Taj for Teej

Thank god for the rains. I just about couldn’t take anymore. The people. The mass of people – swarming and pressing fluidly up stairways and around columns – I feel like a drop of water in a surging sea of brown bodies.

The Taj – The ‘Mecca’ of India for foreigners and locals alike is barely visible through the sheets of monsoon rain yet the crowd still pushes blindly forward. Through the gray we push, soaked to the skin, but determined to catch a glimpse of the greatest monument to love the world has ever seen.

Built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1631, the world famous Taj Mahal (pr: tad’j ma’hell) is the resting place of his beloved second wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

A grand tomb of glowing white marble over simple red brick, it is said to shine like the sun.

Not today though.

It’s Teej, the Hindu Monsoon Festival, and despite Teej supposedly marking the end of the rainy season with the emergence of a small red bug from the wet soil, it is still pouring buckets of pani.

The female Hindu pilgrims, dressed in their finest gilded saris, have taken refuge from the rain under ornate marble-lattice jali’s, their painstakingly applied henna tattoos slowly fading in the wet.

This is a difficult time for the devoted Hindu wife. For many, Teej is a time of fasting, sometimes days at a time with no food or water. This penance to gods Shiva and Parvatti is said to bring marital bliss and the long lives of their husbands. So here they are, bedecked in their finest, chatting, waiting patiently on empty stomachs for the rain to stop.

While I’ve not known the Muslims and Hindus to agree on much in their tumultuous 1400yr past, they have apparently agreed to share a holiday. Teej has fallen on the Muslim festival of Eid, the end of Ramadan. This confluence of religious fervor from both sides has flooded many of the holy sites in India, and I just happened to pick today to come to the Taj.

I’ve arrived by train from Jaipur, transfered to the world’s most advanced, carbon-neutral, TukTuk, before finally finishing my long journey in a cush electric golf-cart. This whirlwind of eco-consciousness, a mandate by the city of Agra to reduce pollutants, has deposited me, $20 lighter, at the massive ‘Great Gate’.

The visual symmetry of the architecture draws the eye in, bringing a distant white pearl into sharp focus.

The crowd surges through the bottleneck. The familiar Indian crush, made more colorful and vibrant by the holiday finery. I struggle to maintain my composure against it.

Little old ladies pull my clothes, and step on my feet. I allow them past as best I can, but with the possibility of up to half a billion more behind them, I simply must make a break sometime.

With a final push, I’m through. The crowd parts slightly, descending two staircases to the garden, and there it is, in all it’s monsoon glory.

When you first get eyes on it, you don’t know yet if you’ve been had. It certainly looks like the postcards. But you’re still not convinced.

To a Mughal it was the height of architecture, and it’s perfect symmetry spoke to the Shah’s near divine talents for maintaining balance, yet to many a flashpacking Westerner the Taj is simply another box to check. So, should it be checked? Does it deserve to be the image in the mind’s eye of the world when it comes to the entirey this massive sub-continent?

The simple anwer is ‘Yes’ with a ‘but’.

Taken as a whole, it is unparalleled. It’s scope, beauty, and attention to painstaking detail is unrivaled in my eyes. That said, India is a fantastic place, full of sights and wonders beyond the imaginable – and vast. It’s vastness is eclipsed only by the myriad peoples and faiths that have sprung up around it. There is so much wonder in India, from the temple cities of Hampi, to the rock-cut caves of Ellora, is the Taj really the crown jewel? 

I’ll get my answer definitively an hour later, when the skys finally part.

For now though, the smooth marble veneer, shined and polished to an ivory white, is still a drab gray under the dark clouds of the monsoon.

I’ve applied my issued booties in order to join the long winding line of pilgrims waiting to enter the inner mausoleum, the sanctum sanctorum where the two lovers lie interred.

I’m at the back of the thousand-person queue, waiting patiently to enter, when suddenly an armed soldier approaches and begins shouting loudly in Hindi. A wave of panic, and my mind floods with all the ways I could have possibly upset the man with the gun.

