Taj Mahal by Diana Preston

Author:Diana Preston [Preston, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

IN THE MIDST of death and desolation, replete with 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 familiy. Whatever the case, her husband and son welcomed the suggestion, and Shah Jahan dispatched 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-story 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 interwined 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 labor. Her daughter Jahanara was by her bedside, and Shah Jahan waited in an adjacent chamber. The court astrologers predicted the birth of yet another Moghul prince, but after an agonizing thirty-hour struggle a daughter, Gauharara, was bom. Various disputed accounts, said to be based on copies of long-disappeared Persian manuscripts, relate what occurred in these, the final moments of the thirty-eight-year-old empress's life. According to one persistent tale, as Mumtaz lay exhausted in the throes of labor, 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 good-bye 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.

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