Khultabad - The Heavenly Abode

'I am blind,' says the youth, clasping my hand. His hooded eyes are vacant, but I sense an alertness in his grip and in the tilt of his face. We stand in an open courtyard under a blazing blue sky. I am sweltering; the youth looks unperturbed, as if his obscure vision brings with it a welcome oblivion to the heat.
'I am here to see the mausoleum of Aurangzeb,' I say.
'I will show you.'
Gingerly, he leads me to a smaller courtyard a short distance away; and it is here, in a small enclosure of latticed marble, that I find the final resting place of Aurangzeb Alamgir – Conqueror of the Universe – the last of the great Mughal Emperors.

Aurangzeb's austere piety as a Muslim ruler is renowned, but not always celebrated: in a vast Hindu realm, his return to a more fundamentalist faith and imposition of strict sharia law would alienate huge swathes of his subjects and lead to a series of rebellions which would sow the seeds of Mughal decline.

His simple tomb is today a place of pilgrimage. I find a man standing in silent prayer in a corner of the enclosure. A small shrub grows over the patch of bare earth where the Mughal Emperor is laid, and someone has scattered petals over the grave. On the far side, a small headstone inscribed in Persian reads, 'No marble sheets should shield me from the sky as I lie there one with the earth'. (The marble screens of the enclosure were erected much later by the Nizam of Hyderabad at the behest of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, who thought it unseemly that a great ruler should lie in so humble a plot. Aurangzeb himself had given orders for an unostentatious grave, which he funded not out of the royal treasury, but from selling skullcaps he had stitched and verses from Qur'an which he had copied.)

Behind the enclosure is the shrine of a Sufi saint, Hazrat Khawja Syed Zainuddin Shirazi, who was a spiritual mentor to Aurangzeb. Compared with Aurangzeb's unfussy open tomb, the shrine seems inordinately opulent. Suspended from the ceiling, in the middle of the edifice, is a puzzling series of ostrich eggs; the main relic - the Robe of the Prophet – is not on display today, but is safely stowed under lock and key.