These are the days when I feel I’ve seen India. We began early, 5:30,
so we could make it to Agra and back in a day. The morning was foggy,
so the journey began in a dreamlike cloud. There were clear things up
close, not so much in the distance. When the fog hadn’t burned off by
ten a.m., it was clear that it was not really fog, but smog. It wasn’t
unusual to see people on the side of the road with their faces covered,
not from any religious piety, but to keep from breathing the terrible
air.
Side note. It is six thirty a.m. and I’ve been up for an hour and a half. I got a brainstorm that today should be Muslim research day and wanted to put together a set of questions I’d ask the Muslims I meet. Silly maybe, but there is no reason not to work on the book while I am here. And there is no reason my Khalid and Davis can’t be from Delhi as easily as from Saudi Arabia. Maybe easier, because there isn’t as much world focus on the extremism here, while there are still hostilities and terrorism.
So the trip to Agra. First, I believe our driver, a nice young man about my son’s age, was lost more than he knew his way. He often stopped, rolled down the window and rattled off questions to strangers in Hindi. Many of the strangers looked like they had never left the particular corner they were on at the time… that they were in fact fixtures there. Most often they just waved him on, indicating the same direction he was headed already. Now all of that wouldn’t be such a notable thing, if we hadn’t spent nearly 9 hours in the car, there and back, when the drive was supposedly a two to three hour jaunt. The livestock, cows, wild boars, along the road and so many dogs, all an indistinct lab like short hair breed and then the people in all manner of costume, from turban rags to elegant jeweled saris, made it an interesting drive, but the dirty dust of the “road” which was more hole than pothole, left us feeling, riding in the back of what is really a luxury vehicle in India, as though we’d been beaten up, the jostling was that extreme.
And the slums. I’ve seen slums, in Rio, in Mexico, Malaysia, and of course in the US… but I’ve never seen slums like these. The best constructed ‘homes’ were made of blue plastic tarps. They had common walls, one tent to the next and they were patched together with garbage bags and whatever else you can imagine. People squatted, sometimes on old crates, others just on the ground, sometimes around an open fire, inside them as we passed by on this chilly morning. Surrounding the slums were areas that reminded me more of garbage dumps than anything else, with ridges of dirt as though they’d been plowed up that way. And yes, not a few people had their pants around their ankles, squatting to take care of their biological needs, right along the roadway, on top of the mounds, along concrete abutments, wherever. Men, mostly, but women too, with saris or other draping wrapped around them, both the butts and their faces the only bare parts in sight. For anyone who thinks women’s privacy, even at that level, is sacred in India… no. Biology and poverty seem to be the great equalizers in India.
As we drove along the road in the pre-dawn hours, we nearly hit a black cow, crossing the road. I wonder if there is superstition about black cows the way there are around cats. My son in law explained when we got back that it was very fortunate we didn’t hit it, and that had we, there was a good chance we’d never make it out alive. All those nice people along the roadside would have, apparently, turned to an angry mob, complete with Mob Justice.
I saw only one cat, a skittish terrified creature that ran past us later in the week as we lounged by the pool. My son-in-law explains that Indians hate cats and consider them terrible omens. (This doesn’t stop him from being the favorite of my daughter’s sweet gray tabby who lives with them.)
The visuals were overwhelming, but nothing prepared me for the noise. Instead of driving in single lanes here, cars drive where they want to drive and then honk when they want to pass a vehicle in front of them. Multi-colored Tata (freight) trucks, which I am told are painted that way to ward off evil, rule the road, and since all goods are shipped into the city at night, night time is particularly perilous. The Tata trucks are not as big as a semi trailer in the states, more like the size of a standard garbage truck, though without the rounding, if that makes sense ness. The trucks are tarped, (unlike in Houston, nothing flies out of them.) I sense pride in the ownership and operation of motor vehicles, and frankly, it is more like race car driving than driving on a highway. Starts and stops are frequent and plentiful, with the constant blaring of millions of horns. “Honk horn and wait for aside” the trucks have painted on them. And at night, use the dippers. As best I can tell, that means flash your headlights.
I haven’t mentioned the smell… which wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. A kind of smokiness that I assume is from the pollution is the standard, and frankly, you get used to it. Possibly because the air in Houston has my body already primed to reject it.
As the drive was long, and as we left so early, it wasn’t unusual that our driver wanted to stop. As mentioned, his English wasn’t great, and he kept saying “repast” to us. I don’t know if he meant he was offering it to us or just wanted a break, but no matter how many ways we said, “ we are fine” he pulled off the road to one of the myriad roadside cafes, known as dhabba’s. These are three sided buildings, made of tin and tarps as best I could see, with what looked like an outdoor kitchen and steam tables. There were plastic tables and chairs, enough to seat a hundred or so, scattered both under the roof and out in the “yard”… a cleared dirt area. A two stalled Indian style bathroom was a few meters separated from the kitchen area in its own concrete building, with a sink for hand washing outside. Monkeys climbed all over the roof, light brown thinly furred ones, and they reached down inside frequently, trying to steal food. A brown dog curled in the dirt in the corner and her puppy, a sweet little girl who came to me right away for belly rubs, wandered the area.
