Here is Jiji, hardly visible under the night sky. Making sure she is by herself.
The twin citadels of Amerkot Fort loom down at her. She is right in their shadow, her back against the ochre brick wall of the kitchens. Even the starlight fails to reach her as it falls on the sands of Thar. Nobody besides her, she thinks, would be out at this time that belongs to the white-footed desert foxes and the slithering Lundi snakes.
Jiji begins.
First, the golden feather. She pulls it out of the folds of her dress, marveling again at how it glows in her hand. She has to stop herself from leaning close to it to try and understand its whispers.
She jumps because she has burned herself with the torch. She shakes her hand, frowns and, with a final look around her, sets fire to the feather.
It needs little encouragement. The shadow flees from this fallen sun, the light of it spinning in its own secret dance as she releases it.
Gently, gently the fiery feather wafts, before exploding mid-air into a confusion of rioting colors.
A snap – the feather’s reed has broken, and Jiji almost totters against the force of the fragrance it releases. She smells an impossible cacophony – scents of melons and pomegranates, cherries and apples, neem leaves and wet terracotta. She cannot stop her heart from galloping – in admiration but also foreboding.
She should be calm – she knows how this goes. She has done this before.
***
The first time was much like this one. She had slipped away from her husband then as well, leaving him asleep so she could burn the feather in secret. And oh, she thought, kicking her jooti in the sand. How well was she rewarded for her deed. How well they both were.
Yet things have not been easy. As soon as she had changed their fortunes by burning the first of the feathers they became refugees. They became homeless and fled persistent enemies until their group had stumbled here upon the Fort, hoping to seek sanctuary with Rana Prasad. How grateful her husband had been to see the citadels back then, and for the royal kitchens with their kindly cooks so bemusedly generous with their stock. And most of all for the shelter Rana Prasad offered their weakened, fleeing group led by the Padshah Humayun.
Humayun. Even now she knows her husband is fretting over problems that orbit their Padshah and his attention. All her husband does is worry about their king.
“Two kings in one fort, how can it be?” Her husband had complained once it became clear where they were going to live.
He was not so trusting of shelter given freely. But Rana Prasad had so far only given evidence of being a most warm and hospitable host. Humayun of Fargana may be a defeated king, he had told his servants, but he is a king nonetheless, and deserved honor and respect. Jiji had caught the mutters and imagined how they must look – Uzbek and Turkic courtiers, Farsi poets and artists, all attendant upon their Timurid King. Now to live side by side with a ruler of a kingdom in Hind.
But what a king this Rana was. Openly defying Sher Shah Suri, who was out for Humayun’s blood, and offering shelter to Suri’s opponent.
“Yes, we will give him respect!” The Rana had thundered, moving his hands to indicate the two courts should mingle. And so his courtiers stood around him, drinks in hand, and they all smiled politely at their guests, who, equally flummoxed, smiled back.
Rana Prasad’s court was as robust, well-oiled, and as immense as his physique. He reveled and feasted and was content. Unlike Humayun, that kingly descendant of Ameer Timur the Lame, who had fallen upon inauspicious times. His feeble court had dwindled, and he slouched in misery and blustered in newfound optimism by turns. Many of his followers had died. Some had fled. Since he had been so brutally attacked by Sher Shah Suri, there was little confidence in the future his followers have put such heavy stakes on. Days go by on wheels of despair, pushed along only by forced geniality.
“In some days we will seek refuge in Persia,” Humayun the would-be conqueror of Hind had announced. “No doubt the Shah will welcome us and send us back with reinforcements. After all, we are kin. Kin!” The Padshah’s good cheer gleams erratic as light bouncing off an unpolished shield. “Meanwhile, we stay here. A welcome pause,” Humayun waved his hand, “from wars and wanderings.”
What he did not say was that given his wife’s condition, the Rana’s protection was a Godsend.
It is easy, Jiji thinks wearily as she kicks harder, throwing sand over the colorful ash that is still falling. Easy to see why Humayun fell in such violent love with his new bride. One encounter with Hamida Bano’s fiery eyes, scholar’s brow, and axe-like wit, and Humayun was begging her father for her hand. Sending his step-mother as intercessor. Starving himself when it seemed he would not win her consent.
This traveling court had closed their eyes to the young Begum’s alarm at her pregnant condition. Unnoticed went the beads of sweat on her nose, her resentment at no longer being able to ride, her trepidation at her massive belly and clumsy waddle. Jiji tried to be always at her side to help. She felt sorry for the girl. Their Padshah Begum, now heavy with child, was only fifteen summers old.
***
With a jerk Jiji realizes the golden feather has almost burned through, and it flashes emerald, jasper, sapphire. It rejects them all and fixes on a final color – an opalescent white, searing her vision. She winces, opening her eyes in time to note the whiteness of its demise. What does it mean, she wonders, putting one hand to her chest. She feels with an undeniable certainty that it means something.
Suddenly her breasts ache. It has been a long day, she thinks. And now a long night.
Jiji’s movements are ungainly as she returns. She walks slowly past the simmering pots filled with food for the next day, cooking overnight with their mouths packed with dough. She pants as she climbs the stairs. Like the Padshah Begum, Jiji too is with child.
Mothers are supposed to be consumed with nothing but concern for the birth of the child. Jiji has her concerns, but no. She has no wishes to make for the birth and has only prayers to see her through. She feels an unfamiliar and novel confidence, conceived like a twin with her baby.
No, what Jiji wished for as the feather burned has to do with the future beyond. Security insured for her generations hidden in wombs and in loins. She wishes for that which her husband desires. For what he frets over day and night: a means to the Padshah’s favor.
Not ordinary favor, no. Not a benevolent wave of the hand or a mere promotion in rank. Favor that transcends fads and fashions. A permanent tie.
But they do not possess wealth to barter for favor.
So how? Shamsuddin would thunder. How to go about it?
She would sit, not trying to reason with him, until the storm subsided.
Shamsuddin is what any girl would wish for. His ambition! Not many in their home city possessed the like.
