Sparkling gems of India

In an email this morning, mom asked me if the Taj was gorgeous. The answer is YES! When I had made my way through a 2k walk dense with beggars and hawkers, including some of the most severely maimed humans I have ever seen, and gotten through the ticket office and locker room, where I was required to store my jelly beans and mini-flash light, but not my humongous camera… and after I had figured out how to find and use the one public toilet in the huge compound… bring paper, don’t let yourself be urgent because it takes time to negotiate the infamous squat fixture, bring rupees to pay attendant for yellow paper napkin, whether or not you will use it....

Finally, I stood on the steps before the reflecting pool, looked at the glowing Taj and said to the eight year old inside, the one who used to gaze at photos of the beautiful Taj and be filled with simultaneous longing and delight; to her I said quietly, “I got you here.”

The colorful garb of Indian pilgrims and tourists makes of the grand scene a setting for jewels, sparkling jewels. Women from all the regions wear the saris of their regions; Sikhs wear colorful turbans; sadhus wear orange and saffron. The Taj sparkles—and it does or does not do so roughly in keeping with the digital read-out of information on pollution index. Yes, the Taj Mahal is dimmed by toxic waste, but not extinguished. But the surprising pleasure for me in the Taj was the way that sound reverberates, more than an echo, something like I imagine a super-conductor might produce if audible. The sound rings round and around in a haunting beauty. The male tour guides would occasionally create a sound to demonstrate this, and, given the almost total absence of the feminine in public places, I made a high note to give to this woman’s burial place—the sound was surprising in the air, and made beautiful by its context. Some loved it, and I am sure some hated it.

So, representative of India on a grand scale, the jewel of the Taj Mahal sits in the cesspool of the city of Agra, where industry has been prohibited, worsening the poverty and lessening the pollution, where cars with exhaust cannot come within a specified distance of the Taj and beggars line the walkway from the car drop-off, where thieves and hawkers and horns assault. No doubt, my perceptions of Agra were colored by the experience of an abscessed tooth and my sensitive temperament, but Agra is Agra, and only the Taj would get me there!

On the walk away from the Taj, a boy of about ten pestered and pestered me, stepping front of me so that I would have to trip over him, while I resolutely ignored him. Finally, I looked down at him, dogging my left side and said, "Do you know the expression 'wasting your time?'"
He smiled ruefully and went off to try someone else. A bit later he was back at my right side, and I said, "A good businessman does not waste his energy." He did not try again. (Yes, of course, it is hard to ignore hungry children and maimed adults, but, if you do not, you have an unmanageable horde upon you in a blink.)

Just outside the city of Agra is Akbar’s Mausoleum, a beautiful red sandstone building, with an enclosed deer park, and a large troupe of monkeys. Sitting on a bench just inside the walls, I was defaced by a very large monkey. By this I mean that she sat looking at me, hand out, as I sat looking at a baby behind me. Then, very suddenly she reached out and clawed the very center of my face, making a nice gash from the inside corner of my right eye, down through my lower lip. Of course, it bled profusely, and this, no doubt, sealed my impressions of Agra, in spite of tender nursing from Bethan and protective hovering from Bel!

As anyone likely to read this knows, I typically fare well with animals and have even fancied myself a kind of human ambassador to the animal worlds; imagine my dismay then at this wild misunderstanding! I came back later after the bleeding had stopped to look at the monkey who slapped me. She was unhappy, frowning permanently, and I thought she might be in pain. I took her portrait. Later, when I looked at it in non-glare light, I could see clearly that she was blind in one eye and I understood that I had probably moved into a space of non-vision and gotten smacked in a frightened hurry. And such is life; why should she have risked me, hurt already as she was? Dorothy Benvenuti, you are not in Kansas anymore!