I’d have had to have been starving to eat, drink or use the facilities, but our driver sat down to what looked like a four course meal, and very much enjoyed it. My husband and I walked around until the owner, who assumed his chairs must be wet, came out with a towel and dried a couple, turning them toward the road so we could watch the view. We didn’t want to insult anyone, so we sat. When I described this to my son in law, he got a dreamy look in his eyes. He loves dhabba food and told us we screwed up by not eating. He also says every time he comes back from India, he looks like a refugee because he always gets sick and loses weight. He hasn’t put the two together yet. We were very big on hand sanitizer and washing, and didn't eat any roadside food. We also didn't get sick. Or lose weight for that matter!
When we finally arrived in Agra, I was a little surprised to find the big city atmosphere. At 1.7 million, it is only the 19th most populous city in India. They don’t mess around with population in India, and I’m pretty sure the concept of “small town” is lost on them. When my husband first introduced himself to the employees there, he explained to them that he’d come from a small town. They wanted to know how small…. 500,000? A million?
He grew up in a tiny place in Iowa with 37 other people living there. They shook their heads. 37 people in a house might be remarkable, but it is no town.
At any rate, Agra houses the Taj Mahal, another UNESCO site, so tourism is the biggest industry. In fact, to halt pollution, the city has banned industry, and there is no tax on goods produced by hand created in Agra. So it is a thriving area of crafts, though I had no real use for the carved marble reproductions of the place. Thriving on Tourism, there is racket after racket and you have the sense that each level is paying off the next one. You must park a half-mile or so away from the Taj. To get there, you must ride either a city taxi (three wheeled, open air electric rickshaw thing) or ride in a cart pulled by a camel. You must have a guide. He meets you in the parking lot, where he explains his fee and the fee of the transport, who is his brother. He sticks to you like glue, explaining his favorite features over and over.
He takes your rupees to buy himself and the driver entrance (20 rupees apiece, again) while you wait in line to buy Foreign tickets, (750 rupees) and go through security. Your 750 buys you not only admission, but a bottle of water and shoe covers… the same thing delivery people put on so they don’t have to take off their shoes. The Indian line just took off their shoes and went barefoot.
He leads you to the entrance, explaining the structures, the architect and the history. For the most part, you will have already read up on this, so you lag behind and appreciate the craftsmanship and beauty, letting him do his job. If you hear one more time that it took 22 years to build the Taj, you will try to feed the guide to the resident parrots.
(transportation to front gate) (driver and the entrance)
The Taj is really a tomb. From trip advisor:
Where better to go for a romantic vacation than to the great testament of love, the Taj Mahal? Built by the grieving Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his late wife Mumtaz Mahal, the Taj Mahal’s unrivaled beauty explains why it’s regarded as one of the eight wonders of the world. A visit to India wouldn’t be complete without it.
The building itself is nothing short of beautiful, but I expected that.
We are accosted first thing with the guides, who must be hired I fear… though now that I think of it none of the Indians had guides. Ours was clearly on the take with both vendors and cabs. We road a camel cart the mile into the TM complex from the designated parking areas… more jostling… and spent time admiring the entry “gates” gardens and hearing the story of the mosque and quarters that flank the Taj itself. The marble for the Taj, and it is all mare only things that aren’t perfectly balanced are the graves themselves. The Taj’s dead wife was laid to rest in the exact center of the complex. When he died, they buried him next to her. There is no grave on the other side.
Marble of the Taj is inlaid with semi precious jewels, (another item that they want to sell us in the Kasbah we must walk through to get back to the car.) It is built with several optical illusions, inlay of dark stone so that columns that are flat look three dimensional, etc. It is definitely worth the trip; photographs can’t capture the luminescence of the marble, the sense of calm that permeates even among the tourists.
I do feel like I’m becoming an expert on Muslim art and architecture though.
After leaving the Taj, we took the “new highway” out of Agra, which was supposed to get us back in 2.5 hours. You already know the end of that story. I soon found that my senses were overloaded. It no longer surprised me to see herds of cattle sharing the roadside, the tiny thin children walking around with no pants, the hundreds of uniformed boys and girls getting off and on busses, the motorcycles carrying at minimum a young man in western type clothing, a young woman in full sari and a child all at once, other motorcycles loaded with plywood, or crates of goods or mattresses, held on precariously by string or just the hands of the men, darting in and around traffic, without helmets or other protection. It didn’t surprise me to see an elephant walking alongside the road. I am ashamed to have lost my wonder and empathy.