“His father was a farmer,” her own father had told her when he’d arranged the marriage. “But his son is not like us. Not like us old men, arms deep in the mud of our ancestors. There is a brightness in his future. I have talked to him, Jiji. He can wander with the freest of feet. He can love things he has not grown up with. He can take you away from here. Don’t argue with me. Which girl would say no to a Ghazi for a husband?”
But she had been skeptical of Shamsuddin precisely because of that word: Ghazi, a warrior. She, who loves animals and their young, and then this man and his sword with its latent violence, she had thought. How is it a good match? But he talked – it is his words through which he faces everything. And slowly she began to understand the world which Shamsuddin was pulling into existence through sheer will. It is the same ancient stubbornness that sprouts unasked for in the hearts of the fledgelings working their way out of their eggs, the puppies that howl in eagerness to help with sheep herding, and the kingfisher who darts again and again to grab fish from the lakes in the dry season.
So she became a wife of a soldier, talking to him about army life.
Soon the army was moving on – towards riches, her husband insisted, towards a better life under Sher Shah Suri.
It wasn’t long before Jiji burned the first feather.
It had changed all things in a single event. One day they had been conscripts in Sher Shah Suri’s army – the next day her husband came home to inform her they were now switching sides.
“What do you mean?” she had hissed. “How can we betray Sher Shah Suri?”
They were whispering, walking with the bustle that accompanies the Fajr prayer wherever Muslims traveled in large numbers. She had stifled a thousand and one yawns waiting for Shamsuddin – she had not slept for a moment the night before. Nobody had. The camp hadn’t stopped its buzzing since the soldiers left in accordance to Sher Shah Suri’s plan to ambush an unexpecting Humayun. And Jiji had had another reason to abandon sleep.
Burning the first of the three golden feathers had been terrifying and exhilarating. The feather had burned its way through flashing gemstone colors, lights piercing her scrunched up eyelids, and finally fixing on a marine blue just before turning to a puff of azure ash, leaving behind a smell of the river.
“We do not have a choice,” Shamsuddin said now. “We must leave at once. Immediately! When the men get an account of what happened in the battle––”
Jiji halted. “What happened?”
“He happened. Humayun. He was making much of himself, strutting around, proclaiming his right to rule on the river bank. And then…well. Somehow he fell into the river––”
Her eyes widened.
“––and the river went mad. Pulling him down. Swirling him in circles. As if the rivers were assailed by invisible storms. It was the perfect opportunity to finish him. His people were busy getting slaughtered on the other side of the Ganges. And on this side, I and God alone watched. His armor was pulling him down. He was sinking fast. Then…I know not why, but…I tossed my empty water flask into the river.”
“It must have floated,” Jiji realized. “It being made of leather.”
“Like a bladder. Yes. It was as if I was acting to a script. I knew exactly what to do.”
Shamsuddin took a deep breath.
“I called him to hold it. He started to float towards the bank. I hoisted him out…”
He shakes his head, in shock at himself, staring at his hands as if they have a mind of their own.
“I hoisted the enemy out.”
It has gone wrong, she thinks. She had wished on the golden feather for success but this has ruined them both.
“What were you thinking, husband? They will have our heads!”
“Wrong! We are fortunate, Jiji. Blessed! Humayun has offered us a place with him. An honored place. He says he is in debt to me. He embraced me, Jiji! Chest to chest. As if I was also a… a brother.”
He had been about to say also a king. Instead of a grimy nailed son of a farmer, ribs showing in times of famine, losing sleep to guard his wealth in times of fullness.
He swallowed.
“And just think––if he wins the wars, he will be a wealthy man in debt to me. Think! To have a reigning king in my debt!”
And so it was. Shamsuddin and Humayun became friends. Humayun gifted him a perfume like those his courtiers wore. Shamsuddin has applied it diligently every dawn and uff! When he does, her husband transforms into one of those lauded exotic beasts. No longer for him the smells of manure, nor the stench of a soldier’s sweat. He is shy and outraged in turns when she teases him, pretends not to know him. The scent of the saffron and musk blend blankets them in the aftermath of their lovemaking.
So now on this night, having burned the second feather, Jiji knows from experience their lives will change.
She climbs the stairs to the women’s quarters. She eagerly reaches to undo her upper garment. It has been suffocating her. There is a dull pain that hasn’t stopped since the feather turned to moondust in the dark outdoors. She unwraps her fabric and lets the air cool her down.
A drop escapes her. She cranes her neck to see it. It rolls like a runaway pearl, sliding down her body, catching the starlight. Smelling of milk.
She feels an odd hunger, seeing it. She knows her hands smell of charred feather, but on the fringes of the feeling her appetite burgeons…she yearns for something she cannot quite identify. If she could only meditate on it a bit more she might discover –
The drop of milk that has escaped her breast hits the ground. And the doors to everything she has always known each close with a bang, the skies of a new world opening above her.
A wave rises from her abdomen. Up. Up. Then down in a crash, a tear, a gushing of blood. She feels a rupture in her womb. Not now, she thinks. Too soon. She gives out an alarmed cry.
Maham Anaga never sleeps anymore, they say. Not since Hamida Begum was taken with child. She patrols the halls between the Padshah Begum’s quarters and her own, ever alert to a sign of the baby’s arrival. She is in charge of the group of milk-mothers kept in readiness to feed the expected prince due any moment now. As Jiji reaches the entrance, clasping a pillar for support, she raises her eyes and Maham’s meets hers, as unerring as the gaze of a trained falcon on the hunt. It is entirely unnecessary of Jiji to gasp and say, “The baby is early,” as she does next, because Maham Anaga is already giving orders, preparing a room, grimly managing all things chaotic. A guard has been sent to alert her husband.
“Have this,” someone says, giving her a tea. Afeem? she realizes too late, but I don’t want to sleep. It is the last thing she thinks before everything else fades out.
