Subcontinental Blues
Exhaustion, Thievery, and the Taj Mahal
Being the third installment of a narrative begun here.
Upon leaving Bundi I took a bus to the rail terminus a few kilometers away. While crossing the apron in front of Kota Station I was serenaded by the piercing and seemingly indiscriminate honking of car horns. I later learned that horn honking is so gratuitous in India as to be internationally famous; Audi manufactures a special kind of louder, sturdier horn for use in the cars it sells on the subcontinent. According to their brand director, drivers in Mumbai have an average daily honk rate equal to a German driver’s annual rate.
In light of the fact that Indian motorists were, in my experience, far less aggressive and thin-skinned than the typical American driver, I was left with the impression that all that honking was indicative not of anger or frustration, but rather of a nuanced system of communication akin to the echolocation employed by dolphins or bats.
Whereas an American driver is usually honking to either signal disgusted rage or avert an accident, Indian honks can variously be translated as;
“Would you let me through, please?”
“Ready or not, I’m coming through.”
“You’re in my way, ma’am.”
“I’m about to make a left turn.”
“I’m about to make a right turn.”
“I’m about to continue in the direction I’m driving.”
“Although I can see there are seventeen cars parked in front of me, I’m going to honk anyway just to make sure this thing still works.”
And the always enjoyable, “Just honking as loud as I can several times to let you know I haven’t gone anywhere.”
A summation of Indian horn culture can be found in the slogans painted on the back of the ubiquitous TATA brand heavy trucks seen rumbling everywhere. Custom-painted in garish colors and covered in lotus blossoms or good-luck swastikas, their tailgates are invariably emblazoned with the phrase, HORN OK PLEASE.
What I did not know, as I sat waiting for the train to Agra, was that I had just been robbed. I would later realize I had caught the moment on film, but at the time I sat there in ignorance, sweating profusely while daydreaming about cold lemonade.
The bus from Bundi had dropped me off several hours before my train was scheduled to leave. Rather than sitting around that entire time, I had elected to spend part of my layover exploring the neighborhood adjoining the station. With nowhere to store my bag, I lugged it with me through a warren of dusty streets, hoping to find the river we had just crossed and spend an hour reading on the bank while catching a breeze coming off the water. I should have known it wouldn’t work.
My inner compass told me to take a right out of the station parking lot and proceed downhill. I tried, only to become quickly tangled in a yarn ball of twisting streets that all eventually dead-ended, or looped back on themselves, or petered out in trash-strewn alleys. Before long I picked up a tail, who was then joined by a buddy. Within a few blocks I was being followed by a whole band of young Sikh boys, their hair tied up in patkas. By the time I stumbled upon a broad set of steps leading down to the river I was a hapless Pied Piper leading a file of several dozen giggling kids.
The children were trying to talk to me as I walked. I had by now become all too familiar with the Indian willingness to accost foreigners, often in an effort to sell them something. Upon finally reaching the river, which turned out to be a slow-moving arm of brown sludge studded with wet garbage and various pieces of jagged metal fine-tuned for the delivery of Hepatitis C, I turned to face the kids.
“I don’t want to talk,” I said. “I just want to be alone.”
“What country you are from?”
Merciless. On top of straightforwardly ignoring my request, the urchins were employing the what country question, an opening gambit favored by those interested in practicing their English by means of blunt force “conversation.”
“You want to know what country I’m from?”
“What country you are from?”
I sighed. “The United States. I’m an American.”
“USS. Thank you.”
Having satisfied their curiosity as to my citizenship, they then wanted to look in my bag. Then they wanted to know if I was going to swim in the river. Then they wanted to have their picture taken. Unsure how to end the nagging, I stood up to oblige their photographic request. In so doing I made a crucial mistake.
Picture a photograph of a dozen boys of various ages posed in a mountain range distribution, shortest on the ends, tallest in the middle. Behind them a handful of young girls look on from behind a low wall, squinting into the sun, hanging back but not wanting to miss a thing. The boys are laughing, arms draped around each other. It’s a normal scene. Except for the two guys in the middle.
Older than the other children, in their late teens or maybe even early twenties, these two fellows are looking out of the frame to their right. Gazing, I later realized, at the exact spot where my backpack lay momentarily unattended. One of them is actually pointing in the photo, a wry grin on his face. It’s like he can’t believe how dumb I am. If I had turned in the moment, I would have seen a twelve-year-old relieving me of my iPod. Instead, I busied myself taking a picture only I would ever look at again, as if it was my cosmic fate to create a record of my lapsed vigilance. Hours later, when it dawned on me that I’d been plundered, I mentally retraced my steps, eventually flipping my camera on and scrolling back through the day’s pictures. Coming to the riverside photo, I saw the smug look on the face of the guy in the polyester shirt with the Boogie Nights collar, and put two and two together.
