Moth Smoke

epilogue

At the ends of their stories, Emperors like empires have the regrets that precede beginnings. As he lay on his deathbed, exhausted by half a century of rule, Emperor Aurangzeb dictated a final letter to his favorite daughter. ‘I reflect now on my life with sadness,’ he wrote. ‘Tell my sons not to fight as we did. To each I will leave a portion of my lands, so he need not make war on his brothers.’

But merciless Aurangzeb, who faced an elephant without fear as a child and ruled his empire as a land of one belief, failed at the task of fathering sons unlike himself. The war of succession was again bloody, and the empire left the victor by his father too frail and too rigid to contain its own people.

Fission of empire, a new fusion, then fission again as children parted ways.

It is perhaps between hope and memory, in the atomized, atomic lands once Aurangzeb’s empire, that our poets tell us Darashikoh, the apostate, called out to God as he died.