It was a sweltering weekend in June. The mercury was flitting above 40ºC when two happily married men decided to ditch their wives and spend the weekend together at the Taj Mahal, the world’s greatest monument of love. Personally, I didn’t mind the homosexual undertones of our trip. After all, I was going to see man’s greatest erection for a woman in all its glory. I was just praying the Oberoi hotel had a room with twin beds!
I had postponed this trip before due to terrorism alerts and my own attacks of procrastination, but I was running out of excuses, and my friend was not going to be stationed in Delhi much longer. So I bought my plane ticket and left him to plan our entire trip.
Two days before I was to depart for India, it suddenly dawned on me that I had forgotten to apply for a visa. While Singaporeans are eligible to apply for visas on arrival in India, I had read about an unfortunate Kiwi couple’s three-hour ordeal to get their visa through this channel and was determined not to suffer the same fate. I decided to seek out a travel agent in Little India early the next morning to process the visa on my behalf.
“How can I help you?” asked the man behind the counter. I explained that I needed a visa by 5pm the next day as my flight was departing at 7pm.
“Impossible!” he declared in a thick Indian accent, his head swaying emphatically from left to right. “We can have it ready for you by 8pm tomorrow.”
“But my flight leaves at 7pm!” I protested.
“Maybe if we rush, we can have it for you at 7pm tomorrow,” was his calm reply.
I sighed and suppressed an eye roll. “Isn’t there an express service that I can pay for?”
“No, no. No express service here. If you want express, you go embassy. We are not allowed to do express here.”
So off to the embassy I went, where I discovered that the exorbitant fee for an express visa made the potential three-hour wait at Delhi airport more than worthwhile. I braced myself for the worst when the flight touched down, but all it took was just ten minutes for me to get the all-important stamp on my passport. The immigration officials were even nice enough to give me a few more days on my visa, “just in case”. I tried not to imagine what “just in case” could mean. This was India after all, and I was prepared for all contingencies, especially with my bulging medical pouch. But as it turns out, there was just one tiny unimportant thing I had forgotten to do before leaving Singapore… purchase travel insurance!
I spent the next day wandering around the crowded streets and alleyways of Old Delhi with a guide, dodging bullock carts, tuk tuks and overly friendly rickshaw drivers. I had set out early to try and beat the heat, but by ten in the morning, the temperature was absolutely oppressive. By lunchtime, I was back in the air-conditioned comfort of my friend’s apartment, emptying his refrigerator of chilled mineral water.
The next morning, just after sunrise, we set off on our journey to the great symbol of love, but not before spending the first 15 minutes swatting the resident mosquitoes in the car. With the score tied at five kills each, we soon reached a road currently under various states of construction, but that didn’t seem to deter our driver, Jumaan, from keeping his feet plastered to the accelerator and from overtaking every motorcycle, scooter, truck, lorry, tuk tuk and the odd wandering cow. Like a man possessed (or in dire need of a toilet), he set out to break the land speed record between Delhi and Agra. We considered fastening our seat belts, but the buckles were stashed below the cloth covering for the rear seats, and Jumaan wasn’t wearing his either. Twice, we heard the undercarriage scrape the uneven road surface, and we lost count of the number of near accidents we were almost involved in.
We reached a paved highway after about an hour of being flung around in the back seat. Jumaan continued streaking past the other motorists, pressing his horn with glee, when he suddenly jammed hard on his brakes to avoid a tuk tuk that had made an abrupt turn. I flew right into the back of his seat and my friend’s head smacked into the plastic air conditioning vents just below the car roof.
“Jumaan! Seat belts! Now!”
After the near collision, Jumaan slowed down a little, but only marginally. We were close to the edge of the border between Haryana and Uttar Pradesh when I decided it was time to whip out my iPod and mini speakers. I selected the classic Queen anthem Bohemian Rhapsody, but I didn’t get to listen to the original version. Instead, it was an Indian remix — with a car horn every few seconds, the Bollywood ringtone of Jumaan’s cellphone and a chorus of Hindi narrative (Jumaan’s incessant chatting with his family and friends).
The track went something like this: “Bismillah! *horn* We will not let you go *horn horn* (Let him go!) Bismillah! *Hello?* We will not let you go *horn horn horn* *huh, huh, tee kay* (Let me go!) Will not let you go *horn horn* (Let me go!) Will not let you go (Let me go!) Ah no no no no no no no *huh, aachaa*…” Freddie Mercury was most certainly rolling in his grave!
When we finally reached the border, we stopped for about ten minutes as Jumaan left the car to get a permit for Uttar Pradesh. Touts were hard-selling their wares. Hostage monkeys on leashes clambered all over the parked cars, performing tricks while their owners demanded money for photos taken. Beggars were also knocking on the windows, some of them severely crippled. It was a distressing experience but there was no way we were going to open the window or get out of the car and risk being harassed. I was especially glad when Jumaan returned, and we left the border and continued our journey towards Agra. This was not my first brush with poverty, belligerent touts or animal handlers, nor was it my first time to India. I had come to India fully expecting to be lifted out of my comfort zone, but all these elements lumped together in a short few minutes was really quite overwhelming.
