The Feast of Roses Read Free Page A

of India around a hundred years ago, a personal viewing of the Emperor by any subject in the empire.
    The jharoka was a special balcony, built into the outer bulwark of the Agra fort, where Jahangir gave audience to the people three times a day. In the early morning, with the rising of the sun, he presented himself at the balcony on the eastern side of the fort, at noon on the south side, and at five o’clock in the evening as the sun descended into the west sky, on the western side. Jahangir considered this his most important responsibility. It was here the commoners came to petition him, here he listened to their appeals, important or not. And in the balcony he stood alone, his ministers and the commoners below him. It cut away the pomp surrounding his crown, made him less of a figurehead on a faraway throne.
    “But you do come to the jharoka with me, Mehrunnisa,” Jahangir said. Something more was coming. He was wary, watchful now. For the past few weeks, Mehrunnisa had stood behind the balcony arch, along with the eunuchs who guarded his back, listening, talking with him later about the petitions.
    “I want to be with you in the balcony, standing in front of the nobles and commoners.” She said this softly, but without hesitation. Ask with authority and she would not be ignored, he had said.
    Clouds began to move across the skies, blanketing the stars. Lightning flashed behind them, branches of silver light blotted by gray. She sat in his arms, unclothed, covered only by her now-dry hair that tumbled over her shoulders down to her hips.
    “It has never been done before,” Jahangir said finally. And it had not. The women of his zenana, whatever their relationship to him, had always stayed behind the brick walls of the harem. They were heard outside, in the orders they gave through stewards and slaves and eunuchs, heard also when he did something they wanted. “Why do you want this?”
    She asked a question in response. “Why not?”
    The Emperor smiled. “I can see that you are going to cause trouble for me, Mehrunnisa. Look,”—he raised his eyes to the sky, and she followed his gaze—“do you think rain will come?”
    “If it does . . .” She paused. “If it does, can I come to the jharoka tomorrow?”
    The clouds had now covered the skies above their heads. They looked like the others had, fat and thick with rain, sometimes pelting drops of water on the city of Agra. And then, some errant wind would come to carry them away, clearing the skies for the Sun God to ride his chariot again. Mehrunnisa was commanding the monsoon rains. She smiled to herself. And why not? First the eunuchs, now the night sky.
    He said, “Close your eyes.”
    She did. With his eyes shut too, with her aroma to lead him, Jahangir bent to the curve of her neck. She wrapped her hair around them. She did not open her eyes, just felt the warmth of his breath, sensed him tasting a line of sweat that escaped from her hairline down her face to lodge itself against her shoulder blade, shivered as the rough of his fingertips scraped against the sides of her breasts. They did not speak again.
    And afterwards, they slept.
    •  •  •
    The sun, a flat line of gold behind purple clouds against the horizon, woke them the next morning. Mehrunnisa lay with her head against a velvet pillow looking up at the play of light against the sky. The clouds hung dense above her. But there was no rain. Moisture in the air, but no rain.
    The eunuchs were back in their positions in the verandah arches, slave girls moved in on noiseless feet carrying brass vessels of water. Mehrunnisa and Jahangir brushed their teeth with a twig from the neem tree, and when the muezzin’s voice called for prayer from the mosque, they knelt side by side on prayer rugs and lifted their hands toward the west, toward Mecca.
    And then, as they had all these days past, the Emperor and his new wife left their apartments to wend through the palace corridors for the first