Word Count: 4825 | Reading Time: 17 min
Sighing, the king of the world bent down and removed his shoes. Straightening again, he paused at the painted doorway. Even this was a masterpiece of art: a gold pattern of impossibly thin lines framed a centerpiece of elaborate calligraphy. “When you enter houses, give greetings of peace upon each other — a blessing from God, peace be upon you.” The king stroked his beard. “It is your majesty Shihabuddin Muhammad Shah Jahan, the King, Warrior of the Faith,” he called. There was a long pause, the silence even heavier for lack of reply. The king cleared his throat. “May God perpetuate my kingdom.”
Another silence, broken from within by what might have been a brief reply, a grunt, or only a cough. Shah Jahan took this as a sign of assent; he was the king of the world, after all; could he not command the lives of all men? At the thought, grief struck him like a monsoon. No, he thought, there are limits to even my power over life and death.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, dabbed at his eyes with the hem of his sleeve, and opened the door. Stepping inside and walking down a hallway, he came to an opening. He stopped at the threshold, unable at first to take in the array of images and colors. Sunlight streamed through high windows. All along the walls and hung on lines that crossed the room were innumerable miniature paintings. Brilliant colors of blue, green, pink, red… Faces and figures, beasts, birds. There, a great bleeding elephant, a hero with sword drawn leaping upon him. There, a waterfowl stood, as proud as a king.
He was so taken with the beauty and abundance of images that he nearly did not notice the three men. Two, younger men or boys — apprentices? — looked at him in shock and confusion before scrambling to their feet to begin the four obeisances. The third man, Farrukh Beg, was older, his full beard gone white and his face finely lined as though with a single hair brush. He stood and placed his hand on his heart and inclined his head slightly; it was a greeting to a king that only a mullah was allowed, but Shah Jahan made no protest.
“How may I serve you, your majesty?” asked Farrukh.
The two apprentices clambered to the floor to begin the next prostration, and Shah Jahan waved at them in irritation to stop. “Enough, we haven’t required the four obeisances for years. Leave us.” They hurriedly departed the studio.
Shah Jahan took a deep breath. He had imagined this conversation many times in the weeks travel from the capital city, but his thoughts were now a blank canvas. “I have a special commission for art for you. It is something I believe only you can paint.”
Farrukh raised an eyebrow. “I sense that there is a longer story that brought you to my home in exile.” He pulled at his beard. “Perhaps you should start at the beginning.”
•
Before the Emperor was Shah Jahan, he was only Prince Khurram, the third son of Prince Salim. The Emperor Akbar, still swollen with glory after the battle of Sehwan, in which the outnumbered Imperial army defeated the forces of Jani Beg, saw the birth of a boy of his lineage to be a great sign of favor of God. He insisted that Prince Khurram be raised in his own household and called him his true son. If Prince Khurram had been born but a year earlier, or had the battle turned against Akbar’s forces, Khurram’s life might have run along a vastly different channel.
•
Shah Jahan gathered his thoughts and began. “Years ago, impatient for my father to pass the throne to me, I declared myself Emperor.” Farrukh nodded; he had still been at court, so of course he knew this. “After I lost, and after my father forgave me and I returned to court, I…” He paused, unsure how to tell this story without sounding mad. “I was told of the painting that caused your exile. It was of me, victorious. Me as Emperor.” Again, Farrukh was silent. “It seems as though you foretold the future to come.”
Farrukh pulled thoughtfully at his beard. “I have no such powers, your majesty. Only God can see the future.”
“But you painted a thing that was not but would be. How?”
Farrukh waved his hand, encompassing the many paintings on the walls. “I paint many things that are not but may be. That bird standing at the river’s edge; it was not a thing I saw, but a thing I could imagine, knowing how waterfowl appear and knowing that river. That requires no prophet.”
Shah Jahan shook his head. “I speak not of that, and I think you know it. I come to ask you to return from exile. You must paint me a book that shows me the future.”
Farrukh sighed. “I have told you the truth. I have no gift other than that of seeing. It is true — when you raised the flag against your father, I painted two portraits, each showing one path; you victorious, or your father. Whichever occurred, I would be sure to have the representation I needed in hand.” He laughed without humor. “As it was, by being prepared I doomed myself to this exile.”
“That was foolish of my father, and foolish of me to not recall you after I took the throne in truth. I ask only that you paint me the different paths you see, and I promise no harm will come if you show an ill future.”
