Taj - Agra day trip

6am wake up call, the driver was downstairs waiting, we were off by 6:20, the roads were very crowded already. Faridabad is the first crush we hit leaving the south of Delhi, Palwal the next. So we're on the National Hiway #2, and your thinking like an interstate (at least I was) we'll fly down the 200 km's in an hour and a half or two... but in India things are different. First, while it is a 2 (marked) lane highway each direction, divided in most places, with a wide shoulder, there are no speed signs, and cars share the road with... trucks, buses, tractors, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians, bike rickshaws, oxcarts, camels, cows, horses, goats, children on their way to school... you name it.
As we get out of the big city and into the villages, each one a crossroads.. there are lines of people waiting to cross, in a few of the places there were police directing traffic, a couple had traffic signals, and then the rest of them were the most confusing choreography you ever saw. A group of motorcycles & bicycles, followed by cars, buses, pedestrians, and what have you (50-500 people in all) will inch out until they have pretty much blocked both lanes, then they get to the center and inch into the other side and have the whole road blocked... traffic on the thoroughfare honk wildly and press forward as close as possible, motorcycles take advantage and go around every other thing to get at the front of the pack... then, the hiway traffic breaks through and resumes again. This happens a few dozen times on the way down.
At Mathura there's a big Krishna festival going on, maybe 50 or 100 thousand people are lining both sides of the road for miles, tent/tarp shelters are pitched, apparently it's a multi-day festival... here the local police of whoever rolls some portable metal walls out onto the highway and the festival goers criss cross a while, then the walls are removed and we're rolling aqain... most times you are stopped there are beggar children and street vendors tapping on your window doing whatever they can to get your attention and give them money. We handed out some food to a one-legged beggar kid at one stop, he had been pointing to his mouth so vigorously and Kuldeep said no don't give them money that will go to someone else... well, the kid shows it to his two sisters and they through it on the ground like it was a snake! So much for that theory.

About 4 hours later we roll into Agra and pick up the tour guide Kuldeep has arranged for our tours of the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, lunch, and the market.

The Taj does not dissapoint, despite the 750 rupee charge for foreigners to get in, the tickets say 500 but you can't question the authorities selling the tickets... india residents pay 20 rupees, with discounts for children, elderly, disabled, etc.
We take a bicycle rickshaw down the hill, to get past the gauntlet of hawkers, beggers, touts, and others that come at you what seems like 2 per second... we get to the bottom and the rickshaw drivers are trying to get more than the 20 rupees you agreed to, for a short ride downhill, and no they don't have or make any change if you only have 50's or 100's. We finally get in, but then the picture takers are hawking you... and we did purchase a few pics.

Having been to Humayuns tomb in Delhi a few days ago we're struck by the similarity between the outer gates, east, west, north, aligned with the points of the calendar, and the gardens and fountains laid out symmetrically along the ew and ns axises(?). Of course here there are only the three, as the south is bordered by the river Yamuna. The fountains are not on today, the reflecting pools reflect the white marble and sky behind it beautifully. We snap a few shots midway, where there is a raised platform, everything in the site is balanced in 2 parts. 12 architects from Iran Then we are walking up, and there is an optical illusion of the 2 small domes along the front, the one on the right appears to be closer, way closer, but as we get closer, we see they are perfectly even. The little white wall, the plynth the monument sits on, is about 35 feet high. All is white marble, the craftsman, 20,000 of them, imported from Iran, worked for 20 years carving, detailing, inlaying semi-precious stones. We go up the stairs, the details astound. Arabic writing framing the main archway, is larger at the top than the bottom, so from the bottom it all appears to be exactly the same size.

We are given white covers for our shoes, you don't have to take them off anymore, though there is a shoe check...

Up the stairs to the level of the main floor, it's unbelievable as you get closer how much detailing there is... the inlay's of lapis lazuli, garnet, jade, onyx, carved marble flowers, screens in every opening, door entries, running all around at the base the flower panels, edged with cirles, the corners with inlaid onyx v's to give an illusion of the marble itself having a v shape... until you are directly below it and see it is perfectly flat.

