She is all of eight years old - and wholly unaware of the great price she and her family will pay for this dream.

One day, she decides with uncompromising surety, she too will become Salim's wife. In that instant, even as a royal gala swirls around her in celebration of the future emperor's first marriage, Mehrunnisa foresees the path of her own destiny. Mehrunnisa first encounters young Prince Salim on his wedding day. Growing up on the fringes of Emperor Akbar's opulent palace grounds, Mehrunnisa blossoms into a sapphire-eyed child blessed with a precocious intelligence, luminous beauty, and a powerful ambition far surpassing the bounds of her family's station. She is called Mehrunnisa, the Sun of Women. As the daughter of starving refugees fleeing violent persecution in Persia, her fateful birth in a roadside tent sparked a miraculous reversal of family fortune, culminating in her father's introduction to the court of Emperor Akbar. She came into the world in the year 1577, to the howling accompaniment of a ferocious winter storm. Lush and romantic, The Feast of Roses is the tale of this power and love.'.An enchanting seventeenth-century epic of grand passion and adventure, this debut novel tells the captivating story of one of India's most legendary and controversial empresses - a woman whose brilliance and determination trumped myriad obstacles, and whose love shaped the course of the Mughal empire. But she never loses the love of the man who bestows this power upon her-Emperor Jahangir. She demonstrates great strength of character and cunning to get what she wants, sometimes at the cost of personal sorrow when she almost loses her daughter's love.

She combats all her rivals by forming a junta of sorts with three men she can rely on-her father, her brother and Jahangir's son Prince Khurram. Mehrunnisa fits none of the established norms of womanhood in seventeenth-century India. Beyond the harem walls, she battles powerful ministers who consider her a mere woman who cannot have a voice in the outside world. She has a formidable rival in the imperial harem, empress Jagat Gosini, who has plotted against Mehrunnisa from early on. But power and wealth do not come easily to Mehrunnisa-she has to fight for them. He loves her so deeply that he eventually transfers his powers of sovereignty to her. Mehrunnisa, the first woman Jahangir marries for love, is now empress Nur Jahan. 'The love story of Emperor Jahangir and Mehrunnisa, begun in The Twentieth Wife, continues in The Feast of Roses.

The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan