The Crown Palace

I look around the lift, on the way down to the lobby: we’re an unprepossessing lot. In all fairness, it’s still dark outside, but the muezzin’s up before us. As far as the boys are concerned, there’s only one 5.30 in any twenty-four hours, and this isn’t it. No-one speaks, but “It Had Better Be Worth It” is ricocheting, loud and clear, off the mirrored walls. The Taj Mahal will be up for the photo-shoot, but the camera lens will need more Vaseline than a baby’s bottom, to soft-focus the bags under our eyes. Then I remember the magic that is photoshop, and chalk up one to technology...

Downstairs, Niraj is waiting for us, in his crisp cotton shirt and pressed jeans. You can’t not notice, that his face and chest are badly scarred by burns. I lean in to catch his words, watching his mouth, then look away, in case he thinks I’m staring, so I miss the next bit, and have to look again. This delicacy ping-pong continues, until I understand that it’s my problem, not his. Niraj, with his disfigured face, spends every day showing off the most exquisite building in the world, with no thought of irony.

Mano takes us halfway, up to the combustion-engine exclusion zone, where we hop into an electric tuk-tuk for the last lap. The ambience teeters between surly and laconic. The conversation’s not monosyllabic, though, because someone would need to say something for that...

The day dawns, as we join the queue. It’s fully light, but with a blue filter. The early birds are opening their shops for the tourist worms. We watch the stall-holders, with their whisk brooms, sweeping up dust from the shoes of yesterday’s customers, which they leave in tidy piles at the doorway, for today’s customers to walk through and bring back in. I love recycling.

Most of the silent queue’s as pole-axed as we are, except the talkative American lady behind me. She’s clearly a morning person, but she doesn’t have long to live. Then, just as I’m going to have to stab her, the kaleidoscope of fate turns, and the queue moves forward, so she lives to chat another day.

We’re herded into separate lines, men on the right, ladies on the left, and at first, I’m winning, because my team’s numerically challenged. The advantage is temporary, though, because the men’s queue processes at walking pace, a quick flick with the bomb-detecting paddle, then, Next Please! The ladies, however, are all carrying enough stuff to put Mary Poppins’ carpet-bag to shame, plus a family picnic in the other hand. I’m twitching irritably, watching kitchen sink after kitchen sink clatter onto the security man’s desk. Do these women know nothing? My capsule handbag contains a lipstick, a phone, a tube of mints and a hundred-rupee note, folded small, for emergencies. (In England, £1.25 would not get you out of many emergencies, I know, unless you were desperate for half a cup of coffee, but in India, Rs 100 pretty well has you covered.)

It’s the last Saturday of the Diwali hols, and the turnstile’s spinning. There’s a queue inside, for posing on the Princess Di seat and looking wistful, with your head on one side, but fortunately, we don’t want to. On Fridays, the Taj Mahal’s closed. The mosque on its left, looking from the gate, is still used for prayer, by the workers who live in the outer courtyard. The mosque faces west, which puzzles me, until I have a geographical epiphany, and work out that Mecca is only to the East, if you are west of Mecca...

Niraj shows us sneaky Hindu lotus blossoms, in the inlaying, inside the central dome. Shah Jehan was Muslim, but his mother was Hindu, and this is a wink to her. Niraj cups his hands round a section of curling fronds of petals and leaves, in the carved wall panels, and there is a perfect marble OM.

The four towers on sentry-duty, at the corners, tilt outwards, so that, in an earthquake, they would fall away from the central dome. They think of everything, these seventeenth century Mughal architects, don’t they? You used to be able to climb them, until fifteen years ago, when some thoughtless love-shorn desperado threw himself off the top of one of them, onto the unforgiving marble beneath. I trust SHE was satisfied. One more copycat suicide, and the authorities drew the bolts for good, to prevent a stampede of unrequited lovers. Not very nice for Mumtaz.

I thought this was the fairest of Indian monuments, but I was wrong. Not in the mirror-mirror sense, I mean racial equity for tourists. Foreigners pay Rs 750, and, last time, I thought Indian residents paid Rs 520, which makes the mark-up for pasty-faces a reasonable fifty percent. In fact, Indians pay Rs 20, you can do the maths yourself. Don’t be indignant, though – they have to pay two rupees, to use the toilets, by the exit, and we get in for free. I don’t find this out, until we’re leaving, or I’d have gone twice, to get my money’s worth.

Shah Jehan also built the Red Fort, at Agra, so we give that the once-over, before hitting the Jaipur trail. The Fort has twin towers, where the royal princesses slept. The first, for Jahanara, is of white marble. Its partner looks identical, but is made of red sandstone, painted to match. This was the bedroom of Gauhara, whom Shah Jehan was never able to forgive, because his beloved Mumtaz died giving birth to her. Explain that one, to a four-year-old...

On the way to Jaipur, we linger longer at Fatehpur Sikri, to complete a hat-trick of World Heritage sites in one day. It’s a whole city, built in the late sixteenth century, to be capital of Uttar Pradesh, but abandoned after only a decade, for lack of water. Even though I’m still not speaking to Akbar the Great, after yesterday’s revelations, there’s no denying its loveliness. I especially like the open-sided five-tiered palace, which looks like a Buddhist temple. This, the guide informs us, is where Akbar would retire to take the evening air and, “have joy with his wives.” Small wonder it needed to be five-storied, then.

Next stop, the Pink City.

