Tripping off the Taj

Mid-term holidays at school and two single-ish mums in Gurgaon with three tweenies between them to keep entertained, so we decide to go to Agra for the weekend to introduce the children to the epitome of Mughal architectural wonder. To tell you the truth, it was more to relive our childhood trips to the city of the Taj.

So we set off on a Saturday morning at about 8 from Gurgaon via the Faridabad road. The car bumped along a non-road for the longest time until we caught the NH2 at Faridabad, after which the journey was fairly smooth. We entered the city limits of Agra at about noon, having stopped on the way for a loo and a couple of puking breaks. It took us another half an hour to find the hotel that we had chosen to stay at - Hotel Grand, rated 3 stars by the online booking website we had used.

Although a little run-down with some renovation work happening, the hotel and its staff seemed pleasant enough. It was situated in the Agra cantonment area, so seemed safe. We were shown to our rooms, adjacent to each other much to the children's delight. We were greeted by a musty smell the minute the doors were opened - on further inspection, the bathrooms revealed a few more nasty surprises - damp walls and a toilet seat with some suspicious looking marks. Nevertheless, the rooms were big, the beds large, the bed linen crisp and the towels clean. We freshened up and went for lunch in the hotel's only restaurant. We seemed to be the only ones there - we asked for a la carte meals, which took some time to arrive, but were hot and fairly delicious.

Later in the afternoon, we drove up to see the Taj Mahal. It was a short drive from the hotel and the way was fairly well signposted. The car park was about a 2 km walk from the entrance to the Taj and was completely chaotic. There was a road leading into the car park, which served both as an entrance and an exit. If that wasn't bad enough, the front half was also a waiting area for all kinds of transport to the Taj - camel carts, horse carts, rickshaws, electric autos. And then there were the guides!!! We were mobbed right from the minute we drove into the car park. The children were petrified with all this unwanted attention and we started walking away from the touts as fast as we could.

The guides, however, were very persistent and followed us almost to the ticket-counter, which is situated about a kilometre from the Taj. Quite interestingly, the prices for guiding fell as we approached the Taj (from Rs 350 to Rs 50!) and we actually decided to take on this bright-faced young university student. And I'm glad we did because after buying our tickets (Rs 20 for Indian adults - the children went free), we went through the security and my friend’s bag which was full of her daughter’s colour pencils was declared a security hazard! She was told to walk back a kilometre and deposit the offending articles at the official storage place. However, our young guide found a safe place for the pencils at the handicrafts shop, which was a minute away.

The Taj was as beautiful as I remembered it to be – perhaps even more so because now that I was older (and perhaps wiser!), I could really take in the bits that might have passed me by as a child – the perfect frame provided by the main doorway, the flawless symmetry of the garden, the straight line of fountains down the middle, the reflection of the Taj in the water, the equilibrium given by the two edifices on either side, the sun glinting off the albeit tarnished white of the marble. It somehow didn’t matter that I was being jostled from every side by throngs of people…it did matter to the children however, who were getting more and more crabby by the minute. We coaxed them into going into the mausoleum with us, telling them that it was a resting place and they had to be quiet, only to be greeted by loud harsh instructions being barked out by harassed-looking policemen on how visitors should stay in queue and keep moving. That sort of spoiled things a bit – you can no longer stop and admire the perfect carnelian pietra dura flower and watch in amazement as it unfurled under the gradual light of the guide’s torch – that had been a magical moment for me as a child and I would have liked my son to experience that…

The children seemed much happier once we exited onto to the shadier side of the building – they ran up and down the courtyard, climbed on to the plinth, posed against the squares inlaid in the walls, gazed at the Yamuna (which seemed cleaner and more contented), pretended to be kings and queens. The sun looked breathtakingly beautiful as it started to set behind the Agra Fort in the distance. Although I could have happily sat there for the rest of the evening, it was time to go back and retrieve those infamous colour pencils from the shop. Of course, we had to show our gratitude to the shopkeeper by exchanging pots of our hard-earned cash for some exquisite inlaid marble bric-a-brac. He said the stones were genuine – I sincerely hope so!! There was a demonstration of this amazing craft being done outside the shop, in pretty much the same way as it used to be done several hundred years ago. The children were fascinated, especially because the young man doing it was just about ten years older than them. They were even more excited because the inlayer gave them little pieces of blue stone to keep!!

We returned to the hotel for a rest and to prepare for the next thing on the agenda – the son-et-lumiere show at the Agra Fort. Having fed ourselves and our gastronomically-challenged children at the Pizza Hut in the Tajganj area, we headed off to the Fort. The sun had set into the horizon by now and the Fort, which was lit up beautifully, looked really imposing and almost surreal in the darkness of the evening. The history that this magnificent structure had seen was so palpable. You could well imagine the emperor sitting atop his regal elephant while it steered itself through the gateway; the troops on horses thundering across the wide moat returning after a victorious battle...

The show tickets cost the adults Rs 20 a pop and were available right at the entrance of the Fort - again the children went free. In our eagerness to get the best seats, we had arrived rather early for our show. The Hindi one was still on and we had to wait nearly half an hour before we could even get through the gates. The organisers had provided a few chairs that we could sit on and wait. It was hot and humid and there were mosquitoes galore – so it was just as well that we had stopped to buy some repellant on the way. The children very quickly spotted bats flying in and out of the niches in the ramparts - that kept them amused for a while as they imagined tiny Batmen and themselves as brave soldiers fighting off baddies and throwing them into the crocodile-infested moat!

Finally, we were allowed to enter – through the huge Amar Singh Gate and up the slope. We had to walk quite a long way inside – in relative darkness – before we found the area set out for the show. We got ourselves reasonably good seats near a big pedestal fan and waited for the show to begin. The children didn’t quite know what to expect, having never seen a son-et-lumiere before. But they didn’t really care too much for darkness and got fairly spooked when the show started. They kept spotting shadows in the distance and got themselves quite worked up. We (the mums), however, found it pleasant enough to hear the history of the Mughals unfold and while I think they could have used the sound and light a little more imaginatively, it wasn’t a bad way to spend an evening.

We woke up the next morning to a very hot sunny day. All suggestions of returning to the Agra Fort to see it properly were vociferously vetoed by three loud voices, who said that all they wanted was to play in the hotel garden. We gave in – it was really too hot to do anything! After a leisurely and hearty breakfast and an argument about over-priced bottled drinking water, we checked out and set off for Gurgaon. As I sat in the air-conditioned comfort of the car while it winded its way out of the narrow roads of inner city Agra, I made a silent note to self – you need to choose the right time of the year to show your children the sights in India and more importantly you need to wait until they are a little older – old enough to appreciate the sheer dexterity of the hands that made these impressive monuments, the magic of a bygone era when India was the ‘first world’ and not aspiring to be a clone of a certain super-power…