A sudden breeze from a distant open door came through the room, and the paintings that hung on the line to dry moved and flapped as though alive. Farrukh peered closely at Shah Jahan, a direct stare that would have gotten him flogged if they were at court. “What future is it that concerns you so much that you travel here as a man to ask me to return? When you could as easily command me, or command your soldiers to return me by force without even standing from your throne?”
Again, the grief returned, and the king feared that it would encompass him as it had done so many times, but although it curled between his legs and up his back, it did not drown him. “I wish to build a monument to one I have lost. A great remembrance, the greatest ever built in all the Hind. But my advisers say that even the wealth of the greatest empire is not limitless, and that should I empty our coffers to build this, it will not leave enough to defend ourselves against our enemies.”
“And you wish me to, what, paint this remembrance for you? Do you not have architects who will make such a thing?”
Shah Jahan shook his head, but felt the unfamiliar stirrings of purpose. “No. I wish you to paint me the futures. Show me what the world will look like if we do this thing, or do not.”
Farrukh pulled at his beard again, eyes unfocused as he appeared to be lost in thought. “Well. If I am to do such a thing, I will need much assistance. These old hands cannot undertake such a thing alone.”
“Anything! You will have the entire atelier at your command!”
Farrukh looked around at the studio, taking it in as though he knew it would be for the last time. “Then we have a great deal of work ahead of us. We should begin at once.”
And for the first time in a year, Shah Jahan smiled.
•
At the age of 15, Prince Khurram was betrothed to Arjumand Banu Begum, a Persian girl of 14 from an old and influential family. Five years later, they married. Court marriages, especially those of favored princes, are instruments of power and diplomacy, each chosen carefully to maintain lines of influence, favor, and political advantage. And yet Prince Khurram truly did fall in love with this witty and sophisticated (and, truth be told, comely) girl, a feeling which only strengthened over the following years. Arjumand was a well-chosen spouse for a potential future Emperor: wise in politics and the management of kingdoms, fluent in many languages, even a gifted poet. Prince Khurram was to marry two other women, but loved only Arjumand, and relied on her as his chief advisor and confidant. Once he became Emperor, he named her “exalted one of the palace,” or in Persian, Mumtaz Mahal. Prince Khurram’s father could have chosen many potential brides for the prince; others may not have been as capable or may not have inspired love. Perhaps if they had met for the first time only on their marriage day rather than in their teens, they would not have formed the unbreakable bond that they did. Who can say?
•
Shah Jahan, with more drive in his step than he had in a year, strode into Farrukh Beg’s atelier, newly installed in the palace. In only the month since he had arrived in Agra, Farrukh had brought on nearly a dozen new assistants, and the work had begun in earnest. All around the room, artists were hard at work. Some prepared the paper, pressing cotton fibers in a press; others took the finished papers and drew elaborate borders of brilliant blues and yellows, with fine traceries of repeating patterns. One boy sat in front of what looked like the tail of a squirrel and painstakingly composed brushes of only a single hair.
“Well, Master Farrukh? What have you for me?” The old man sat–even here in the palace he refused to follow court etiquette, and Shah Jahan was little inclined to correct him, even at the great displeasure of the mir tuzuk who served as the master of ceremonies. Before Farrukh was a sketch of a painting; Shah Jahan had already learned that Farrukh would compose the initial sketches before handing them off to younger workers whose eyes were up to the task of more delicate traceries.
“These works are a marvel. How do you summon such brilliant color?”
Farrukh rose slowly, and Shah Jahan wondered how old he truly was; he had been a favorite painter of Emperor Akbar, Shah Jahan’s grandfather. Farrukh walked to the wall and indicated segments of a painting hanging there with the handle of his brush. “Green: copper salts. Bright red: cinnabar.” He moved the brush again. “That darker crimson is made from crushed beetles.” Shah Jahan raised his eyebrows. Farrukh seemed to have the ghost of a smile as he pointed at the brilliant disc of the sun. “This yellow can only be made from the urine of cows that have been fed mangoes.”
It seemed impossible that Farrukh Beg would fabricate such a fact, but it seemed implausible to the Emperor. He was about to inquire whether he had been serious when Farrukh brought him to a wall where two miniature paintings hung. The first showed Shah Jahan himself seated beneath a golden canopy, figures of peacocks carved atop the dome above. The detail was exquisite; he could see individual gems inlaid in the surface. The ceiling above showed tilework of repeating hexagonal patterns, while the carpet below showed bands of alternating blue and red, with yellow stars and flowers, each barely the size of a grain of sand. “It’s magnificent, Master,” he breathed. “I have not seen the like. Perhaps I will have such a throne built.