Side note. It is six thirty a.m. and I’ve been up for an hour and a half. I got a brainstorm that today should be Muslim research day and wanted to put together a set of questions I’d ask the Muslims I meet. Silly maybe, but there is no reason not to work on the book while I am here. And there is no reason my Khalid and Davis can’t be from Delhi as easily as from Saudi Arabia. Maybe easier, because there isn’t as much world focus on the extremism here, while there are still hostilities and terrorism.
So the trip to Agra. First, I believe our driver, a nice young man about my son’s age, was lost more than he knew his way. He often stopped, rolled down the window and rattled off questions to strangers in Hindi. Many of the strangers looked like they had never left the particular corner they were on at the time… that they were in fact fixtures there. Most often they just waved him on, indicating the same direction he was headed already. Now all of that wouldn’t be such a notable thing, if we hadn’t spent nearly 9 hours in the car, there and back, when the drive was supposedly a two to three hour jaunt. The livestock, cows, wild boars, along the road and so many dogs, all an indistinct lab like short hair breed and then the people in all manner of costume, from turban rags to elegant jeweled saris, made it an interesting drive, but the dirty dust of the “road” which was more hole than pothole, left us feeling, riding in the back of what is really a luxury vehicle in India, as though we’d been beaten up, the jostling was that extreme.
And the slums. I’ve seen slums, in Rio, in Mexico, Malaysia, and of course in the US… but I’ve never seen slums like these. The best constructed ‘homes’ were made of blue plastic tarps. They had common walls, one tent to the next and they were patched together with garbage bags and whatever else you can imagine. People squatted, sometimes on old crates, others just on the ground, sometimes around an open fire, inside them as we passed by on this chilly morning. Surrounding the slums were areas that reminded me more of garbage dumps than anything else, with ridges of dirt as though they’d been plowed up that way. And yes, not a few people had their pants around their ankles, squatting to take care of their biological needs, right along the roadway, on top of the mounds, along concrete abutments, wherever. Men, mostly, but women too, with saris or other draping wrapped around them, both the butts and their faces the only bare parts in sight. For anyone who thinks women’s privacy, even at that level, is sacred in India… no. Biology and poverty seem to be the great equalizers in India.
As we drove along the road in the pre-dawn hours, we nearly hit a black cow, crossing the road. I wonder if there is superstition about black cows the way there are around cats. My son in law explained when we got back that it was very fortunate we didn’t hit it, and that had we, there was a good chance we’d never make it out alive. All those nice people along the roadside would have, apparently, turned to an angry mob, complete with Mob Justice.
I saw only one cat, a skittish terrified creature that ran past us later in the week as we lounged by the pool. My son-in-law explains that Indians hate cats and consider them terrible omens. (This doesn’t stop him from being the favorite of my daughter’s sweet gray tabby who lives with them.)
The visuals were overwhelming, but nothing prepared me for the noise. Instead of driving in single lanes here, cars drive where they want to drive and then honk when they want to pass a vehicle in front of them. Multi-colored Tata (freight) trucks, which I am told are painted that way to ward off evil, rule the road, and since all goods are shipped into the city at night, night time is particularly perilous. The Tata trucks are not as big as a semi trailer in the states, more like the size of a standard garbage truck, though without the rounding, if that makes sense ness. The trucks are tarped, (unlike in Houston, nothing flies out of them.) I sense pride in the ownership and operation of motor vehicles, and frankly, it is more like race car driving than driving on a highway. Starts and stops are frequent and plentiful, with the constant blaring of millions of horns. “Honk horn and wait for aside” the trucks have painted on them. And at night, use the dippers. As best I can tell, that means flash your headlights.
I haven’t mentioned the smell… which wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. A kind of smokiness that I assume is from the pollution is the standard, and frankly, you get used to it. Possibly because the air in Houston has my body already primed to reject it.
As the drive was long, and as we left so early, it wasn’t unusual that our driver wanted to stop. As mentioned, his English wasn’t great, and he kept saying “repast” to us. I don’t know if he meant he was offering it to us or just wanted a break, but no matter how many ways we said, “ we are fine” he pulled off the road to one of the myriad roadside cafes, known as dhabba’s. These are three sided buildings, made of tin and tarps as best I could see, with what looked like an outdoor kitchen and steam tables. There were plastic tables and chairs, enough to seat a hundred or so, scattered both under the roof and out in the “yard”… a cleared dirt area. A two stalled Indian style bathroom was a few meters separated from the kitchen area in its own concrete building, with a sink for hand washing outside. Monkeys climbed all over the roof, light brown thinly furred ones, and they reached down inside frequently, trying to steal food. A brown dog curled in the dirt in the corner and her puppy, a sweet little girl who came to me right away for belly rubs, wandered the area.
Dhabba: note the "fog," the bathroom building to the right, and the monkey on the roof.
I’d have had to have been starving to eat, drink or use the facilities, but our driver sat down to what looked like a four course meal, and very much enjoyed it. My husband and I walked around until the owner, who assumed his chairs must be wet, came out with a towel and dried a couple, turning them toward the road so we could watch the view. We didn’t want to insult anyone, so we sat. When I described this to my son in law, he got a dreamy look in his eyes. He loves dhabba food and told us we screwed up by not eating. He also says every time he comes back from India, he looks like a refugee because he always gets sick and loses weight. He hasn’t put the two together yet. We were very big on hand sanitizer and washing, and didn't eat any roadside food. We also didn't get sick. Or lose weight for that matter!
When we finally arrived in Agra, I was a little surprised to find the big city atmosphere. At 1.7 million, it is only the 19th most populous city in India. They don’t mess around with population in India, and I’m pretty sure the concept of “small town” is lost on them. When my husband first introduced himself to the employees there, he explained to them that he’d come from a small town. They wanted to know how small…. 500,000? A million?
He grew up in a tiny place in Iowa with 37 other people living there. They shook their heads. 37 people in a house might be remarkable, but it is no town.
At any rate, Agra houses the Taj Mahal, another UNESCO site, so tourism is the biggest industry. In fact, to halt pollution, the city has banned industry, and there is no tax on goods produced by hand created in Agra. So it is a thriving area of crafts, though I had no real use for the carved marble reproductions of the place. Thriving on Tourism, there is racket after racket and you have the sense that each level is paying off the next one. You must park a half-mile or so away from the Taj. To get there, you must ride either a city taxi (three wheeled, open air electric rickshaw thing) or ride in a cart pulled by a camel. You must have a guide. He meets you in the parking lot, where he explains his fee and the fee of the transport, who is his brother. He sticks to you like glue, explaining his favorite features over and over.
He takes your rupees to buy himself and the driver entrance (20 rupees apiece, again) while you wait in line to buy Foreign tickets, (750 rupees) and go through security. Your 750 buys you not only admission, but a bottle of water and shoe covers… the same thing delivery people put on so they don’t have to take off their shoes. The Indian line just took off their shoes and went barefoot.
He leads you to the entrance, explaining the structures, the architect and the history. For the most part, you will have already read up on this, so you lag behind and appreciate the craftsmanship and beauty, letting him do his job. If you hear one more time that it took 22 years to build the Taj, you will try to feed the guide to the resident parrots.
(transportation to front gate) (driver and the entrance)
The Taj is really a tomb. From trip advisor:
Where better to go for a romantic vacation than to the great testament of love, the Taj Mahal? Built by the grieving Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his late wife Mumtaz Mahal, the Taj Mahal’s unrivaled beauty explains why it’s regarded as one of the eight wonders of the world. A visit to India wouldn’t be complete without it.
The building itself is nothing short of beautiful, but I expected that.
We are accosted first thing with the guides, who must be hired I fear… though now that I think of it none of the Indians had guides. Ours was clearly on the take with both vendors and cabs. We road a camel cart the mile into the TM complex from the designated parking areas… more jostling… and spent time admiring the entry “gates” gardens and hearing the story of the mosque and quarters that flank the Taj itself. The marble for the Taj, and it is all mare only things that aren’t perfectly balanced are the graves themselves. The Taj’s dead wife was laid to rest in the exact center of the complex. When he died, they buried him next to her. There is no grave on the other side.
Marble of the Taj is inlaid with semi precious jewels, (another item that they want to sell us in the Kasbah we must walk through to get back to the car.) It is built with several optical illusions, inlay of dark stone so that columns that are flat look three dimensional, etc. It is definitely worth the trip; photographs can’t capture the luminescence of the marble, the sense of calm that permeates even among the tourists.
(Marble details, including optical illusion
columns (those zig zags are flat) and residence built to match the
identical mosque on the other side)
View from the back (the back is identical to the front) with armed guard.
I do feel like I’m becoming an expert on Muslim art and architecture though.
After leaving the Taj, we took the “new highway” out of Agra, which was supposed to get us back in 2.5 hours. You already know the end of that story. I soon found that my senses were overloaded. It no longer surprised me to see herds of cattle sharing the roadside, the tiny thin children walking around with no pants, the hundreds of uniformed boys and girls getting off and on busses, the motorcycles carrying at minimum a young man in western type clothing, a young woman in full sari and a child all at once, other motorcycles loaded with plywood, or crates of goods or mattresses, held on precariously by string or just the hands of the men, darting in and around traffic, without helmets or other protection. It didn’t surprise me to see an elephant walking alongside the road. I am ashamed to have lost my wonder and empathy.
from inside the car. Sharing the road.
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