I soon realize he is shouting at the crowd around me to part, which they do dutifully whilst still jostling to stay in shifting queue. The guard, a near giant of a man behind a huge handlebar moustache and rusting Kalashnikov, grabs me roughly by the arm and ushers me quickly through the crowd.

Pulled along in my silly cotton boots, we approach the main entrance to the massive mausoleum. The guard, slapping and pushing the attendees to the side with one hand, drags me swiftly behind with the other.

He deposits me at the doorway to with a curt nod and the hint of a smile behind the old chai-strainer. Reshouldering his rifle he eases back to his post, having just saved me hours in line. Perhaps this is the one perk of paying thirty-seven times the local admission, i’m not quite sure.

I enter the Taj itself at the head of procession of 500 Indians in a big column. We are allowed in to circle the stone sarcophagi three times, then are supposed to funnel out a different door.

For all it’s outside splendour the interior is a dimly lit, murky cave, replete with the oppressive smell of bird and bat droppings.

The twin sarcophagi, ornaments of the real crypt stories below, are ringed by marble-lace curtains, allowing pilgrims just enough space to peer in and maybe toss a coin through for luck.

Strangely, the entire space is lit by a single bare bulb. Hanging from the end of a long ratty cable, it bathes the intricate carvings and stone inlays in a cheap, dingy light.

My group begins to file out, but I decide to stay behind a moment, pressing myself against a wall. The next group has not been given the call to come in, so I am allowed a strange moment of peace. Any moment of quiet in India is a small victory, and I feel that stealing such a moment in this place, the marble heart of India, would be a win.

As I stood on my tiptoes peering at the coffins, I couldn’t help but try vainly to understand the man, Shah Jahan, and his love for his wife.

Arguably the greatest emperor at the greatest time in India’s history, he was a builder, a warrior, and by most accounts, a sound governor. Married many times for political reasons, his second wife, Mumtaz, bore him all his children, and was the sole recipient of his affections. It would be these unrelenting affections that would lead to her death during childbirth, her fourteenth pregnancy.

Making no small demands from her deathbed (‘oh, don’t make a big fuss’) she called on the distrught Shah to build her a tomb of unparalleled beauty – which he did, eventually, and at great cost.

Unfortunately, the Shah would see his work completed through the bars of a jail cell.

Deposed and imprisoned by his own son, he would have witnessed the crowning of her magnificent dome from the jali windows of the nearby Agra Fort.

His death during imprisonment may have felt like a liberation, freeing him from his opulent prison to be next to his wife.

The sudden echo of hundreds of stampeding feet on the marble floor rips me back, and soon I am swamped again. Awash in a sea of selfie snapping pilgrims, I quickly make my way out into the now brilliant sun.

As I begin to consider leaving, I couldn’t help but be drawn back to the question, was it all worth it? Were the packed train, and the touts, and the overpriced everything, worth the experience?

It depends.

If you look at traveling life like a spreadsheet, moving variables, adjusting the profit of adventure against the loss of time and capital, then no. There’s simply no adventure to be had. It’s simply a very pretty building.

If you look at travel as checking worldly boxes, then this is a box that must be checked, even if you only do it as an alternative profile pic to the one of you eating that giant sandwich. Visiting the Taj is as requisite of a trip to India as a blurry snap of the Mona Lisa or tossing a coin into the Trevi fountain – it’s what you do.

That said, if you travel to understand, to truly understand, rather than simply ‘do’, then this is simply a first step, a toe in the water of a very deep lake.

The future of India lies in it’s veneration of it’s past while trying not to be hindered by it.

It is the travelers duty to try, even if it is ultimately in vain, to comprehend that past.

Sone measure of understanding comes from simply watching.

Young, middle class families, cleanly pressed and shined, have all come to look proudly at the work of their not too distant ancestors, and pay their respects to the enduring love story of their people.

Reminding their children that they are part of a great lineage, and at the same time hoping to understand their own country a little better.