“Shit,” I said, shaking my head. “Well, I really hope you guys like Third Eye Blind.”
By the time I reached Agra and checked into a moldering hotel half a mile from the entrance to the Taj Mahal, I was blasted. The unrelenting heat, regular gastrointestinal shocks, and cultural dislocation were all catching up to me. Like a tag-team duo of professional wrestlers, Creeping Loneliness and Bone-Deep Exhaustion quickly pinned me to the bed. I lay there motionless, staring up through the slowly turning blades of a ceiling fan generating no discernible breeze at a water stain in the shape of Wisconsin. On top of everything else, my overly ambitious diet of shrine visits had left me with an acute case of Temple Fatigue. All of which explains why, during my time in Agra, I spent only a few hours at the Taj Mahal, and many more back at my crappy hotel, laying on bedsheets pilled with a thousand washes, reading a book.
David James Duncan’s The Brothers K is an ambitious novel. The story, which ranges across decades and continents, includes disquisitions on minor league baseball, the Vietnam War, Seventh Day Adventist traditions, and much more. There’s even a subplot in India, which, I mean, come on; it was perfect. I had been saving the novel for my trip, finally cracking it on the night of my train ride out of Mumbai. The story was really getting going as I arrived in Agra, but as I lay there turning pages in the dim light of a naked bulb I couldn’t ignore the imp on my shoulder who kept screaming, “You’re holed up in your hotel, reading, in the middle of India?! You’ll never be back here! You have a lifetime to read books! Get your ass out of bed and go find another Ganesh shrine!”
From time to time I did get up, if only to walk across the street for another mango lassi. There was a second-floor restaurant in Agra that served the cool, smoothie-like drinks in every flavor of the rainbow; mango, strawberry, papaya, guava. Slouched in a white plastic lawn chair, sunburned and sweaty, pulling the thick liquid through a green straw, I imagine I looked like a sculpture titled Loneliness, or Pathetic Kid VI. Something about the dichotomy between the cafe’s crappy wooden patio and the well-groomed lawns of the Taj Mahal seems like a metaphor for my entire trip, for travel in general, perhaps even for life itself; the things you think will be the most important and unforgettable parts of your journey are often supplanted by the mundane.
Ok, but… really? Did you really travel all that way and only pop your head in to what is ostensibly a Wonder of the World?
Look, for starters, it’s not that big. You could easily tour the grounds of the Taj Mahal in under an hour. That is not a mark against it—I once stood motionless in a tiny moss garden in Kyoto for what might have been days, completely spellbound—but the Taj just wasn’t that impressive. Perhaps I’m not allowing for the difficulty of accomplishing its construction in the 17th century. When I look at pictures of it now, observing the intricate floors, the vines worked into the marble façade of the main tomb, the elaborate flanking buildings of red sandstone with their own sub-domes, minarets, and ramparts, the manicured grass, the symmetrical images reflected in the long pool extending from the mausoleum towards the entrance arch, I register their aesthetic beauty. But in their physical presence I was underwhelmed. The place simply failed to arrest my imagination. This may have had something to do with my expectations. Tourist destinations are tourist destinations for a reason. But some of the most moving and beautiful experiences I’d had thus far in India had been random, and the Taj, by contrast, could not live up to the burden of hype.
Then there was the fact that the place is a grave. The grave, specifically, of Mumtaz Mahal, the third (but favorite!) wife of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. While the story of the emperor’s grief following his wife’s death is moving—he is said to have retreated into seclusion for a year of mourning, from which he emerged bent, with white hair—it struck me as grotesque to spend the amount of money and resources that went into the site’s construction simply to commemorate someone’s death. The Crown of Palaces cost the modern equivalent of some $827 million US dollars. That would have covered a lot of public works, schools, food aid, farm subsidies, or tax relief.
Finally, there was my existential loneliness. Wandering the grounds of the Taj Mahal, surrounded by couples holding hands, all I wanted was someone to share it with. Watching lovers stroll through the gardens, my thoughts turned to Lydia, the girl I had dated my freshman year of college.
I had spent the previous five years nursing an unhealthy fantasy about how someday Lydia, who I had not spoken to in that half decade, would miraculously realize I was still the love of her life, break up with her new boyfriend, fly across the country, and fall into my arms. As you may imagine, this had hamstrung ancillary dating efforts. At one point, a few months into another relationship, I confessed I couldn’t stop thinking about Lydia. My new girlfriend stared at me, eyebrows raised in calm disbelief, before finally delivering the understatement of the century.
“I know,” she said.
And that was the end of that.
Before long, tired of my melancholy vigils on the metal benches of the Taj lawn, I booked a ticket on the next train leaving Agra, and was soon rattling north out of the desert.
This story continues here.