We continued towards Agra, past several crowded roadside markets, awed at the highway spectacle around us. Colourful saris fluttered in the wind. Tuk tuks designed for three passengers somehow managed to carry up to 15 people at a time — seated on both sides of the driver, behind his back, clinging on to the metal frame behind, and even sprawled across the roof of the vehicle with nothing to hang on to but each other. Brightly decorated freight trucks were grossly overloaded with cargo, their canvas sheets bulging at the sides, and motorbikes carried as many as four passengers, with everybody’s nether regions locked in an erotic embrace that would make a porn star blush.
We finally arrived at our hotel in Agra at around 11am after making a short stop at the tomb of Akbar the Great, the grandfather of Shah Jahan, the Mughal Emperor responsible for building the Taj. To our rather visible relief, we were given a room with twin beds which afforded a slightly obscured view of the Taj, but a view nonetheless.
That afternoon, we first visited Agra Fort, where Shah Jahan spent the last eight years of his life imprisoned in a beautiful room that framed the Taj in all its glory from a distance. He would peer out of its windows every day, dreaming of the day that he would be reconciled with his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, the love of his life and the woman who gave the Taj Mahal its purpose. She had died during the birth of their 14th child and Shah Jahan had spared no expense to build the Taj as a resting place for her remains. Legend has it that his subsequent imprisonment by his son in Agra Fort was due to the son’s discovery that Shah Jahan was a royal spendthrift and was planning to spend the empire’s remaining fortune on a black marbled version of the Taj on the opposite side of the river for his own remains, thus potentially bankrupting the empire and leaving it vulnerable and susceptible to attack.
As a showpiece, Agra Fort has been well preserved, with its imposing walls and defences fully intact and its rooms still haunted by the ghosts of its former occupants. These days though, the Fort’s defences are helpless against the charge of the tourist brigade, and it is overrun every day by hordes of these invaders.
Running parallel to the Eastern walls of the Taj compound is a road leading to the River Yamuna just behind the Taj, where we headed to at sundown. We had heard about a lone boatman with a monopolistic licence to bring tourists on a slow boat ride along the river. Such a tour would provide us with a beautiful view of the Taj from the back, and we would be able to capture images that would stand out from the millions of clichéd photos that have been taken within the monument’s compounds.
Oddly, for a man with a monopoly, he still allowed us to bargain for our boat ride, which made me think of a business proposition: Purchase the boat from him for what would initially seem like an exorbitant amount, promote the boatman to captain of the vessel, give the vessel a catchy name like the Tajtanic, and set up a fixed-price ticket booth at the end of the road. Implement a website offering advance payment options for Visa, MasterCard and American Express at a five percent early bird discount with no cancellation options. Then as the money rolls in, quit your day job and enjoy the good life.
Business propositions aside, the boat ride was worth every rupee paid and more. Despite the total absence of life jackets or a safety briefing, we hopped onto the boat and soaked in the serenity and tranquility as the boatman punted us towards the other riverbank. A flock of white cranes was feeding in the water, and we spotted eagles circling the dome of the main mausoleum. As we approached our destination, our view of the Taj became one of stunning symmetry, majestically mirrored in the waters of the Yamuna River and testament to the vision of the ancient engineers who built the monument.
By the time we returned to our boarding point, a queue of tourists had begun to form. We paid our dues and walked back towards the pickup point for our transport back to the hotel, but had to fend off an aggressive army of teenage touts. For well-educated teens who spoke good English, they did not seem to possess the word “no” in their vocabulary, nor the skills to drive a good sale. One merely has to act disinterested, smile a little and keep shaking your head to witness the implosion as the prices of fridge magnets and snow globes go from exorbitant to dirt cheap in less than a minute.
Early the next morning, we entered the compounds of the Taj through the Eastern entrance, determined to beat the heat and the crowds. A small group of tourists had already gathered at the main gate and were stopping to take pictures, but we hurried forward to the central fountains to take close-ups of the Taj. As we were ahead of the pack at the main gate, our behinds became incidental embellishments to their photos... I hope they did us justice!
The fountains were unfortunately under repair, which was a little disappointing, but the previous night’s rain had created puddles that reflected the central section of the mausoleum. From research, we also knew that the arched doorways of the mosque and the guesthouse on either side of the mausoleum made stunning frames for photos of the Taj, but our best-laid plans were thwarted once again by our evil arch nemesis — Mr Maintenance Man! Perched to the side in the central doorways of both the mosque and guesthouse were three-storey-high metal scaffoldings with their wheels locked in place. Somebody obviously wanted to make sure postcards were in high demand!
After an exhaustive photography session, we followed our guide Nadeem into the mausoleum to visit the final resting place of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan. Inside the dimly-lit octagonal main tomb, Nadeem showed us the intricate work of the artisans involved in building the tomb. The elaborate floral motifs and Quranic verses on the walls were first etched into the marble slabs. Precious stones were then cut and inlaid into the grooves, all done with painstaking perfection and without the aid of precision tools.
By 8am, we had finished our tour of the tombs and were wandering around the gardens. Large crowds were beginning to stream in, but as most of them headed straight for the mausoleum, the gardens remained uncrowded and idyllic as we searched for more angles to frame the Taj in all its majesty.
It took 22 years to finish building the Taj but hopefully, its legacy, like the notion of eternal love, will last forever. It was therefore poignant and ironic that as we said our goodbyes to the spirits of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan and made our way out, we passed a quarrelling couple who were calling each other names that rhymed with ditch and bog. I guess for some of us, the search for eternal love will never end…