palms had to be crossed with silver rupees before access was allowed to the chain; the guards screened anyone calling for justice, attendants stopped supplicants at spear point and demanded to know what their complaint was and why. The chain remained largely silent. But not this morning. The might of the sixty bells, all pealing at the same time, bounced and echoed off the walls of the fort at Mandu. The whole city woke to that clamor.

Hoshiyar came running into the room. “Your Majesties, there is a woman outside ringing the bells.”

“Ask her to stop that infernal noise,” Jahangir moaned, clutching his head.

“We will be at the
jharoka
in a few minutes.”

“Your Majesty, she refuses to stop. She says that she will stop only when you come.”

Jahangir and Mehrunnisa rose hurriedly and flew through the corridors to the
jharoka
window. The entire
zenana
—women, eunuchs, and slaves—followed them. The din was almost too much to bear and banged in their ears as they climbed the steps to the balcony. The courtyard below was already crowded with nobles and courtiers, who had also hurried out of their beds. Everyone was curious.

Mehrunnisa looked at the woman who had roused them from their sleep. Her graying hair flew about her shoulders, and her veil had slipped off her head. Unmindful of their presence, she yanked at the chain again and again as tears ran down the grooves of deeply wrought wrinkles on her brown face. She was a small woman, and the chain was heavy, but something gave her the strength to pull at the chain and release it, over and over again. One of the attendants said something to her. Then he had to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, and point to the
jharoka
balcony. She stopped, and the silence that came fell sweetly upon all of them.

The woman turned and ran up to the
jharoka
window. She threw herself down on her knees and raised her hands.

“Your Majesty, I want justice,” she cried.

“And you shall have it. Tell us the problem,” Jahangir commanded.

“Your Majesty, my son was killed yesterday,” the woman said, wailing. “He was my only child, the support of my old age. Now he is gone, murdered.”

“Who killed your son? What was your son’s crime?”

“There was no crime, your Majesty. Just a childish mistake, and for that his life was taken.”

“Who killed your son?” Jahangir demanded again.

The woman was quiet. She wiped her tears carefully and looked at the veiled figure by Jahangir’s side. She lifted a finger and pointed toward Mehrunnisa.

“She did it!”

The courtyard echoed with shouts. Mehrunnisa gripped the parapet and leaned over. What was this? What was this woman saying?

“Silence!” Jahangir shouted, holding up his hands. Anger colored his face. “Do you know who you are accusing of murder?”

“Yes, I do, your Majesty. Empress Nur Jahan killed my son yesterday,” the woman wailed. “You have promised me justice. Sentence the murderer to death.”

The nobles in the courtyard started to murmur. In the
zenana
enclosure behind Mehrunnisa, one woman cried out, “Justice from his Majesty, the Adil Padshah!”

Mehrunnisa heard the cry. Whose voice was it? Empress Jagat Gosini? Or one of her underlings? She turned to look back, but the other women, and then the men below, picked up the chant. They started to yell. “Justice. Justice.”

“Mehrunnisa,” Jahangir said, reaching for her hand. “What am I to do now? How do we silence them? Is she the mother of the intruder in your palace?”

She had to lean forward to hear his words. A small breeze caught the chant and sent it spiraling over the walls of the palace into the city. “Justice. Justice.” Mehrunnisa started to tremble, for the first time seeing how much she was really abhorred by almost everyone. People jabbed their fists in the air. They all looked only at her, not at the Emperor.

Jahangir held her hand tight. “What shall I do?” he asked again.

She could not reply, fear coming to blossom inside her. Once, early in their marriage, one of her cousins had killed a child in the streets of Agra. He had been goading his elephant beyond its normal speed, and the child had darted across the elephant’s path only to be thrown violently to one side. The child’s parents had demanded justice too. And the Emperor had given it to them by his rules. A life for a life. It had not mattered that the perpetrator had been her cousin; he had been ordered trampled to death by elephants. What would Jahangir do now?

He turned from her to the courtyard and held up his hand, and he held it in the air until the noise stopped. “What crime is your son accused of?” he said harshly to the woman below them.

“Your Majesty,” the woman replied in a small voice “he entered the
zenana
to catch a glimpse of the Empress.”

A touch of disapproval went through the assembled courtiers. They had reacted instinctively to the call from the
zenana
that justice must be served; what the crime was, they had not known. The men were quiet now. It was forbidden to see the exalted ladies of the
zenana,
of any
zenana
for that matter. Almost at once, the tide of opinion swung back in Mehrunnisa’s favor. She had been right to kill the commoner; after all, once he had so deceitfully seen her face, he could not possibly expect to live. If she had not done this, Jahangir would have ordered it.

“Do you consider that a childish prank?” Jahangir asked.

“Yes, I do.” The woman lifted defiant eyes to Jahangir’s face. Her tears had dried, her back had straightened. “He meant no harm, your Majesty. He had heard tales of the Empress’s beauty and wished to see her.”

“Since you have brought your plea to me, I will render justice thus. The Empress will be arrested immediately and taken into custody. The case will come before the chief justice of the court tomorrow. I agree to abide by the
qazi
’s decision . . . ,” Jahangir’s voice faltered, “ . . . even if it is death.”

Nizam’s mother bent to touch her head to the ground. Two of the
zenana
Kashmiri guards came to escort Mehrunnisa back to her apartments. She stumbled on her way out, and Jahangir steadied her. “Go, my dear,” he said. “I will take care of everything.”

Mehrunnisa returned to her rooms in a daze, Hoshiyar a few steps behind. In the courtyard behind, the nobles began to clap in rhythm, the sound like evenly paced gunshots. One after another. They did not shout or talk again, they just clapped.

•  •  •

The morning hours passed, and news of Mehrunnisa’s downfall reached every corner of Mandu. Courtiers hurried home to tell their wives and those unfortunate neighbors who had not answered the bells’ summons. Prince Khurram had been in the courtyard, and his hand had been one of the first raised, his voice had shouted the loudest. He wanted Mehrunnisa destroyed; she was of no use to him anymore. And Abul had stood by Khurram, his hand on the prince’s shoulder. The voice that had first spoken in the
zenana
enclosure had been Arjumand’s.

A rush of excitement coursed through the harem. This was no mere fight between Mehrunnisa and the Emperor, nothing she could cajole him out of with her wiles and her spells. This was the end. This was surely the end. Tomorrow, the
qazi
would render judgement the only way it was done in the Mughal Empire. A life for a life. A death for a death. Anything else, any other leeway granted to the Empress, would smack of imperial favor, of injustice, of prejudice. And so little pockets of hatred filled all over the
zenana,
fueled by gossip and revulsion. A group of
zenana
women composed a ballad and had it smuggled out of the imperial harem. By afternoon, the street minstrels set it to music and sang the ballad through the day and into the night.

Mehrunnisa stayed in her apartments, embroidering the hem of a new
ghagara.
She worked on it steadily, dipping her needle into a bowl of pearls, threading the silk through the hole in the center of each pearl, and attaching it to the raw green silk of the skirt. She heard the ballad sung in the deep voices of the men in the streets outside. They called her a criminal, they called for her demise.

Hoshiyar watched over her all through the day. She did not eat, he tried to coax her, but she refused, drinking only water. Every now and then, her hand trembled and she put away the
ghagara,
clasped her hands in her lap, and waited for the trembling to subside. Then she forced herself to begin again. The song played outside her windows incessantly.