The Leaving of Things (23 page)

From the TV monitor installed in front of the coach, a Hindi movie came bursting out at full volume. I tried to keep my attention on the countryside while the movie’s concussive soundtrack and noisy characters filled the bus. At one point, I glanced at the monitor to catch Bollywood film stars lip-syncing and gyrating their way through a swoony song-and-dance number, backdropped by some alpine dreamscape of waterfalls, pastures, and mountains.

The other passengers stared expressionlessly at the monitor. They seemed neither entertained nor repelled by what they saw; the movie was just a distraction to be consumed, a way to kill time before Agra. I slouched back down, put on my headphones, and put on a Midnight Oil tape in my Walkman, the tape Shannon had bought for me the night before my leaving.

While the drums pounded and the horns screeched like howling outback winds and Peter Garrett lamented how we slept and danced as our Earth turned, our beds burned, in the face of so much injustice, we roared across the open Indian country, an expanse of marigolds, sunflowers, and wheat fields. It was a view of the real India, not the Bollywood India. A lovely India that I imagined sharing with Karl, Nate, Shannon. The music brought them to me.

* *

We stopped for lunch outside Agra at what turned out to be a traditional South Indian restaurant (though here we were in North India). Our group packed into a plain, low-ceilinged hall patrolled by servers with pots of
samb-har
, coconut chutney, and chilies. We crowded together at long tables—the whole place looked not unlike the Xavier’s mess hall—where we found a banana leaf and small copper bowls set out for each of us. Servers ladled sambhar into the bowls, the condiments onto the banana leaves.

The savory redolence of
dosas
and spiced potatoes filled the room, mixing with the pungent sambhar. The dosas, which resembled sleeves as long as a forearm, were stuffed with potatoes and perfectly crispy. I cautiously sipped the sambhar. Never in my life had I tasted anything that hot: one sip was like a stick of dynamite had gone off in my mouth. These guys made the real deal.

Dharmanshu Uncle, sitting next to me, noticed me gulping down my bottled water. He asked me if I’d had any trouble getting used to the Indian food.

“My mother’s right,” I said. “It tastes better here than it does in the States.” I set the water bottle down, nearly
empty now. “But I won’t lie. I do miss hamburgers.
Real
hamburgers.”

He laughed, “You’re in the wrong country for that.”

Anand sipped the last of the Limca from the bottle he’d ordered and asked my father for another. As my father tried to hail down one of the servers, I turned to Dharmanshu Uncle and asked if he’d ever wanted to travel to the States.

“Once upon a time,” he said. “In the ’60s. I loved America. Lots of idealism back then, you could say.” He straightened in his seat. “Especially in college, I wanted to go for my engineering degree or begin my career there. I used to study schematics, the city layouts, you see,” he said with a flourish of his hand, “of New York, London, to see from ground up how these cities were functioning. Sewer systems, subways. I studied these cities, and then I would make up designs of my own cities. Built from scratch. Cities I wanted to build for India.”

I told him I would love to see those designs.

He waved his hand from side to side. “Those are all gone now.” After a pause, he went on, his voice lowered, more thoughtful. “When Dilip was six, seven, well after my degree and I was working for Delhi municipality, I was offered a position there, one urban planning firm in New York.” He then turned his attention back to his meal laid out on the banana leaf and began nimbly tearing pieces of the dosa and dipping it into the sambhar.

“But you didn’t go,” I said.

“Things change,” he said, “when you least expect.” He stared off, pondering his words. After a moment, he cleared his throat and turned to Anand, who sipped from a new chilled Limca bottle. He joked with Anand about not being able to handle the spiciness of the food and asked
him what his favorite American foods were. Soon they fell into conversation about baseball vs. cricket and Coca-Cola vs. Thums Up.

As before, Dharmanshu Uncle was lively and talkative but disengaged somehow, restless, as if this wasn’t so much a conversation as a means of distraction. He was present yet not present. His mind seemed elsewhere, racing to stay ahead of something … whatever it was.

* *

Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, was a smaller city than Ahmedabad but just as noisy and disarrayed: Traffic spilled in from everywhere, weaving in and out past cows, carts, and pedestrians. It was a tumbledown city, a far cry from the Mughal principality it used to be. I wondered what Dharmanshu Uncle must’ve thought of it.