Not forgetting Mumtaz - Golden Triangle 4

“His other wives must have been furious,” Diana says. They’ve got thirty-two million reasons to be, because that’s how many rupees his last gift to her cost, nearly four centuries ago. We’re trailing our slack jaws round the Taj Mahal, the most famous symbol of love in the world.
It’s still dark, when we haul ourselves out of bed. The muezzin’s calling, as well as the alarm-clock. Pulling on yesterday’s clothes, for speed, is not an option, given the unmissable photo opportunities of the day ahead. In the hotel foyer, we meet Vijay, our guide, who visits the palace at dawn and dusk, each day. He knows and loves its every last cornelian petal and malachite leaf.



Factories are banned in Agra, he tells us, because of the risk of pollution. All manufacturing industry was shipped out, fifteen years ago. People now commute to work elsewhere, or stay home to till the soil, and guide the tourists. He looks complacent. Cars aren’t allowed within half a kilometre of the palace. We abandon ours, leaving Sanjay to snooze in the car-park, at a safe distance, while we make the final leg of our pilgrimage in an electric tuk-tuk. At the entrance, Vijay procures us tickets, bottles of water and attractive little white bootees, seemingly out of the dawn air, thereby earning his keep in the first two minutes. Foreign visitors, 750 rupees, Indian residents, 520 rupees. It’s the closest to parity we’ve yet seen.
Security’s fierce, but, by now, the day would be incomplete, without being frisked and having our bags rifled. The Taj is a Muslim monument, and, in a post-9/11 world, they’re not taking any chances. Vijay says that after nine o’clock in the morning, no bags at all are allowed in, because of the weight of traffic. With twenty to thirty thousand visitors to process each day, and double at the weekends, you can quite see their point. You’d get repetitive strain injury, unzipping zips.
He sits us in a row, on a marble step, like schoolchildren, to listen to his Taj lore. Stray tourists linger in the vicinity, to hear his words of wisdom, as well they might. Mumtaz Mahal was the Jewel of the Palace. At the age of fourteen, she was betrothed to Emperor Shah Jahan, and married him five years later. He had nine other wives, as Mughal emperors were wont to do, but Mumtaz was favourite, his constant companion, which can’t have made the entente very cordiale in the ladies’ quarters. Mumtaz bore him fourteen children (I think a little something in marble isn’t overdoing it, then) - but died giving birth to the last. Shah Jahan was disconsolate, and went into enclosed mourning for a year. He emerged, hair white, back bent, with the design for the marble mausoleum for Mumtaz, to fulfil his promise, never to forget her. It was to take twenty-two years. Enough to make your lip wobble.



The craftsmen inlayers went blind, Vijay says, creating the intricate decoration of the walls. Each flowerhead’s made up of hundreds of tiny pieces, no bigger than your thumbnail. Not only was the work very fine, but, in an age pre-dating safety goggles, flying chippings and debris took their toll on workers’ eyes, too. Women weren’t allowed to be apprenticed - not because of some warped seventeenth-century take on equal opps, it made sense: if a woman trained to become an inlayer, and then married, she would take the knowledge and expertise out of the family, and into someone else’s. Sic transit....
Taj Mahal means Crown Palace, initially projected to be forty-five years in construction. But then, the planners counted the hours in a day, and decided they were wasting time, sleeping. The builders worked in shifts, cutting stone in the night, piecing it together during the day, thereby halving the estimate. And Shah Jahan was canny – instead of having slave-labourers, he paid his workmen, to ensure their commitment - paid them so well, in fact, they didn’t have to work again. If a workman was injured during building, the Emperor gave the family enough money to be financially secure for generations to come. We hang on Vijay’s every word. He has lovely hands.
It’s completely light, when we come through the portal between the outer courtyard and the gardens. The Taj Mahal’s translucent and warm in the early sun. The white marble’s blinding at midday, but right now, it’s soft as pearl, in the light of breaking day. We stop speaking to one another, eventually, and walk round with our mouths open, close to tears.



Vijay points to a ruin, across the river. After the completion of the white Taj Mahal, he says, Shah Jahan began work on a black one, on the opposite bank, a reflection of the original. Aurangzeb, his third son, had other ideas, however. He’d already murdered his two older brothers, to ensure accession, and now he put his own father under house arrest, so the project collapsed. We sigh. The black Taj was to have been inlaid with diamonds (because lapis lazuli doesn’t show up on black), with a bridge of silver, spanning the river to its white partner. It’d have required some serious coffer-rattling, so you can almost begin to understand Aurangzeb’s parsimony. For the last years of his life, Shah Jahan could only see his beloved Taj, reflected in the mirror over his bed. Diana and I exchange a look, blinking hard.
Vijay encourages us – orders us – to touch the walls. We comply, gingerly, not having been brought up to fondle monuments. The marble absorbs nothing but the glue used for the inlay, and that’s a secret recipe. Grubby tourist fingerprints are washed off by the monsoon, or wiped away in the annual cleaning. Inside the crown itself, it’s quite dark. Vijay puts his torch-face flat against the wall, switches it on. A red flower springs to life. If we gasp any more, we’ll pass out. He recites the litany of semi-precious stones used for the inlay, lapidary poetry: cornelian, agate, malachite, onyx, lapis lazuli. The precious stones - emeralds, sapphires, diamonds - are long since looted, but the crown’s still bright.
Inside the onion-dome, Mumtaz has her cenotaph, in the centre. Shah Jahan’s is offset, but bigger. I’m glad to see this, perfect symmetry makes me twitchy. The actual graves are under our feet, in a locked vault, opened once a year to visitors, who happen to arrive on the right day. I applaud the randomness of access.


Outside again, the sun’s revving up and the coaches are beginning to arrive. We take off our j-cloth overshoes. A team of bullocks, yoked to a mower, quarters the lawns, flanking the watercourses.
Until today, the Taj Mahal seems to me anodyne perfection, a piece of wedding-cake architecture. Right now, up close and intimate, I change my mind, and give my heart away. You need to go and see for yourself.