All perfectly proportioned, each of the 4 minarets equal distance apart, same exact height, as are the two domes, and each of the 4 arched doorways. The structure is an octagon, 4 sides, 4 corners, all precisely the same, oriented to the compass. The front entry faces north, along the north/south axis, as do the fountains centered in the reflecting pools, in the center of the gardens. At the entry, we stop to see how the stones glow under a flashlight, how the marble is translucent when backlit. It's India marble, very hard, 20,000 Iranian workers spent 20 years building it, and today their families are still there plying the trade. When they finished the work, they were given an option of returning to Iran, without hands, or staying in India with. They all chose to stay. They were imported because they were the most skilled stone workers in the world at that time.

We go inside, and the tomb chamber is centered under the dome, which reaches a height of exactly twice that of the arched entryways. The gold spire on top the dome had been solid gold, before the british claimed it, and other precious stones from the site. The main floor is a replica tomb, the real burial chamber is directly below, the architect did this so that the floor above the resting place would never be walked upon. All is screened with white marble, each section carved from a single block of marble. Mumtaz is exactly centered, on the north south axis, her head pointing north, slightly turned to the west, toward Mecca. Shah Jahan lies to the side, he was added to the site by his son Aurengzeb, who deposed, then imprisoned him, in a tower looking to the Taj Mahal, until his death.
We go out the south exit , a large plaza of white marble, overlooking the sacred Yamuna river. It will join the holiest Ganges a few hundred kilometers to the southeast. Today it is very hot and hazy, and the river is filled with water buffalo. Directly across the river, centered on the Taj north/south axis , is a marker, and some foundation work, where Shah Jahan intended his tomb, a mirror image of the Taj, in black marble, to be. The site work sits as it had been started…. Never to be finished.
We slowly make our way back toward the front, stopping to sit on one of the ledges in each of the corner pieces, on the cool white marble in the shade. It is a sweltering day under a strong Indian sun, well past 100 in temperature. We linger, running our fingers over the flowered screens, feeling the curves and edges of the leaves, hard to imagine they’ve survived 350 years in such excellent condition.
Finally, slowly, we make our way down the stairs, and down the long east promenade through the garden, thankful for the cooling shade and greenery all around. A monument to love, and a structure of such perfection, it can never be surpassed.
We go to the marble artisans workplace and see them working as their forebearers did, creating items of incredible lasting beauty by painstaking, difficult physical labor, turning the stone grinders by hand, carving the marble with hand chisels, grinding the semi-precious stones to the exact size of the scribes in the stone.
After a spicy vegetarian lunch in a long established, cool restaurant, we drive slowly past the Red Fort on the way out of town… it’s too hot an afternoon for the several hours it will take to see the Fort properly, but we see the massive structure in red sandstone with white detailing. Aurengzeb’s huge bed chambers high atop the fort, near to the white marble tower where Shah Jahan was imprisoned and died, overlooking the Taj from a mile away. The Yamuna was diverted to fill a double moat in the days of the fort, one to keep out the lions and tigers that prowled the area, the other filled with river crocodiles, to keep out anyone else. I align myself with the tower and face the Taj and snap a picture, and think of Shah Jahan looking there, to the monument of love he made for Mumtaz.
The ride back was much as the way there, differing that now the children and their buses and the oxcarts and camels and Krishna worshippers and cyclists were heading back the other way. We saw great grey clouds that promised rain, but contained only dust and wind. A huge duststorm came up, as it does before the monsoons start, bring sand from the Thar desert to the west. We saw great drops of rain tease for about 2 minutes, but not enough the dampen the dusty roadsides. No rain for at least another 10 days, the paper says. We are again back into the crush at Faridibad, it takes over an hour to get the rest of the way to our hotel in south Delhi’s East of Kailash sector. We had quite a day, and the heat and sunburn and long time in the little Tata subcompact made a body feel good and tired. After a shower and laying down to rest, the memory of the feel of the cool white marble of the Taj somehow made the tiredness seem a fit ending to a perfect day.