***
When Jiji opens her eyes, body sore and head heavy, she hears drums beating wildly. Ecstatic trumpets. Clamor at the gate as from a high balcony servants drop largesse into the open palms of screaming crowds who are so overcome with joy they are wailing, supplicating. A frenzy of celebration. But what has happened?
“Congratulations on the birth of the prince,” the midwife attending her says. And then, more kindly, “He was born at the same time as your son.”
Her heart leaps as she reaches for him.
She names him Aziz which means dearest, most precious, beloved. She feels her first pang of sadness when she sees he has only one swaddling cloth, that too made from Jiji’s old clothes. The rest of their wealth is used to buy gifts for the new prince, the Padshah and his flushed-cheeked, triumphant Begum.
As soon as she can stand, Jiji is summoned to the bedside of the fast-recovering queen.
“It seems to me it is destined,” Hamida says to her. Her hair is splayed out on the cushion. Her son is not in the room. The wet nurses who will become his milk-mothers have spirited him away. The prince has been named a string of epithets, but will be known to all as Akbar. The great.
“Yes,” Hamida Begum says. “Destined. Two boys, born at the same time. A prince and his infant courtier. And,” she gets more animated, more like the young girl she is. “What I like about you is you don’t fuss. You are sensible. And so very kind. I don’t know anyone quite as kind as you.” She pauses, choosing her words. “And your husband has served us so well. I think the Padshah would like to honor your husband by elevating you, Jiji. You know how he is about qismet and signs and such. So it is decided,” she claps her hands. “He wishes to appoint you as the Anaga of his son. I am very pleased with this decision.”
“Anaga?”
But she is already being waved away. And someone else is at her side.
Maham Anaga, who has never exchanged a word with her in her life before, is passing her arm through hers like a kindly aunt.
Jiji knows about Maham what everyone else knows – practically nothing and only what she has observed. Maham is ever smiling. She is older than all of her group of milk-mothers she is the superintendent of. A stern and capable leader of the flustered group of nine women who are new mothers themselves. She has a little son, Adham Khan, ten years old and yet skilled with a blade. Her husband Nadeem is the Padshah’s cup holder, in one of those trusted positions so coveted by Shamsuddin. Humayun is generous to Nadeem and sees he is lavished discreetly with all he could want. At festivals Maham drips in gems and jewels, fashionably cut silks only just a little inferior to the princesses.
“Congratulations,” she says with the widest smile Jiji has seen yet. Such a permanent fixture, as incapable of fading as a general’s sword is of breaking in battle.
She launches into her instructions, even as they walk. To give the best of milks to the princeling, there are foods Jiji must eat. She must only let her vision rest on objects of beauty. She must not be fractious nor must she ever eat anything sour. All these things, it is known, taint the milk. Jiji must inform her at once should she see the start her monthly courses again. She must pray, be honest, and be always virtuous. These qualities will pass through her milk to the Padshah’s son. She will receive remuneration, of course – Maham casually mentions a sum. Jiji feels the room swim before her eyes, so that she must stop and cover her face until she recovers.
She smiles behind her hands.
She has done it. She has finally done it.
***
Shamsuddin beholds her in awe. He asks her to repeat the sum, again and again.
Jiji leans into her cushions, telling all the events to him. Meanwhile her mind is almost bursting with her greatest secret. That is the thing she really wants to talk about, but dares not. Instead she replays it behind her eyes, as she carries on talking to her husband.
The day she met the Simurgh bird, she was bloody and bruised and limping. Ghazni was where she had grown up and it had been Jannat on earth for her. But no more. Now she was fleeing for her life on the same green lands that she had played on as a toddler.
Her hair and veil were disheveled and tangled together as she ran for escape beneath the dusty emerald leaves in the forest. Hiding from the neighbors who had ganged up on her and her father.
Everything was changing, and though Sher Shah Suri was, for all his faults, an able administrator, there was simply too much wealth too fast. The neighbors who she had grown up with, who had commiserated with her at the death of her mother, had now turned unrecognizable, voracious in their greed. Forcing her father to sell his flocks to the horse traders who have newly become landlords.
She fell into a heap behind the thickest tree trunk. Everywhere there was a cool darkness as the leaves blocked out the urgency of the sun. Everything grew quiet.
A small thing changes everything. A response. An action. A choice.
A pit viper, dappled black upon the sand, scaly coils almost undetectable against the ground.
And there, right within its grasp – a small, flapping creature. A bird? She focused but there was a shiver in the air around its form, making her think of the rippling surface of the river. It must be a bird, Jiji thought, because it has feathers. Though when she blinked she thought she could see scales. Another blink, and it was like a lion. Golden? No. Blue? No. One moment it was almost like a chicken. The next it was – something fantastical.
She must have hit her head harder than she thought. Her limp had gotten worse, so she grabbed the nearest branch as she surveyed the snake and its prey.
She could not place, not immediately, what kind of bird it was, but she knew if she had time she would remember its name. Just as one knows one’s way around the paths in a new place in a dream, even without having a map.
It is only a fledgling, she had thought, and very young, so perhaps that is all it is. Baby birds are so naked and disconcerting and alien. Unsettling to look at. This, of course, must be why she finds the creature so peculiar.
All this goes past in a flash, under the fatal concentration of the viper.
Why interfere, her mind told her. You could die. Is this worth your life?
But the voice of her father replied from the back of her mind. Jiji, this bird is a fledgling, it has its whole life ahead of it. Are there not enough wild boar carcasses for the snakes to eat? Jiji, her father would have said, think of the mother.
She picked up a rock. Several. She left it to the same instincts that would help her choose the best pebbles for the games she played, where she built towers with the other girls before aiming a sharp pebble to topple them down.
She forgot her bruises and her leg. She forgot her broken bone that was responsible for the screaming scarlet pain shooting up through her leg and to her clenched jaw. She forgot snakes were lethal if they wore the markings this viper did. She aimed at the snake and threw. And again, and again.
A nest is not an invitation. A nest is a story, released from the minds of birds made hopeful by lust, who then entwine twigs and dirt together with the object of concealing their naked, featherless family. In the future Jiji will be a widow, molting memories, and she will wonder if she had been right in believing that a nest is, above all, a border. Between what is important, and what is a threat.
