The Taj Mahal

  It was no accident that we went straight to Mcleod Ganj and stayed put for five weeks. Transportation in India is more terrifying by far than its Chinese counterpart. And that's saying something. The day we traveled to Agra, we received a crash course in all the things we'd missed out on thus far. The inside of our sleeper car on the train looked a lot like my dad's old grey van—it even had huge, dusty fans attached to the ceiling, maybe 6 inches from our bunks, so I was able to share with Jason the story of how my sisters and I always got our hair caught in the van's rotating fans on long road trips. Throughout the 6-hour trip, children hopped on to try to sell things, or to sing songs for money.

 

In Agra, we had to negotiate with rickshaw after rickshaw to get to the bus station. Then, successfully not getting ripped off too badly, realizing we weren't at the correct station, we had to negotiate all over again. Some guy tried to push an offer to drive us there in his private car for nearly $80, to which I finally responded, exasperated, "Look, I know you see our white skin and think we're rich, but I honestly do not even have that much money in my wallet right now." We arrived at a bug-infested hotel near the Taj Mahal around 11 p.m., crashed until 5, and then rose to see the Taj before the crowds.

 

Like the Golden Temple, the Taj Mahal is so picturesque as to be cliché. What can I tell you about it that you haven't seen in elementary school history books? It's big, it's beautiful, and when you think about the fact that the whole thing is one great big tombstone, it really puts cremation in perspective. The space inside is really austere, just marble floor to ceiling, and a wall around the two tombs—one slightly higher than the other—ornately decorated with carvings and intricately painted flowers. In an empty side chamber, I broke the no camera rule to capture a bat sleeping peacefully in a corner.

 

There are gardens to walk through all around the main mausoleum, but I hated to turn my back on the shining mass of marble in the perfect, post-thunderstorm morning light. As the sky turned from purple to crisp, clear blue, I wanted to walk backward away from it to lock it in my memory. I worry that my brain will file this perfect image as something it saw in a book, and the memory of really standing there in awe of the whole thing will fade.

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