taj.0

The first morning in Agra we were woken up bright and early to see the sun rise at the Taj Mahal. It is here that blogging gets really hard. I wish I could communicate through words and pictures exactly what it was like to be there. But, somehow, I don’t feel that all the description I could possibly give would ever amount to the sum of its parts. I guess the experience I could most closely relate it to would be your first trip to Disney World, when you are about 4 years old. At 4, the world is still new enough that the littlest thing excites you. At the same time, Disney is this magical place full of things that would stir excitement in someone of any age, unless you were born without a heart. So, to go there at 4, is like finding out that magic is real. Its like learning that the tooth fairy exists because you saw her, you talked to her. She’s real.

            The morning was beautiful. There were not too, too many people there, so we were able to take in the grandeur of the entire structure without a million people crowding us. We left for lunch about 2 hours later. After lunch, we departed for a famous Buddhist temple an hour away. Unfortunately, we never made it there.

entrance the Taj Mahal.

            About a half an hour into the drive, our bus got caught in a traffic jam. Apparently, there had been an accident with two pedestrian fatalities and we couldn’t pass on the road that would take us to the temple. Amongst all the hubbub and confusion over the accident and while attempting to turn the bus around, evidently, our driver grazed the side of a car in front of us. The car’s driver was understandably an angry elf after this. He parked his car right in front of the bus, got out, ran on to our parked bus, took our keys out of the ignition and started running down the street. The crazy thing was that all of that all of this managed to happen without most of the people on the bus noticing. There was a windowpane separating the driver from the rest of the bus so most people were not bothered from their snoozes in the very least.

            I, on the other hand, was way too excited about this! Standing at the front of the bus, I watched the whole bizarre situation pan out in front of my eyes. I even tried to get off and settle the dispute myself but our tour guide, who had made it clear he was not too liberal about us even breathing in the "wrong air," would have nothing of it.

            This was India! A place where people’s cars get hit. And they get mad. And they steal keys and run for dear life down the street until you can’t see them anymore. India is not those souvenir shops where you can buy a marble elephant for 1500 rupees if you are American and 500 if you are smart, from their tiled, air-conditioned shop with a creative name of something like “Taj Mahal Textile Mall.” Don’t get me wrong, India is those shops. But, it was moments like this that made me feel like maybe there was a lot more to India that, at least, I did not see at first or even second or third glance.

being a photgrapher.

My vision of me, in Julia Roberts' body, hopping off a rickshaw to meet the boat on the last day, with a tummy full of tandoori chicken, henna covering my arms, a bindi on my forehead and a new ohm charm necklace that I had gotten from that yogi who lived in that asham high up in the hills of Kochi, seemed to be getting fading. Maybe I was wrong to think this way.  Maybe I put too much expectation on India. But, I do know that the reality could not have been further from my vision. My sight was averted towards the clean hotels, the Taj Mahal, the full spread buffets, the futuristic buildings American and European companies had built in downtown Delhi. I refuse to believe that is India.

Eventually we got our keys back and were on our way. We had lost a lot of time in this debacle so we quickly drove to and walked through Fort Agra, which was a large fort built by the son of the emperor who had built the Taj Mahal. We made our way back to the Taj Mahal for sunset. At that point it was much more crowded but still awesome. A group of three of us just sat on a platform facing the front of the Taj Mahal, soaking in the scene for our entire time there.

That night, we boarded a train back to Delhi where we stayed for the night.