The snake writhed, and she flew towards it, picking up a rock. It turned and made its quick way to the path that led to the river, disappearing into the bushes.
The bird was still crying. She had not been able to see its face, tucked away under a wing. She approached it with all the gentleness her father had taught her.
Gazing up into the tree, she thought she could see its nest.
I will most likely die in any case. She could not tell for sure if she was passing out and waking up repeatedly, but it felt like it.
One final thing then.
She picked up the bird and started to climb. Climbing was easier than walking on her injured leg, and she had lots of experience climbing trees.
When she looked up to see the nest, she found it larger than she expected it to be. There was also a whispering. Voices, threading the air around her.
Frowning, she continued upward, the fledgling sitting upon her palm. Again she looked up, and the nest was huge. The baby bird suddenly jumped to sit on her neck, heavy as a cat.
Everything in creation shivered and stretched. The very tree she was climbing changed in girth. Its branches grew thicker and its foliage a darker green. The leaves, she thought. It is the leaves muttering stories and secrets.
At the end of it, the nest was as big as a house. The fledgling, big as a colt, almost breaking her back where it sat, brought its head out from under its wing, and met Jiji’s gaze.
She could see herself reflected in its inky eyes. An old woman, neck flapping and wrinkled. And herself, a newborn, unclothed and crimson in the blood of her birth. She saw planets and flaming balls of silver against a never-ending vastness. She saw her parents as young children, babies. Her mother, who she had never seen in her life, who had died giving birth to Jiji.
She was ill and hallucinating, that is all she was. She was poisoned. Surely the broken bone had become infected.
And now she had a delusion. She feels it was a delusion, because a giant bird with eagle wings, a monster of a bird, had descended upon the nest. A bird has feathers and certain features that define it as a bird, but this one had paws instead of claws. A body warm and catlike. And the back of it had no feathers, nor even fur, but scales.
I am dying, Jiji thought, lying limp on the branch. The mother bird towered over her, then with a swiftness that took Jiji off-guard, she bent down and picked Jiji in her beak. As soon as Jiji was lifted, she was put down again – right in the nest among the other fledglings, who together surveyed her with ancient knowledge. Jiji could feel everything she had ever been told roll away. In its place was the shapeless, faceless truth that runs through the twisted, hidden roots of reality.
She blinked.
And then there was no nest, but Jiji’s home, and no mother bird but… her own mother. And Jiji was no injured young woman but had become an infant herself. A hungry, tired infant.
Turning her around, the bird that was her mother offered her milk.
A bird does not give milk. Surely not even one with paws and a cat body. Yet this one did. And after she imbibed her milk, she threw up. And then she drank some more, heard her father’s flute playing, and her mother, whom she had never known, telling her a story. A story about a cosmic creature, flying against a sky that is not of this earth, but from an eternally silent blackness. Tasked with the tending of a tree from which budding worlds emerge.
“You saved my child,” Jiji was told. The words nestled in her heart without needing to pass through her ear. “You saved one of us, expecting nothing in return, not knowing who we are. So when you wake, take three of my feathers. And any time you need help, you must burn one feather and make a wish. And I will make it so.”
“Who are you?” Jiji asked her mother. The leaves whispered the answer back to her, louder and louder, until the sound overpowered her and in the dream she fainted, and that phase of sleep overtook her which leaves one dead to all the worlds.
When she woke up, the sun was close to setting, the baby birds were asleep, and the mother watched her.
Three feathers, Jiji recalled. She reached out and – hesitant to hurt the bird – gave a gentle pull at the wing she was offered. Under the massive wing were golden, downy feathers.
And now here she was. Jiji, fully healed and now home from the adventure, sitting in her father’s house. Golden feather in hand, about to burn it. Ready to change her fate. For how could she and her father live persecuted by their neighbors? Perhaps the bird could help her.
But none can change a person’s fate more than a parent.
Jiji heard her father calling.
He talked for a long time, and she only listened.
“Jiji,” he pleaded with her. “It is for the best.”
His friend’s son is trustworthy. Reliable. Ambitious. A bit like his own daughter, na?
She looked at him doubtfully. She would never describe herself as ambitious. She was happy tending the sheep and looking after the funny-faced chickens. Collecting all the healing herbs they could need and managing the lambs each year.
She was silent in front of her father. Not from grief, but in something that does not come naturally to her – calculation.
On the one hand if she burned a golden feather, she could change her fate and her father’s.
On the other hand, her father had seemingly come up with a solution which could help them both. The soldier’s father would give her father a dowry. Her father could pack up and leave, should he choose, on that alone. And she would be gone with her new husband.
It wasn’t all bad, she thought to herself later, when she saw the roguish smile playing on her soldier husband’s lips. He built her a nest of her garments and his, next to the fire in the autumn night, and they buried themselves in it. And moving together they made the future.
So she had kept the golden feathers. All three. And she knew the bird’s name.
One time, in the library in the women’s quarters, Jiji came across a manuscript. There were stories of a bird called the Simurgh, a legend from Khorasan in Persia. She read that the Simurgh bird lives upon the Tree of Knowledge – whatever that is. She traced their forms with her finger in the manuscripts – over beings that look like lions and horses and birds mixed up.
***
She plays now with the idea of telling her husband. But Shamsuddin has drifted to sleep, snoring contentedly. She is glad; glad for him and for herself. His face is turned towards the window, lines smoothed out and almost blissful.
He has fretted constantly on how to gain status at Padshah Humayun’s court. He has been vigilant of reminding Humayun of his fealty and his ability. Others, like that Bairam Beg, have his ear constantly. He must cement his place.
“What should we do?” Jiji had asked him.
“I need a wardrobe,” he had grumbled. But they were almost penniless. He needed confidence and wit, he said. Prudence and tact.