Farrukh only grunted and gestured toward the second. It showed a far busier scene; again, Shah Jahan sat, but here on a platform outside, with city walls and gates behind. Many members of his retinue filled the foreground and sides; some wore only loincloths, while others had richly embroidered suits of build, green, and purple. Towers with flags unfurled filled the background, emerging from trees. It seemed a victorious mood, as if showing the aftermath of a battle. Again, each detail was tiny, almost possible to see the threads on the clothes and the bricks of the buildings.
“These are truly lovely works. Do they show my future?”
Farrukh studied the two paintings alongside the Emperor, as if he was seeing them anew. “They show a choice. Splendor –” and here he gestured toward the golden throne. “Or victory,” as he indicated the emperor and his retinue outside the city.
Shah Jahan nodded slowly. “And you say that this is the choice I face; to spend the Empire’s wealth on the mausoleum is to forgo a victory in battle?”
“They are merely two possible futures. But what comes next? It is not enough to consider a choice, or even the consequences of that choice. What new choices arise, or are foreclosed? What will others do? If we are to truly understand the branchings of history, we must go further.”
Shah Jahan was pleased, but not without a small note of disquiet. It seemed that he was getting what he had asked for. And yet, this talk of choices upon choices unsettled him. He had imagined that he need only see a painting to know what to do. But no, he reassured himself. Great art takes time. He has only started; I must give him a chance to work. And he returned to his duties, already looking forward to his next glimpse of the future.
•
By all accounts, Prince Khusrau, Khurram’s eldest brother and favored by Emperor Akbar to follow him on the throne, excelled at statecraft, strategy, and bravery. Beloved by common and noble alike, he was said to be free of vice. Upon the death of Emperor Akbar, however, Khusrau and Khurram’s father, Prince Selim, ascended to the throne as Emperor Jahangir, the World-conqueror. Jahangir was flawed in every way that Khusrau excelled, and was often drunk or lost in opium dreams. After only a year, Prince Khusrau mounted a rebellion against his father. Seized by his father’s army as he attempted to cross the Chenab River, he was forced to ride an elephant through the old marketplace of Delhi as he watched Jahangir’s men disembowel Khusrau’s supporters, one by one. He was then blinded and imprisoned for the rest of his life. One can only dream of the course of the Mughal Empire if Khusrau had taken the throne as Akbar intended instead of his drug-addicted and alcoholic father.
•
Shah Jahan stared in wonder as he slowly leafed through the muraqqa’. The bound album was thicker than any he had seen, but each page was scarcely the width of three fingers and of paper as fine as onionskin. Each new page showed tiny figures: a battle on a great plain of red clay; two men, different but somewhat alike to the man he saw in his mirror, each seated on the great throne; the execution of a Sikh guru; an emperor in final repose, but he could not tell whether it was himself, one of his descendants, or yet some other ruler. He grew almost dizzy with it.
“This… is all of my futures?” he asked, voice hoarse with wonder.
Farrukh snorted. “Hardly. This is merely a handful of glimpses, as though you sought to count the leaves of all the trees of the forest in the flash of lightning.” He shook his head. “If a million and one painters painted an image on single grain of rice each day a for a million and one days, we could fill the royal hall with rice and it would be nothing but a spoonful of water to the great ocean.”
Shah Jahan frowned. “Then of what use is this to me? I asked for wisdom to guide my decisions, so I may see the outcomes before I act.” He shook the muraqqa’, splaying the pages to the air. “To know countless futures is to know nothing at all.”
Farrukh put down his brush and for the first time looked up at the Emperor. Shah Jahan reflected yet again that no other member of the court would dare act with such disrespect. “You misunderstand. We need so many pages not because of each decision, but to see further. Say you choose your son Dara as your successor. What then? What decisions to his brothers make upon your announcement? What will he do on his first day when he takes the throne? What happens at the Safavid court? And what of the lords of the Deccan? Will they rebel again? To peer even a year out is to follow a thousand upon a thousand branches.”
For a moment, Shah Jahan could see it, the flowing of a mighty river that split again and again and again, like the far-off delta of the Ganges.
•
When Prince Khurram was 30, concerned that his father’s wife was preparing to have her son, Khurram’s younger brother, named successor, he raised an army against his father and declared himself the rightful heir. After four long years of battles, he was defeated and forced to submit. But only three years after that, Emperor Jahangir finally succumbed to illness brought on by years of alcohol and drug abuse. Prince Khurram and his supporters quickly seized power and had his rival claimants executed. Upon accession to the throne, he became known as Shah Jahan, king of the world. Did it matter that he rebelled, or that he rebelled and failed? Would he have become Emperor in any case, at lower cost of life?
