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namaskar —the salutation to the sun. Even as he performed the motions of his exercise, some four hundred miles away, Empress Mumtaz Mahal went to meet her death. Raja Jai Singh dreamed desultorily of a small chattri to cover his ashes when he died, here by the banks of the river, the jalis of the chattri filtering the cool breezes from the Yamuna. But it was not to be, for his Emperor wanted his land and his mansion for a loftier purpose—to house the remains of his beloved wife at Agra.
    Jai Singh did not know then that his haveli would be demolished before the year was out, and in its place would rise a Luminous Tomb.



Three
    Even though the Incomparable Giver had conferred on us such great bounty, more than which cannot be imagined, through His grace and generosity, yet the person with whom we wanted to enjoy it has gone.
    —From the Padshah Nama of Amina Qazwini, in W. E. BEGLEY AND Z. A. DESAI , Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb
    Burhanpur
    Tuesday, June 23, 1631
    24 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1040
    T he days wasted themselves in Burhanpur, in a daze, slowly moving into night and returning again. The town heard the gurgle of the ghariyalis’ vessels filling with water to measure time, heard the men strike the brass disk hanging above their heads to announce the ends of the watches, saw light turn into darkness, but it was for all of them with a sense of unreality.
    The shops in the main bazaar street were open, awnings held up on vertical poles to shelter from the sun, but business was not as usual. If money changed hands at all—for flour and rice, vegetables, copper pots, gold and silver—it was with a reluctance, as one hand hesitated in handing over the coins, the other grabbed a little too greedily at the first income of the past week. Even after their purchases, customers tarried outside the shops, trying to make conversation that did not sound stilted. They talked of the weather (it was hot, fiercely so), about the lack of dependable rain (and again about the weather), about the Emperor’s presence here at Burhanpur (such a blessing to them all). But of the death of Mumtaz Mahal they could not speak, struck dumb. The men in the streets, the few veiled women of a higher class who strayed for goods, the more common women who wandered with their heads bare to the gazes of all; they had none of them seen their Empress, but news from the fort palace that loomed over the bazaar seeped into every corner. And what they heard most of was their Emperor’s grief at this lady’s death. A day after she had died, after she had been buried on that small island in Zainabad Bagh, in the center of the Bagh’s pond, they heard that their Emperor had died also.
    At that news, the shopkeepers pulled wooden shutters over their storefronts, locked them securely, and crept into their houses behind the shops as a mob of young men racketed through the street, shouting profanities and wrecking anything they could find. Three hours later, the dust settled only when the Ahadis, the Emperor’s personal bodyguards, thundered through the street on their horses, swords drawn to slice down a head here, an arm there. The rebellion—if it could be called that—of the miscreants ended then, as abruptly as it had begun. Burhanpur settled into a state of long-drawn-out waiting accompanied by a hush, a silence, a burgeoning fear.
    Outside the fort at Burhanpur, the highest amirs of the Empire waited also, day and night. It was customary for the nobles to take turns of a week or more in guarding their sovereign—they would arrange themselves and their retinues in the courtyard just beyond the guard of the Ahadis, set up their sleeping and cooking tents, array their men in semicircular bands around the palaces and on the banks of the Tapti. But since Mumtaz had died, all the nobles in Burhanpur, most of them normally present at court, found themselves crowded in the courtyard. When night fell, small fires sprang to life, over which meats were