“Story here is the same as everywhere in India,” he told me. “Too much population and total mismanagement.”

“So the government just can’t keep up, huh?”

Dharmanshu Uncle fixed his stare out the window. “Not that it
can’t
. It’s just indifference. We have the money, materials, know-how to keep pace with roads, drainage, bridges, so forth. Do really big projects. But there’s no will, you see. These politicians—my bosses—are simply too corrupt. They don’t care. Why they don’t care?” He gestured to the chaos of humanity out the windows. “Because their voters don’t care. They are too uneducated, too poor to care. To ask questions. Illiteracy and poverty. Politician’s best friends, hm?” A wry smile came over his face, and he laughed softly.

“Must get frustrating for you.”

He stared out the window, thought for a few seconds, shrugged. “Not anymore.”

The murmuring among the other tourists on the coach became livelier, and the monitor switched off (to my relief). My mother kept her eyes shut, and my father sipped chai from the thermos he’d brought along. Anand, by now, was intently watching the scenery, fascinated by the frenzy all around us.

We pulled into a roundabout, some distance from the road, where we parked and began filing off the bus. Everyone chattered excitedly, relieved and glad to have arrived. I had never seen the Taj Mahal, and beyond the pictures of it on postcards and in movies, I had no idea what to expect.

The moment we got off the coach, we found ourselves in the line of fire of an army of hawkers: young boys and men peddling postcards, miniature photo albums, trinkets of the Taj. We passed through a wrought-iron gate and walked through a tree-lined paved pathway that offered some shade from the sharp late-afternoon sun. We joined a procession of tourists filing through the gate with an air of solemn expectation, as if we were all pilgrims on our way to some holy spring.

I snapped a picture of gray, surly-looking macaques that had taken over an entire bench. A few ate morsels of food dropped by passersby; others stared out at us haughtily, perched on the bench or the trees above.

A boy, about my age, hawking postcards trotted up next to me. “Postcards, sir, postcards, very nice.” He held up a clutch of them, all of them dull and shabby. I bought a couple of them for five rupees. Before he took off, I told him, “One minute,” and raised the camera, clicked off a
photo. I did it quickly, before he knew what was happening and started posing. He smiled—“Thank you, sir”—and went away.

Anand scanned above the line of trees as we walked on. “I don’t see it. How far away is it?”

The moment he said it is when we saw it. The finial, topped by the Islamic crescent, appearing like a secret above a high crenellated wall.

I got my camera ready as we passed through a gate into a stone-paved courtyard fringed by rosebushes and other garden flowers. We stopped at a massive gateway, all stone and marble, with two small decorative arches on each side and an enormous one in the center. Guards—army soldiers with guns—stationed within the archway frisked everybody and directed us to metal lockers set up to one side, where we stashed bags and purses.

That’s when I turned and caught my first glimpse, through the archway, into a celestial otherworld.

The sun hit the Taj’s marble dome full force, setting the whole structure and the minarets at each corner of the white plinth on fire. Whatever this was, I thought, it did not belong among us. A shimmering ark brought down to Earth. For an instant, I floated away, above myself, and thought I was looking at an exquisitely carved mountain of moon rock.

It was more than the mind could take in at once. More than any camera could take in, for sure. Postcards and movies did not do this place justice, no photograph could.

We descended the steps on the other side of the gateway and entered a sprawling space. Visitors thronged the pathways that flanked the long clear pool that stretched from where we stood to the Taj in the far distance. Stands
of low cypresses bordered the pool. There were pathways fringed with zigzag ornamentation, dividing evenly an enormous expanse of lawns and bursts of trees. Families sat on the grass, strolled the lawns and the pathways. On the plinth, hundreds of people as tiny as ants crawled about the base of the Taj and the minarets.

“Guide? You all need guide?” inquired a stocky, bossy man in a beard, knit cap, and sweater over his kurta pyjama. He chucked his bidi away as he descended the steps of the gateway toward us. “I am tour guide here.” He spread his arms as if to encompass the whole place. “Happy to show you ’round. Not much fee.”