•
After six months, Shah Jahan visited the atelier again. There were now many dozens of workers, and he knew that they had claimed several other nearby rooms. Now, paintings barely a thumb-width filled the walls and hung from countless cords. Tables groaned with the weight of stacks of bound albums.
The Emperor picked the nearest up and leafed through it, increasingly troubled by the images of possible futures. Four armies, each with the imperial banner at their front, clashed on a sun-baked plain. A great city burned at the hands of foreigners. Was it Agra? Another? A Mughal Emperor sat on a mighty throne while kings of countless nations knelt before him. Pale soldiers in tight uniforms stood at the side of the Mughal Emperor. Shah Jahan, deeply disturbed by these visions, grew angry. “Did not the Prophet say that by no means can anything befall us but what God has destined for us? How can you see such things?”
At this, Farrukh put down his brush. “It is true that divine destiny is an article of your faith. In Persia, many would say that humanity has free will. But even the mullahs of your nation say that we are responsible for our choices and actions. God can foresee all actions and their consequences, and inscribed all in the Book of Decrees before he created the universe.”
The Emperor considered this. “How can it be both? If everything is written, then there is only one path. This — ” He shook the muraqqa’ at Farrukh and threw it to the ground in sudden anger. “This is nothing but fantasies or lies. At best, only a single page is true.”
“Scholars have debated this since the Revelation. But in my view it is no paradox. It is only because God’s knowledge and wisdom transcend the world that the Book of Decrees is final. We could never read such a Book; we would not even comprehend it. To men and women, we must only act as though we can choose. Perhaps we do choose; after all, the Prophet has said that we are responsible for our choices, and it would be a cruel jape to play on man to make us responsible for actions that we are destined to perform.”
Shah Jahan stared down at the muraqqa’. It lay open on the ground to a miniature he had not seen before. It showed a tiger, asleep in a field. In the background, no bigger than his thumb, was a marvel: four curved minarets of white stone surrounded a central structure, also of white. A mosque? A palace? No, he knew suddenly with no room for doubt that it was the mausoleum.
The Emperor’s voice was dry as though he walked the desert. “Our final destiny is assured and has never been in doubt. I cannot fathom how it is that our destiny is written. I am the king of the world; every day my word becomes law and law becomes truth. A dozen times every hour I must choose; should this man or that man be given honor? Is this man guilty, to be lashed? Is that man honest, to be given command of an army? God may know my choices before I make them, but I do not, and still I must choose.”
Farrukh Beg picked up his single-hair brush again, and began to add lines to the miniature before him. “As do we all, your Majesty.”
•
In the fourth year of Shah Jahan’s reign, his beloved Mumtaz Mahal died at the age of 38 giving birth. Shah Jahan was inconsolable. He went into seclusion for a year in mourning; some say that he left the capital entirely to travel among his people looking for succor or release from grief. When he returned, his hair had turned completely white. How did her death change the course of history? If she had survived the birth of that child, how much longer would she have lived, and how would Shah Jahan’s reign differ?
•
Shah Jahan sat, crossed-legged, in the middle of the atelier studio. There was barely room to sit, much less walk. Tables were piled with art; so many cords crossed the room to hang paintings to dry that the room felt like a spider’s lair. The paintings were far too numerous to contain in an album; even if it were possible, many were too small to even bind. The largest were the width of his hand, the smallest on paper were the size of a single fingernail. But even that minuscule size was too large to encompass the paths of history. Grains of rice, speckled with dozens of jewel-tone colors, overfilled a copper kettle large enough to fill a bath. It was like being in the midst of the rainforest: trees, vines, a riot of blooms of every color, brilliant-winged birds aloft, smears of crimson, gold, white, black. He picked up a handful of rice and peered at them. A dozen cities each with a different flag; an emperor, the Mughal shamsa surrounding his head, seated atop an elephant triumphantly entering a foreign city; a pallid round-faced woman with a crown and sceptre; a thin holy man making salt at the seashore.
“Is it done?” he whispered, unable to summon his voice. “Is this the Book of Decrees?”
Farrukh slowly picked his way through the piles to the kettle, to pick up a single grain of rice between two fingers. “Do you remember when we first spoke of the Book of Decrees?”
