Wanderlust

Delhi is a giant human anthill. It must have taken at least two hours to get out of Delhi’s traffic-infested urban sprawl and onto the highway to the Taj. The road to Agra is flat and nondescript, a superhighway with fields on either side and a pollution-white sky. Agra kind of resembles its name: guttural, industrial, dirty, with hints of agriculture. It’s so polluted here that visibility is less than half a mile.

We spent a freezing cold night at a budget hotel and headed for the Taj early the next morning. The Taj was built by Mughal Emporer Shah Jahan in the mid-1600s as a tomb for his second wife, Mumtaz. Jahan was said to be so grief-stricken after her death–she perished while birthing their 14th child–that his hair went gray overnight. Around 20,000 people constructed the Taj, giving rise to the city of Agra. The Taj is constructed on a platform, so that the sky is its only backdrop. It’s touted as an edifice of purity and beauty; a wonder of the world, one of life’s must-sees.
Understandably, it’s also a tourist megahub. You pass through a line of aggressive peddlers to buy a ticket, check all your bags and food in a locker, and stand in line for a scan inside a metal detector. After you’re cleared, you join a throng of international tourists to the tomb itself. Indians mingle with Europeans, Japanese tour groups, Americans, and one-offs from all over the globe. It’s overrun, but you hope it’s worth it.

It is. Even with a hundred heads in view, even with the dense pollution, the gleaming white edifice of the Taj stops your heart for a split second. It’s an exact match to the Taj you picture in your imagination. On  glance, time itself stops until you blink and remember where you are. From a distance, it’s all gleaming purity; as you venture closer, you glimpse elaborate designs that appear inlaid with unmatched tenderness. The monument looms in its aching perfection, an immaculate testament to a fallen love and, later, a Mughal kingdom turned to ash. You want to walk up to it, but feel hesitant to touch it, because its architecture is fine enough to be just out of reach. It’s a building that you can enter, but can never truly access. The place has captured a soul and held it tenderly, like a child holds a butterfly. It’s even more exquisite with the contrast blocky, dry, blaring Agra surrounding it.

We took pictures for a while, then took a secret detour to the Taj’s mystical backside. The Taj is perfectly symmetrical from all four sides. Most people only see it from within the confines of its four official walls. However, if you walk north past the storage lockers on the east side of the grounds, past stone cutters and herds of goats, you access the wide and stagnant river that delineates the Taj’s rear perimeter. We hired a boat to take us across the river, then found a small boy with a camel to capture the Taj from a new angle. Seth worked his magic while the kid, who couldn’t have been older than nine, hustled us like the best of them. He grinned, posed, and flashed his pearly whites like a Bollywood stud. When it came time to pay, he gave us the professional lowdown on his profit distribution (care and maintenance of camel, food for self, board for camel, money for friend), and ended up making out pretty well.

After that, we loaded up on chai, pancakes, and porridge–the quintessential Indian tourist breakfast–and headed back to Delhi. Just a couple more days in Delhi before we leave for the great deserts of Rajasthan.