“A teardrop on the cheek of eternity” was how one besotted visitor described Agra’s No. 1 tourist drawcard, the Taj Mahal. Many others have simply claimed it to be the most beautiful building in the world. The Taj was built by Shah Jahan as a memorial to his second wife Mumtaz Mahal who died giving birth to their 14th child, and was completed in 1653. The 20,000 builders and artisans who toiled on the project set up home immediately south of the mausoleum, creating the congested maze of alleyways known as Taj Ganj, now a popular backpacker haunt.
We stayed at the Kamal Hotel in Taj Ganj and dined just the once in their rooftop restaurant, the strangely named Stuff Makers. As it turned out though, it was a fairly accurate description of what’s served up here. Several of the small hotels in the surrounding alleyways also have incredible views of the Taj Mahal from their rooftop cafes, and are packed with visitors at sunset.
We were at the south entrance of the Taj before sunrise on Sunday, hoping to beat the hordes of visitors who would come later. The air looked romantically misty, but this was due to air pollution, not water vapour. Along with a few hundred others we admired the edifice from a distance before going inside the mausoleum itself. It’s certainly a very beautiful, elegant building that lives up to all the hype. Something we hadn’t thought about or expected, though, was just how close the Taj is to the surrounding ramshackle buildings that are anything but beautiful or elegant. The Taj is a swan pressed up against ugly ducklings.
Sadly for Shah Jahan, the Taj Mahal had been completed for only a short time before he was overthrown by his treacherous son and imprisoned in nearby Agra Fort where he died eight years later. His body was then moved to the Taj, next to his late wife.
We had a look around the huge Agra Fort and the very beautiful “Little Taj”, the mausoleum of a Persian nobleman who held a senior position in the Mughal government of the time, and who was the grandfather of the woman in whose memory the Taj Mahal was built. On Monday we hired a taxi to take us to the abandoned fortified city of Fatehpur Sikri about an hour to the west. This was built in the late 1500s and was intended to be the new capital of the Mughal Empire. But severe water supply problems caused it to be abandoned after a few years. The buildings and courtyards are massive and still in very good condition, and to wander through and around them is an atmospheric experience.
Three nights in Agra were enough for us. We’d seen the main sights, and the stifling heat and slightly nauseating sulphurous air pollution were getting to us. And the dozen or more electricity supply breakdowns daily were becoming very irritating. So we boarded a dawn train and headed for Delhi.
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