Shah Jahan nodded. ” I will remember that until my appointed time.”
Farrukh inspected the grain, turning it before his eye. “Since then we have painted a thousand-fold beyond that. And yet even now this glimpse is but a single grain of sand in the deserts of Araby to the Book of Decrees that God wrote before he created the world.”
At that, something like the rages he felt as a Prince boiled up in Shah Jahan. “Then what is the purpose of this? Why did I wait ten years for guidance, only to behold things I cannot even see, and cannot tell me what course to take? Better I had been blinded like my brother when he rose up against my father.” And then like a summer storm the rage was gone, leaving emptiness. “All a waste, all without reason.”
Farrukh tossed the grain of rice back into the kettle, then reached his hand fully into the rice, and lifted it out, grasping a pile of grains. “I do not believe art can ever be a waste. The act of creation is how we honor God, by echoing his own creation in a tiny way.” He tilted his hand and let the colored grains pour out of his hand back into the kettle like a painted waterfall. “But I see that perhaps you sought something that we could not give you.” The last of the rice dropped off his palm. “Art cannot give us certainty. It shows us things that may be, but the truth of what it shows is not in the pigments, but in the eye of he who beholds it.”
Shah Jahan leaned forward and took a handful of grains himself, watching the colors shift and play with each movement of his hand. “That tells me nothing. I see nothing.”
“Nothing, your majesty?”
“Nothing but colors, nothing but countless choices, nothing but paintings that will likely still be in this room after I am dead as well.”
Farrukh didn’t speak, and the only sound in the room was the susurration of rice falling back into the kettle as Shah Jahan lifted a handful and poured it back in again and again. It seemed to Shah Jahan that he dreamed now, lulled by the sounds. Once, he had understood this task that he had set Farrukh Beg; one future on one path, a different future on another. Now, it seemed like trying to split a great river in half with a knife. Each cut leaves the river unscathed; you could have a thousand warriors each strike at the river until their strength broke, and still it would only be water, running down inevitably to be lost to the vastness of the ocean.
Once, when he commanded the Empire’s armies during his father’s reign, he had led his troops to the very mouth of the Yamuna River. Even the mightiest rivers end, just as each man — and yes, each woman — has their appointed time. The kingdoms and empires that came before all fell in their time, and Shah Jahan could see only too clearly that it could happen to the Mughal Empire in a distant age. No, he admitted in an unwelcome clarity. It would end; God would not allow any human thing to be immortal.
And, so, what then? What did we leave behind? The waters of the rivers were lost in the ocean. The dead were only memories. The vanished empires of the past were only buildings. But… perhaps that was not nothing. Rivers did indeed carve the land in their flow. Each drop of water might be gone, but the river persisted. The greatest buildings might fall to dust in ages to come, but stood as a remembrance for many lifetimes. And memories… it is no small thing to be remembered.
He turned his face up to look at Farrukh, who was watching him. “Do you regret all of this art that you made? Was this all a waste, to learn nothing?”
Farrukh shook his head, perhaps a ghost of a smile. “No art is a waste. The act of creation itself honors God. More than that, though, we have brought into being a vision of these times, of possible futures. They will be seen by others, after we’re gone.”
Yes. It was, after all these years, finally clear. His advisors, who counseled against spending the Empire’s fortune on the greatest tomb, the better to prolong the life of the Empire, were utterly misguided. Nothing lives forever. There is only what we leave behind.
“Summon the architects. It is long-past time that we begin the work of building a fitting resting place for Mumtaz Mahal. Let it stand by the Yamuna River and her memory shall last even as the waters slip past. May it remind all who see it that she lived, and was loved. There can be no greater future.”
•
The mausoleum that was to be later known as the Taj Mahal was finally completed seventeen years after the death of Mumtaz Mahal. At the age of 65, Shah Jahan grew ill and appointed Prince Dara Shikoh, his eldest son with Mumtaz Mahal, as regent. The news brought the politically charged Imperial court to immediate conflict as Shah Jahan’s many sons raised armies of their followers. After a series of bitter battles, Shah Jahan’s third son, Aurangzeb, seized the capital and placed his father under house arrest. Did Shah Jahan’s choice of successor matter at all?
•
Upon his death eight years later, Shah Jahan was entombed beside his most beloved wife. His decision to build the Taj Mahal has shaped the image the world has not only of the Mughal Empire and his reign, but of all of India throughout the centuries. It is considered one of the most admired works of art of all human history. Think how much poorer the world would be if he had chosen not to build it.