You have these, Jiji would say in confusion each time he complained. Until the last time when he banged his fist on the wall, almost knocking a lantern to the ground. No, he had said. He could tell you when to change the pastures of a herd of cows. He could tell you when it would rain. He could tell you which irrigation technique was worth the money of setting it up. He could tell you if the crop would be favourable.
He could not tell you if a line of poetry had the right meter and if it hit the right cadence. He cannot tell you if his wife should be dressed in silk from Jaunpur or from Kashmir. If pearl earrings from the Bay of Bengal are what courtiers must wear, or if it is the thing to sport a simple heron’s feather in one’s pagri wound about one’s head.
“So what?” Jiji had asked bewildered.
He turned his face away.
Shamsuddin would sit always with nobles and courtiers. Learning, constantly learning. It is no small thing to transform from being a farmer to a soldier and then to an aspiring courtier. And then who knows what else?
“We need more wealth,” he had finally said. “Then the circles will open up and the knowledge of these matters begin to flow.”
His envy of the wealthier, horse-owning courtiers had grown day by day. Their exclusion of him was a thorn in his side that tore at him, and which he in turn would use to rend the fabric of his marriage.
“You do not understand finer things. After all, you are a shepherd’s daughter. Do you not see how the wives of the courtiers advise them? But what could you advise me in?”
This is not him, Jiji knows. It is only that he gets tired. Leaving the opponent’s army was for the best. The Simurgh bird had guided their destiny. A journey to Persia was imminent, and there more honors would await Humayun and his court. The children of her womb would call the court their home. Perhaps they would be learned, more learned than their parents from Ghazni, taking lessons in the palace’s famous Chamber of Books. They would speak many languages. They will marry royalty, Jiji once said laughing.
Shamsuddin only nodded grimly. “Of course.”
The baby sleeps as well. The night breeze smells of tez leaves. Tomorrow she will pick them and go to the kitchens and she will be exclaimed over, sent away. Then the Khan-e-Saman in charge of the kitchen and household will call her back. He will send a girl with her to the women’s quarters with a jade platter of fenugreek sweetmeats, dripping with sweet gurr syrup. Fenugreek stimulates the milk glands, the maternal stana the Ayurveda speaks of. She and her lineage will never be hungry again. She will be given new clothes, as fine as a princess.
Fire destroys. But the one she has set only builds.
***
Motherhood suits her, she thinks. When she has a moment to. When her infant son latches, the world shifts as if it has been tilted on its side her whole life and now someone – probably a mother – has said “tut, tut,” and set it aright. The fit of the yawning need of his hunger is made to her body. The milk rolls forth – first a water, like dew drops, and though she has heard this is not good, that this first milk must be discarded in favor of the milk that comes later, she allows it. Feels a rightness in it. It is a gentler milk for a new visitor, awaiting its color as he awaits his naming. Then the cloudy warmth of mature milk arrives, hesitant until he spends a full night attacking his hunger, crying with alarming urgency in his thin, new voice, until inadequacy haunts her – perhaps my breasts do not have enough. She storms the library and demands texts in Sanskrit on Ayurveda, in Farsi on apocrypha. An amused guard who sits at the door of the library translates for her.
“But you do know,” she says to Jiji gently, “these are penned by men. You are the mother. Trust yourself.”
That night her milk is not stinted but flows in a spurting stream, as if the infant ambush on her supply has created an unending river in her breasts. So much so that when Aziz pauses for breath, he receives the milk full on his face to his astonished chagrin and Jiji’s relief. But this is good, Maham assures her. For Jiji will need enough milk for two.
Still, there are ten milk-mothers. Ten! Twenty breasts full of milk for one son of a Padshah. Uff, Shamsuddin mutters, these Padshahs start out voracious. So it is not likely the royal infant will demand much of her time. Also she is shy, as her husband complains. Not easy for her to push ahead in this game of politics. The baby is an asset, and every Anaga knows it. They jostle each other for a turn to feed the prince’s imperial hunger. They squabble in whispers at his bedside for a chance to be next in line to feed him.
One night, after handing back Akbar to the next milk-mother, Jiji comes back to her room, finally lying next to her own infant. But there in the distance a wailing begins. And this time it does not stop.
She comes back out into the hall. Another milk-mother – Daya Anaga – is rocking the prince and flinching under Maham’s glare.
“He will not latch,” she murmurs. “I do not know why.”
“You must be doing it wrong,” Maham retorts.
“I will do it,” Bhaval Anaga takes him, making shushing sounds. “Little prince, little prince,” she sings as she opens her garment and sits on a cushion. Meanwhile the wailing sears through everyone’s head, nullifying all thoughts except how to best silence it.
Akbar contemplates the milk-mother’s breast with a squint and tiny flared nostrils. There is blessed silence. And then a demonic crying as if someone is trying to slay him.
“Let me.”
“Me.”
“I can do it.”
“I can do better.”
Each milk-mother lines up. Each is rejected by determinedly pursed lips and an angry, scrunched up face.
“What is this?”
The Padshah’s sister Gulbadan stands behind them, eyes open wide in astonishment.
“What is the commotion? Why is my nephew crying so?”
All stand in hurried deference to her. The baby does not cease his crying.
Gulbadan reaches for him. She frowns as the silk swaddle loosens and she narrowly misses being hit by a flailing fist.
“He refuses milk,” Maham Anaga says. “But I will find a solution.”
“He sounds very hungry,” Gulbadan says. “How long has he been without milk?”
Nobody answers.
“Ten milk-mothers my brother has done honor to by keeping for his son. And not one of you can give him milk. I am not married,” she continues, “and I do not have any children. But I do not think this is very normal.”
“We have all tried,” Bhaval Anaga says, her voice hitching. The prince has turned red as a cherry, shaking his little head in rage, mouth perpetually reaching for something he cannot find.
Is there any storm like an infant’s? It is hard, Jiji knows, to be rejected by a baby, especially when one’s breasts are full of milk. She does not blame Bhaval for the tears rolling down her face, nor Daya for her quivering lips. Jiji holds her Aziz close to her, giving him her knuckle to suck on to keep him quiet. She stands quietly in the back.