In Hindi, Dharmanshu Uncle told him we didn’t need him, at which the man, unfazed, turned to offer his services to other visitors stepping in from the gateway.

Turned out, Dharmanshu Uncle knew a fair amount about the Taj Mahal. He told us that in its seventeenth-century heyday, the gardens covered ten times the present area, that they were once lush with fruit trees, a forest of towering palms and cypresses. But then after the fall of the Mughals, it all fell into disrepair and the Victorians razed the forest and built gardens to resemble their own manicured English lawns, totally incongruous to the surrounding landscape, culture, architecture. He took a deep breath and scanned the Taj grounds. “This place was really something before that. Three hundred years back.”

“It still is,” I offered, “wouldn’t you say?”

Nodding, he replied, “It puts many of our own civic projects to shame. That’s true.”

We stopped at the marble water tank at the center of the grounds, where the north-south and east-west pathways bisected, and Dharmanshu Uncle pointed out the
symmetries all around us. He pointed to the gateway and how its alcoves and massive archways were built to mirror perfectly those on the façade of the Taj. “And see there,” he said, holding out both arms toward red sandstone structures with domed roofs and arched entrances on either side of the Taj, “on west you’ll find a mosque and on east you’ll see an identical structure.”

“Another mosque?” I asked.

“No one knows what that structure was for. It’s a mystery,” he said, “but it gives perfect counterpoint to the mosque.” He swept his hand across the panorama. He was right: mosque, the Taj, the mystery structure—harmony on a scale I’d never witnessed. He turned around and pointed out how the gardens were divided into quadrants and these quadrants subdivided into four perfectly sectioned lawns. Visitors lounged there now or strolled among them with children. I imagined when the lawns were full of peacocks, parakeets flitted between the trees, and noblemen, priests, and scholars enjoyed the mango- and jasmine-scented air. “It all follows the Mughal aesthetic,” he said. “Finely developed over centuries and centuries.”

“And what were the Indians—I mean, the Hindus doing all this time?” I asked.

“This is not just an Islamic structure,” Dharmanshu Uncle said. “Many think so, but you’ll find many Hindu elements. The spire on the dome”—he pointed to the peak of the Taj—“was designed to resemble Shiva’s trident. And the carvings of the chatris”—he indicated the ornate kiosks that stood like smaller siblings on four sides of the great dome—“are very much like what you see on medieval Hindu temples and the Rajput palaces in Rajasthan. The Taj is really a pan-Indian structure. Pan-
Asian
structure, in
fact. Materials are here from all over India, China, Persia, Sri Lanka, even Caspian Sea.”

“Who knew India produced such an international building.” I said as we moved from the water tank and made our way toward the plinth.

“The
great
international building,” Dharmanshu Uncle replied, “before there was such a thing.”

The light on the Taj shifted, mellowed, the dome glowing like a desert flower in bloom. I could see the marble work clearly, the tiling of the dome evidence of the involvement of human hands. The alcoves resembled half-closed eyes as the shadows within them lengthened, and the whole façade gradually felt more mysterious, more romantic with the setting sun.

Anand and I walked on ahead, past the lingering tourists—I heard German, Japanese, and English, along with the polyglot of Indian languages. I trained my camera at the Taj. Took pictures like everybody else—framing the dome and the minarets on either side.
Click. Click. Click.
It felt pointless, though; there was just too much in the frame, too many intricacies to be captured, it was like trying to snare the moon with a butterfly net.

Following a train of tourists, we handed in our shoes to a kindly clerk in exchange for a claim ticket and mounted the steps to the plinth with its great veined marble floor. We walked all around the soaring perimeter of the Taj. Our necks got sore from staring upward at the vaulted archway and the calligraphy engraved along the ornate framework.

We took in as much as our eyes could, and it wasn’t long before I had to load a new roll of film into the camera. A guard reprimanded Anand for trying to clamber onto the low ledge of one of the alcoves for a look through a window.

The wide angles weren’t doing it; the minarets, the archways, the spandrels, and kiosks—all that loomed off each side of the great dome seemed territory already covered in millions of generic picture postcards. I wanted something different, what didn’t occur immediately, the drama of the minute, the unexpected.