Free The Dancer and the Raja by Javier Moro Page A

girl and made her his empress … does it sound familiar?” Mme Dijon asks her wickedly. Anita smiles, thinking about the raja who is expecting her in a few hours’ time.
    â€œGo on, go on with the story …”
    â€œThe legend goes that one morning, in the palace bazaar, as soon as he saw her, he set his sights on her. She was very pretty, like a picture taken from a Persian miniature. She was sitting at her stall, surrounded by silks and beads for necklaces when the prince came up to her. He asked her how much a piece of cut glass that shone on a pile of jewelry cost. ‘This? … You don’t have enough money to pay for it! It’s a diamond,’ she told him. The legend says that Shah Jehan gave her ten thousand rupees there and then, which was an exorbitant amount, leaving the girl speechless. Perhaps it was her self-confidence or her beauty: something in her had captivated him. He courted her for months and finally got to marry her. He gave her the name Mumtaz Mahal, ‘Chosen one of the palace’…”
    â€œAnd … ?” Anita waits impatiently for the rest of the story.
    â€œWhat else do you want to know? She became his empress and his adviser. She won the hearts of the people because she always interceded for the poor. The poets said the moon hid for shame in the presence of the empress. He discussed all matters of state with her and, when official documents were finally written out, he sent them to the harem for her to put the royal stamp on them.”
    â€œTo the harem?” Anita asks, intrigued. “How could he have other women if he was so much in love with her?”
    â€œEmperors can have as many women as they like, but there is always one who steals their heart.”
    â€œAh!” The girl from Málaga sighs, as though that explanation served to exorcise her fears.
    â€œAfter nineteen years of marriage, she died when she gave birth to her fourteenth child. She was thirty-four years old. They say that for two years the emperor remained in strict mourning, not wearing any jewels or sumptuous clothes, not joining in any parties or banquets and not even listening to music. For him life no longer had any meaning. He gave control of his military campaigns to his sons and put his heart and soul into building that mausoleum to the memory of his wife. It’s called the Taj Mahal, an abbreviation of the name of the empress. They say that on her deathbed she had whispered to him the idea of erecting a monument to commemorate how happy they had been together. Now they are together still, in a crypt under the white dome.”
    It was still a paradox that the monument considered by the whole world as the supreme symbol of the love between a man and a woman had been designed and built by a man whose religion permitted him to share his love with several women. But as Anita now knew, love knows no frontier, or taboo, or race or religion.
    The emperor Shah Jehan found a little consolation in his other great passion, architecture. He was obsessed by building, as if having glimpsed how fleeting life is with his wife’s death, he also guessed how fragile his empire was. To counteract that, he spent his time raising monuments able to survive the storms of history.
    His yearning for eternity resulted in palaces, mosques, gardens, and mausoleums, which filled the cities in the north of India with glory and beauty. He changed the six-hundred-kilometer road that links Agra and Delhi and then Lahore, in the north, into a beautiful avenue bordered by trees. The railway follows that old road, worn down by the ups and downs of history. It is not so well looked after, and neither does it have as many trees as in the times of the Moghul Empire. But it is the great commercial route of India, the Grand Trunk Road, the one that Kipling made world famous in his novel Kim. At the entrance to the towns, long caravans form of oxcarts full of fruit, vegetables, and all