Gulbadan’s eyes slide to her.
“Have you all tried? What about you, Jiji?”
Jiji hands her own son to a cup-bearer – none of the other milk-mothers seem inclined to assist her – and stands forward. As soon as she takes Akbar in her arms, he stops crying. Everyone watches her in disbelief as she puts him to her breast and he takes it immediately.
Loud in the new silence, Gulbadan exhales.
“Well,” she says. “It would seem no royal male is too young to have a favorite.”
Leaving that last word dangling, she steps out of the room.
Maham Anaga does not frown, because she is not a lady who frowns. Instead she smiles. Intensely.
“Sorceress,” Jiji hears someone hiss. She snaps her head up immediately but cannot tell which of the resentful faces around her has uttered the accusation.
***
The day repeated itself, over and over. Akbar would be passed to the next Anaga, but would cry, turning red in the face in imperial rage, kicking at the person holding him. Until he was handed back to Jiji, and his muscles would relax as he melted into her bosom, next to his milk-brother Aziz.
“I knew there was something special about you, Jiji.” Hamida Begum says as a maid brushes her hair. “I had a dream, you know. There was a golden bird, and it was sitting on your head. That is usually interpreted as a person being royal, or so my father would say. He was a very learned man, tutor to the Padshah’s brother.”
And she smiles at Jiji before leaving her with Akbar and Aziz. The milk-brothers are practically twins, Jiji thinks, laying them side by side to take a sip of her cumin tea. The spiced drink is utterly vile but important, the Palace cooks assure her, for decreasing flatulence in the infants that could be caused by her milk.
“Even your names,” she says to her little ones. Both have names that are approximations of great.
She is tired and growing haggard, and the days and dreams blur into each other. At night when she feeds the babies, she keeps a book by her side. It takes practice but she manages to read, though she cannot always concentrate.
They are bundled in the same swaddling material embroidered with gold – for Hamida Begum had decreed it so. They are bundled in the same auspicious fate, she is sure.
One day Jiji is visited by the leader of the Anagas.
“I believe in ambition,” Maham says, facing the window. “Overt ambition. Ambition that is more than an encouraging mother’s words of wisdom to her hyena sons who take all her strength, picking her like an elephant carcass. That is what is expected of us in the women’s quarters. It is frustrating, I know, to be limited such. So I do not blame you for trying to get ahead, my dear. But sorcery is not an acceptable weapon. It will impact the babies. You had better tell me now how you did it.”
“I did nothing,” Jiji says. Maham turns to face her.
“Oh, you must not be so modest. Think on it. There are ten women here, full of milk. There is no reason for an infant to refuse them. Perhaps,” she goes on. “It has to do with those books you pore over so unnaturally.”
Jiji glares. Most of the high born women here are learned in art or science. There is nothing improper in her love for books.
“Perhaps what you mean to say,” she says icily. “Is that my antecedents are less noble than my tastes.”
Maham holds up a hand heavy with rings.
“Evidently there has been tampering done due to magic. I do not know what the Padshah will say if I take this to him.”
The prince, too weak to support its neck, is gazing at Maham from his cradle. Jiji’s senses, always highly strung since the birth, pick up that something is wrong. It is his face, she realizes. A golden aura surrounds his face. The prince turns his head and regards Jiji.
The infant speaks.
“Do not worry,” he says to Jiji. “This fledgling will only drink of your milk, and none other’s.”
Jiji’s heart stills.
Maham lets out a strangled cry. For the first time Jiji sees her without her smile. Her fingers claw at her throat.
It is like a veil has been removed, a line has been crossed, between what needs to be believed to keep life running, and the awful, terrible reality that is its backbone. And the result was the stuff of nightmares.
Maham runs out of the room, grabbing the first person she sees to gabble out this story. Jiji cannot find it in her to feel a snide joy at this unraveling of the lady who was so good at keeping secrets.
“A messianic miracle!” The court poet says later. “The babe saw his beloved Anaga being accused, and he leapt to her aid! A miracle of God, what else?”
Humayun agrees in his earnest way – he spends most of his time in the company of soothsayers and diviners and astrologers. General Bairam Beg’s gaze flickers and the line of his jaw clenches to keep his rugged face expressionless. Other warriors exchange glances with each other. What do they really think, all of them? Of course they must think the women are making it up. And the women, they must think it is a clever ploy by Maham to further some nebulous political ambition. Maham keeps her face averted from Jiji. She takes care never to directly handle Akbar but to blow affectionate kisses from afar.
Only she and Maham know what truly happened.
***
But there is one more person who doesn’t believe her. She finds Shamsuddin looking down at her one day as she sleeps, exhausted from nursing two babies all the night.
“I’ve been trying to think,” her husband says, bending down to sit next to her, “why you would say such a thing. Why you would make up a lie to such a degree. Why would you say the prince could speak, and why you would put such words in his mouth? And I have only one thought: this is not the kind of lie you would tell. So tell me. Did the babe speak?”
She nods.
He lets out an exhalation between clenched teeth.
“So you are a sorceress.”
Jiji sits up in irritation.
“Why are you so furious when everything I have done has been to help you?”
For they have, between them, assured the position of their family at court. Shamsuddin had pulled his good fortune along with Humayun out of the Ganges. Though even that had been Jiji’s doing. And Jiji has become fast friends with the Padshah’s womenfolk, to the envy of the rest of the Anagas. And again, that is her doing, through her supplication to the Simurgh bird.
“Tell me about it,” he says.
So she does. Clumsily and slightly scattered. She is very sleepy, and her breasts are sore. But she tells the story, from start to finish.
“Well.” Shamsuddin says when she finishes. “That is certainly something.”
Jiji feels a flash of pride through her exhaustion.
Shamsuddin gets up and starts pacing the room. Planning.
“Of course, you will give the third feather to me.”
She freezes.
“After all, you have had two turns.” He puts his hands on his hips. “It’s not fair.”
