What now sorrowed us most was the treacherous path taken by the progeny of our own loins. Mohammad Sultan had earlier blackened his face by joining his uncle Shuja against us, and now Akbar went over to the infidels. Azam, to whom we had given Dara’s daughter as wife, turned out to be a worthless braggart. We had to put him in prison for a year to keep him away from wine and to teach him to govern his temper. Our youngest, Kam Baksh, had neither ambition nor competence, but of all the slights that our children had aimed at us, none hurt us more than the conduct of our gifted daughter Zebu-un-Nissa to whom Allah had given the gift of poetry (she composed verse under the pseudonym ‘Makfhi’). She encouraged her brother Akbar to carry on treasonable conduct against us and with a heavy heart we were constrained to order her to be detained in Salimgarh fort. She aimed her last barbed shaft at us:

I have experienced such cruelty and harshness in this land of Hind,

I shall go and make myself a home in some other country.

Saying which she went to the land of the dead.

We had reposed faith in our eldest-born, Muazzam. Even he betrayed our trust during our victorious campaigns against Bijapur and Golconda by treating with the enemy. We did not let our affection stand in the way of justice and had him put in prison and forbade him to either cut his hair or pare his nails or drink anything except water. We kept him in confinement for seven full years.

Came the summer of 1705. As we camped in village Devpur, on the banks of the river Krishna, a severe fever seized us. In our delirium we recited a quatrain of Shaikh Ganja:

When you have counted eighty years and more,
Time and Fate will batter at your door;
But if you should survive to be a hundred,
Your life will be death to the very core.

A nobleman attending our sickbed added the last lines:

In such a state lift up your heart: remember

The thought of God lights up a dying ember.

We had little will to tarry longer in the world and the succession of fevers that ravaged us confirmed our hope that before long Allah would summon us. In one of these feverish bouts we composed another couplet:

A moment, a minute, a breath can deform,

And the shape of the world assumes a new form.