The Feast of Roses by Indu Sundaresan Page A

head. How was he to say what he wanted to say? Suddenly, Jahangir stopped and turned to his minister.
    “How is Mehrunnisa? I hear you visited her at the shooting ranges yesterday. Does she keep well? She looked tired after the hunt.”
    “She is well, your Majesty. But . . .”
    “But what? Tell me, Ghias Beg, does something ail her? Do the servants bother her?”
    “It is not the servants, your Majesty,” Ghias Beg said carefully. He paused. How did a father plead his Emperor to return to his daughter?
    “It must be the servants,” Jahangir said firmly. “If I am not at her apartments, they do not perhaps listen to her orders.”
    “That can be easily remedied, your Majesty.”
    “Yes.” Jahangir turned to one of the maids dawdling in the corridor. “Send a message to Nur Jahan Begam that I will visit her this evening.”
    “Thank you, your Majesty.” Ghias bowed and backed out of the corridor. It had been so easy to ask this favor without even asking for it. He had fretted all night about his daughter. She had been unhappy when he had seen her. She had pretended otherwise, but she had cried, and Mehrunnisa cried so little, unlike other women, whose tears were at a rush to come for demands and wants and fears. Or if she did, Ghias never saw that sorrow. Not when she had had the miscarriages, not when Ali Quli had died . . . although that last, it had been a freedom of sorts. And so, in the morning, after a night spent thinking these things, Ghias had decided he would speak to the Emperor.
    When he left, Jahangir went down the marble steps into one of the courtyards. The slaves, eunuchs, and concubines lounging under the shade of the mango trees rose to melt away. He waited until they had all gone and then sat down at the edge of a pond. The carp in the pond came to nibble at his shadow, greedy and waiting to be fed. He waved a hand over the water and watched as they skittered in the direction of his hand, mouths open and gulping.
    Here was a chance to see Mehrunnisa again. Again and at last. In this last week, he had not known how to go back to her. Every morning he woke to an empty bed by his side, an emptiness around him. And his days were then filled with state duties, visits to Empress Jagat Gosini’s apartments at night to take part in interminable entertainments and cups of wine. His head ached from wanting to be with Mehrunnisa. Jahangir had his eunuchs tell him every detail of her days, he knew she went to the jharoka balcony on the two mornings he had not gone, that she spent the rest of the day in the shooting ranges. He listened to all of this with a calm face, but inside a hunger rioted.
    Jahangir removed his imperial turban and laid it on the stone edge of the pool. The afternoon sun stood guard over him, reflecting off the slabs of marble in the courtyard. He would have to wait till the evening to see Mehrunnisa. Why had he said evening, why not right now? Surely, twenty minutes would have been enough for her to prepare herself.
    Once, Mahabat, Sharif, and even Jagat Gosini had tried to keep him from Mehrunnisa, to keep him from seeing her, from marrying her, citing her family’s disloyalty to the throne, her husband’s perfidy, saying that for sure she would harbor resentment against him. All these reminders had returned in the past week, borne on a breeze of slyness. Mahabat’s and Sharif’s voices had taken on a strength that had waned after Mehrunnisa’s first jharoka, and Jagat Gosini had solicitously showed him the imperial farmans she had signed with the royal seal. But they had not been able to see that their Emperor was grieving. It was Mahabat’s and Sharif’s behavior that was unsettling. What was it they feared? A rise in status in her family? Mehrunnisa’s voice at the jharoka ? But why?
    He sat there for a long time, his head uncovered, his hair soaking up the heat of the sun. After his evening prayers and the final audience at court, Jahangir bathed and dressed in a