In 1548 Humāyūn entered upon a campaign in Badakh-
For this historic feast Gul-badan has provided a hors d'œuvre in shape of a story of improper conduct in Sulaimān which, if it expressed derision, as her vague wording does not forbid to be read, was fully justified by both what had been and what was to come. It is a very funny little tale, and readers are commended to it.
To tears and professions were added lands and freedom. Kāmrān received Kūlāb, where Ḥaram Begam's father had once ruled for Bābar and Humāyūn. He was now dead, and his son, Chakr 'Alī, was left with Kāmrān there. The mīrza was not pleased with his fief. ‘What!’ he exclaimed to the bearer of the deed of grant, ‘have I not been king of Kābul and Badakhshān? Kūlāb is a mere district of Badakhshān. How can I serve in it?’ The bearer observed that he had heard Kāmrān was wise, and begged permission to remind him that the wonder was he had received anything at all. 'Askarī, too, was given a fief, and then, leaving them neighbours and at large, Humāyūn went back to Kābul in October, 1548.
A campaign was planned for 1549 against the Uzbegs and Balkh. This was done despite marked instability in the royal following. Instability or, in a plainer word, desertion, was an accident to which Humāyūn was peculiarly liable. One cause of it is more interesting than the common one of personal gain, because it is rooted in theological bias. Humāyūn's coquetry with Shiism in Persia is one of the most entertaining of the episodes of his sojourn there, and it had consequences in arousing distrust of him, which cropped up from time to time. Bābar himself had lost ground because of his tolerance to variety of faith. But to this, both in the father and still more in the son, were added, as causes of desertion, the flux and reflux of weak government which forbid men to know who will keep the upper hand and have power to oppress.
To return to the Balkh campaign: spring was waited for and there was delay for men. Spring came, and the minds of the ladies turned to thoughts of excursions out of town. They remarked more than once to Humāyūn that the riwāj would be coming up in the hills. This is a plant of subacid flavour which some say is like sorrel and some like rhubarb. It was, at least, a plant that people made excursions to eat, much as others go blackberrying. To these hints for change, the royal reply was that the army was going out; that it would pass by the Koh-idāman (which is renowned for its riwāj); and that the ladies should go too. Gul-badan must not be deprived of her story of the picnic, which illuminates the domestic ways of the court. The ladies went so far as to see the waterfall at Farza, and perhaps even to Istālif, twenty miles north of Kābul, and then returned.
There had been bad omens for the start and there followed plenty of bad news from the front to fix attention on them. Kāmrān broke his promise to come to Humāyūn's help. Gul-chihra's second husband, an Uzbeg prince, ran away when he came to know that the army was directed against his people. There was an extraordinary retreat without an enemy, and of which the cause seems to have been fear that, as Kāmrān was not there, he was oppressing Kābul. Humāyūn was left almost alone, and the Uzbegs attacked and killed many fugitives. His horse was wounded and the whole affair was a fiasco. After all, too, when Kābul was reached, there had been no sign of Kāmrān.
It was the expected that Kāmrān should not keep his word, but perhaps the unexpected was behind his conduct on the occasion of the Balkh campaign. Sulaimān and Ibrāhīm were with Humāyūn, and their presence might well have kept him away, for Gul-badan tells of an incident in which the three men had part and which did not make them good company for one another. It is a bit of scandal to which Ḥaram adds salt and vitality. It is repeated here because some little points do not quite stand clear in the begam's wording. While Kāmrān was in Kūlāb—i.e., his last holding,—someone, who from her name of Tarkhān Begam must have been a woman of good birth, advised him to make love to Ḥaram Begam. Good, she said, would come of it. So Kāmrān sent a go-between with a letter and a kerchief to Ḥaram, who, furiously angry, at once summoned husband and son from wherever they were away from home, and told them of the advances made to her. She railed at Sulaimān, saying that it was clear he was thought a coward, and further observed that Kāmrān feared neither her nor her son. Much was packed in the pronoun here; there was ground to fear the energetic and resolute woman who had the army of Badakhshān at her disposal. She was a forceful person and had the go-between torn to pieces. Kāmrān was audacious, and his advances look the more so that Ḥaram's sister was his wife; but they may have been made rather to the charms of her army than to those of its commandante.
The events of 1550 sum up in Jauhar's words: ‘Mīrzā Kāmrān wandered about the country with bad intentions.’ In his course he surprised Humāyūn in the Qibchāq defile, and an engagement took place which was attended by great loss of life. It was witnessed by Kāmrān's wives and daughters from a commanding height. Bāyazīd mentions that the ladies wore turbans (dastār-bastī), a detail which may have been suggested by the great heat of the weather. Why the women were on the scene is perhaps explained by a similar record in the Memoirs which concerns a wife of Sulān Ḥusain Bāyqrā. Shahr-bānū, a daughter of Sulān Abū-sa'īd Mīrzā, was, with Ḥusain's other wives, present at a battle between her husband and her brother, Maḥmūd Mīrzā. She did not, as the other ladies did, leave her litter and mount a horse, so as to be ready for flight if necessary, but trusting to her brother, in the case of her husband's defeat, remained comfortably in her litter while the fight went on. This dispassionate composure so much offended Ḥusain that he divorced her. Perhaps Kāmrān's family, too, had prepared for whatever was to be their fate by protecting themselves against the sun and by being ready to mount.