This is all wrong. Through her grogginess she does not have the energy to explain why it is so, but it is wrong to give the feather to him. She cannot articulate it all to a man so pumped with energy and who is working on the strength of many nights of uninterrupted sleep. But the feathers, they are a contract between her and the Simurgh bird. They belong to her.
She swallows her anger. She knows her state would make even the tiniest thing flare up between them, and she simply does not have time for a raging argument. She can tell it’s almost time for one or both of the babies to wake up.
“Do you have a wish you would like to make?” she says lightly. “I can make it for you.”
He shakes his head. “You have done enough. Leave it to me. You have been using it for your womanly ambitions.” He laughs. “Honestly, trust a woman to wish for things related to the home. When she lives in a palace and associates with queens! You could have wished for…well, never mind.”
They have been married a long time now. Just as he could tell she had not been lying about the baby speaking, she can tell a few things about him. Climbing is his imperative. Ambition is coiled up within him, as is a nimble ruthlessness. She realizes, all of a sudden, he would never have rescued any fledglings. She remembers the snake in the jungle back in Ghazni, slithering away from mediocrity, waiting for the right moment to strike a precious victim.
Now that Shamsuddin is the right-hand man to the king, there is only one thing left to wish for.
To become king himself.
She has been immersed in baby smells and shares her cushions with two babies. Her rooms at night are occupied by royal lullaby singers. Girls employed to fan the prince in the heat in the afternoon. Masseuses to rub the prince’s limbs with garlic-infused mustard oil. Chefs dash in and out who make her special foods to increase her milk supply. She has not had a stretch of time to herself to think or to dream, to wish or to set on fire. She sees things through a curtain of weariness. What spare time she does have is spent sometimes feeling blurrily sorry for her own son, Aziz, as he watches his milk-brother’s largess in bewilderment. And if she gave away the last feather, hers by every right…what would become of her? With her sagging belly, unkempt hair, sore nipples, and lack of attention to herself?
“No,” she refuses him gently. She will keep the third feather. And he can tell her what he wishes for, surely? Why not tell her?
Shamsuddin stares at her as if seeing her for the first time.
“But why not?” she insists. Unless his wish is something, in part, that he is ashamed of?
They both stare at each other. She cannot help thinking of herself standing as a girl with a broken leg, one arm holding herself against a branch. And a snake looking intently at a baby bird.
Shamsuddin continues to be courteous to his wife when they do meet – they are both so busy in their unique roles at court that they barely see each other. They do not discuss the third feather again, which she keeps upon her person, but only speak of matters of the court, of Akbar and of Aziz who are growing up into strong, sturdy young men. Fourteen years later, long after she has finished with her duties, he visits to tell her Akbar’s reaction when he and Maham Anaga were sent to tell him of the Padshah’s death. How he cried inconsolably. How he had looked around, beyond their shoulders, as if seeking a third face. How, really, the courtiers should have sent her.
***
When Jiji burns the third feather years and years later, she does so in a crimson rage. Jasper, bloodstone, red dappled gray. The room fills with red smoke. She stares ahead of her. She does not try to decipher it. She wears white, as a widow must.
Her son and foster son are grown-up. Fathers themselves now.
She has had a pleasant, distant companionship with her husband. They were a powerful couple at court, and each drew status from the other person. The ties made by milk, Akbar would say, are the same as those made by blood. Akbar, so brilliant that his learning is admired throughout all the trading world, looked up to him, calling him father. Calling her mother. They would smile at him and at each other, as cool and powerful as the immovable red sandstone Agra Fort itself was built from. Shamsuddin still wore the same saffron and musk perfume but it would evoke nothing in her.
“Justice,” she says now to Akbar when he visits to give her condolences.
“Justice has already been assigned,” the young Padshah says patiently. His eyes are red rimmed. He has a glorious mustache and favors Hind’s fashions instead of the Turkic ones Humayun preferred. He is a son of this soil. Jiji remembers him running after elephants with Aziz and the other children. And Adham Khan, Maham Anaga’s son, watching them with a calculated, aggrieved look. She had once caught him talking to Aziz.
“Akbar is stupid,” he was saying. “He cannot even read though he has a thousand more tutors than you or me.”
She had dragged Aziz away and spoken to him sharply.
“Stay away from Adham Khan,” she had ordered. “He is trouble.”
Aziz had looked at her thoughtfully, before breaking away at Akbar’s call.
Akbar loved Aziz. Though for some reason, Jiji had noticed, Aziz could be cold to him. Leaving Akbar hurt and confused, but never abandoning him. He was always demanding Aziz watch him as he did some dread inducing acrobatics. Aziz always pointed his flaws out even when Akbar was surrounded by flatterers. Both loved the same books and studied under the same tutors. No wonder, Jiji had said instructing Aziz, boys like Adham were envious of his closeness. So be vigilant of him. She knew there was more to be envious of – Akbar and Aziz were both extraordinary when it came to knowledge. Any scrap of it that could be found, they would have it in their twin possession. She put this thought aside – it unsettled her as much as she liked it.
Yet the day would come, decades later, when Adham Khan’s jealousy of their family would manage to hurt them all.
“Justice has been assigned,” Jiji says slowly, “and I thank you for applying it with such swiftness.”
She hadn’t been there. And still whenever she’d see the illustrated manuscript of Akbar’s biography of the execution, she would hear Akbar’s wordless scream in the background. When Adham Khan’s men had raced towards Shamsuddin with swords unsheathed, the entire court had been aghast. Akbar strode out of the women’s quarters, bleary from his nap, before he understood that the lifeless body dripping blood was Shamsuddin’s. In the illustration Akbar stands above on the balcony, wild-eyed and strong jawed, restoring order. Bringing justice.
Yes, justice, in a sense, had been swift. Adham Khan had worn a sheepish look and had swaggered towards Akbar.
Akbar was known for his indulgence towards his milk-brothers, and Maham’s son was one of them. But Akbar had one hand over his heart, barely in control of his senses. And then he saw Adham Khan’s audacious, outstretched hand, in a gesture asking for mercy.
Akbar had straightened his back. His nostrils flared as they did when he was in one of his mad elephant rages.
“Throw him off the balcony,” he commanded.
That thump and sickening crack as the body slammed the sandstone floors. And again. Twice. Until he was quite dead.
Yes. What more could she ask for from Akbar? He had executed her husband’s murderer though it must have pained him to break Maham Anaga’s heart. For he was close to her too.
“You have done well,” Maham had whispered to Akbar, bowing in submission, grief stabbing her heart.
Akbar takes his leave. He embraces Jiji and they sobbed, consoling each other. When he leaves and the sound of the kettle-drums that follow him everywhere finally fades away, she shakes her head.
“Justice,” she repeats. Stern.
What does she mean? She is not sure. Really, it has nothing to do with her husband. What she wants is the years back. She wants herself. A self unfettered from so much pain. She wants memories of archery, of wild horse riding and wandering like Gulbadan has, who has traveled here and there and even to Mecca in Hijaz for the pilgrimage. She wants love with all its pleasures and none of its pain, like the concubines profess to filling their days with. She wants a motherhood like Hamida Begum’s, with all the joys regality can buy, and only some of the hard work. She wants to be an adventurer like the new Padshah’s wife, Maryam az-Zamani, owning a trading ship and commanding merchants.
She feels the ache in her aged bones, the place the river of milk sprang from all those years ago. Justice, she whispers, and the word flutters like the single shorn feather of a mythical bird.
So she burns the third feather, trusting it to know. She had been hoarding it all these years with the vague notion to use it for her son. But Aziz is a fine and intelligent man. He is best beloved of Akbar, and his good fortune is assured. Even when Akbar squabbles with Aziz, Akbar is still keen for his good favor. Timid, even. What more could a mother want for the son of her womb?
One day Jiji is coming back from her husband’s mausoleum, and she sees caravans returning from travels. Akbar’s son, Salim, has a penchant for trapping new animals and studying them. She sees a cage covered by a cloth and turns to it instinctively.
She cannot see what’s inside.
And yet, she knows what’s inside.
Salim has caught a new beast, she is told.
She cannot sleep, restless and thinking. Did she imagine the flash of gold from the cage?
Jiji goes out into the night, goes past various servants. An elderly woman, milk-mother to the Padshah in his infancy, has license to go anywhere. She creeps up to the cage and peers in.
A dull, gray shadow. It raises its head from under its wing, and there it is again. That moment. She sees herself old and new, her birth and death. Planets. Mountain peaks. A girl with a broken bone killing a snake. She reaches out to lift a wing, to see beneath it. The downy feathers wink gold – only for an instant. Then they turn gray. She inhales a sharp breath and looks at it again. That gap between normalcy and magic, what we see and reality. We are all deluded. Let it be so.
Salim is not very much like his father, but in one respect they are the same. They can rage like an unchecked fire, their anger a catastrophe for those it struck. If anything, Salim’s rage is even more untempered and adolescent.
He would be furious if he witnessed what Jiji was doing. Jiji opened the cage, and the bird stepped out. It nodded at her. Was that a smile? It turned its head and looked once inside the cage. She followed its gaze––there was something the color of blood inside there. She reached for it as the bird flew away.
Why would a creature like that let itself be captured? Her hand curled around a thing as round as an egg and as rough as a seed. A red jewel.
That night she dreamed with the jewel beneath her pillow. It smelled of gardens. She dreamed of her dead husband, and he showed her a tree, and in it sat the Simurgh bird who spoke to her, saying, “I will give you justice. And it will be good and terrible.” Then it nuzzled her and said. “Why did you not ask it of us before?”
When she awakens she knows what to do.
***
Here is Jiji, writing a letter before she leaves.
A forest. Any spot will do. Time will bend towards the sheer force of it and will do the work of hiding it.
She plants the jewel in the evening light among the trees. When she is done, she stands over it and weeps. She weeps for her aching breasts that paid for her rank in milk. She weeps for the end of milk-mothering, for the last embrace she ever gave her babies before they became too old. She weeps for the husband who had never felt whole enough as he was. She weeps for the young queen forced to leave her child to be brought up by others as she and his father fled from land to land. She weeps for the loneliness of Gulbadan. The concealed Simurgh. She weeps for her lost years.
She sheds her discontent with her tears. The seed is watered with both.
Her insides creak. They twist and change shape. She thinks of all there is to be known. All the secrets that are fruit of the trees of knowledge.
There is a tearing, like that of the womb, but of all her parts.
Her skin starts to slip.
***
Aziz Koka stops reading and frowns.
“What happens next?” Akbar prods him. “Go on.”
Aziz moves out of his reach.
“It ends here.”
Akbar’s face sinks.
“I will shave my mustache off in respect.”
Aziz remains expressionless.
“What? You doubt my grief?”
“No. Not at all.”
“What do you think happened?” Akbar asks.
“I think…” Aziz sighs. He almost thinks, but his mind skirts the thought with trained skill, of the doors of the zenana of his own house. The shared experience of the wives and mothers and sisters, their laughter and tears and furies he will ever be a stranger. He is no longer a boy who can cling to their skirts but has been ousted. Sent to hunt, and ride, and empire build on behalf of his milk-brother. The women know something he never will. It makes him feel small, so he leaves the thought, leaves the letter, and eventually leaves Akbar. Akbar grows old and successful, but also bitter, seeking from his sons something which he himself had as a boy. Never did he find it.
A mausoleum is built and a grave constructed. The tomb reads Jiji Anaga. Nobody witnesses the body being brought in. None can say they had been present at the washing. Yet there is the tomb, and there is her name, ordered written by a grieving Akbar.
In the forest there is a new tree. Almost a giant, whispering secrets. You will never come upon it. You will never smell its fruits.
A bird, golden feathers beneath its wings, bursts from this tree. Twisting and turning in the sun, it crosses the sky, garlanded by justice and knowledge. Disappearing into the horizon.