Moth Smoke

prologue

It is said that one evening, in the year his stomach was to fail him, the Emperor Shah Jahan asked a Sufi saint what would become of the Mughal Empire.

‘Who will sit on the throne after me?’ asked Shah Jahan.

‘Tell me the names of your sons,’ replied the saint.

‘Dara is my eldest son.’

‘The fate of Dara should be asked from Iskandar.’

The Emperor’s toes curled beneath him. ‘Shuja is my second son.’

‘But Shuja is not shuja.’

‘What about Murad?’

‘Murad will not fulfill his murad.’

The Emperor closed his eyes. ‘Aurangzeb is my youngest son.’

‘Yes,’ said the saint. ‘He will be aurangzeb.’

The Emperor gazed across the plain at the incomplete splendor of his wife’s mausoleum and commanded his workers to redouble their efforts. It would be finished before the war of succession began.

The truth of the saint’s words became apparent. Aurangzeb was crowned Emperor, and he obtained from the theologians a fatwa against his defeated brother, charging Dara Shikoh with apostasy and sentencing him to death.

The Alamgirnama records the incident thus: ‘The pillars of Faith apprehended disturbances from Dara Shikoh’s life. The Emperor, therefore, out of necessity to protect the Holy Law, and also for reasons of state, considered it unlawful to allow him to remain alive.’

Imprisoned in his fort at Agra, staring at the Taj he had built, an aged Shah Jahan received as a gift from his youngest son the head of his eldest. Perhaps he doubted, then, the memory that his boys had once played together, far from his supervision and years ago, in Lahore.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Yesterday, an ordinary man may have been roused from his sleep to sit in judgment at the midnight trial of an empire. Before him, as he blinked dreams from his lashes, sat a prince accused of the greatest of all crimes, a poet and pantheist, a possible future. None present were innocent, save perhaps the judge. And perhaps not even he.