Monsoon Honeymoon: A Subcontinental Travelogue: Part III: Escaping the Delhi Megalopolis in Search of the World's Loveliest Tomb

Andrew, Aswhin, and Leigh in Delhi.

Wednesday, June 19: Delhi to Agra

I arose in the early morning to the sound of laughter.  The Indian boys were back for their summertime dawn Cricket match.  After Chai Latte and Poached Eggs, Leigh and I strolled through the village ruins.  Five hundred years ago this village had been the site of a water tank, a mosque, and a Muslim University.  We learned this as we ducked through arches, danced on stone walls, and greeted the Indian kids who were swarming over the ruins even at this early morning hour.  We strolled on, as my Leigh inevitably loves to do, through Deer Park, where we saw Deer, Peacocks, and a jovial father chuckling while playing Cricket with his son.

Back at the hostel, we received a visit from Ashwin, the college classmate of Leigh's sister Shannon.  Our 45 minutes together were revelatory, as Ashwin distilled his early experiences of his yearlong sojourn in Delhi. As an Indian-American working in the city, he was a definite cultural outsider.  Quite simply, in America he had become accustomed to an autonomy utterly alien to modern Indians, who still existed in a social and cultural fabric emphasizing caste, family name, arranged relationships, and more.  He was steeling himself to deal with the words a friend had said: "Ashwin, in India YOU are not single; you are alone."

Our driver Karan arrived at 11:00, and though we had spent barely 24 hours in Delhi, it was time to leave.  The whole sub-Continent awaited us, and we hadn't a second to spare.  Leigh and I gazed wide-eyed out the car windows as this perplexing metropolis streamed by.  It just. . . never. . .ends.  Delhi is larger than life, beyond imagination.  As we reached the outskirts of the city, we saw the River Yamuna swelling and surging against its banks, more so than it had done in years.  Shacks built in the riverbed were already flooding, and upriver in the Uttarkand province some of the worst flooding in decades was claiming the lives of almost 1,000 Indians.  The monsoon had undoubtedly arrived. . .

We crossed the border into Uttar Pradesh, which looked like the New Jersey of Delhi, an urban satellite of the metropolitan core.  We merged onto a toll road, which we raced along for hours.  Around us high rises receded into villages and farmland, where industrious Indians farmed millet for bread or burned clay in furnaces to make bricks.  Smoke belched forth from the mouths of hundreds of brick furnaces in every direction.

Much like China, not an inch of land is wasted in India.  If it is usable, it is a road, a house, a building, a farm, something.  There is no equivalent of the endlessly spacious American West in this country of a billion people, and as this youngest and fastest growing of mega nations continues to reproduce, human density will only increase. 

Four hours southeast of Delhi, downriver on the Yamuna, we approached the city of Agra.  This riverfront city was a prominent military fortress for the Mughal Emperors 400 years ago, and the castle they built to fortify their Empire looms forbiddingly above the river.


However, the reason you visit Agra is to see India's most famous site, and the world's most famous monument to love: The Taj Mahal.

You're going to have to earn it though.  The traffic of Agra, home to uncountable millions of people, is a labyrinthine obstacle course.  The honking, as everywhere in India, is relentless.  Cows wander randomly through apocalyptic traffic.  Some buildings have been taken over by rascally pods of monkeys.  Despite the working A/C in your car, heat pours through the windows.  Is it worth the trouble. . .?

As India's premier tourist destination, in Agra hotels abound.  We checked in to a hotel just one kilometer from the Taj, sucked in cool drinks and air conditioning, then ventured back out for a late afternoon tour of Agra Fort.

Sunil would be our guide, arranged for us by the high-quality tourist agency "Magic India." He was polite, knowledgeable, respectful, and a little flash.  In the midst of his insightful presentations, I thought I detected a fatigue at being a college-educated man making his living every single day off of tours of Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal. I don't blame him.

Like Red Fort in Delhi, Agra Fort was an imposing red sandstone fortress built to house the Mughal Emperors, their women, and their soldiers.  The common people lived outside the city walls on the river. Despite the existence of moats, lookouts, walls, secret chambers, and guard posts, Agra Fort was never attacked. 

The most sophisticated artistry of Agra Fort centered around rare stones.  20,000 Persian artisans were imported to work on a cherished art form, the inlay of precious stones- onyx, rubies, emeralds, sapphire, turquoise- in white marble. In the Emperor's private quarters, such spectacular stonework abounded.  After spending decades working on the palace, the Persians ended up settling down and blending with the local people, and Agra is now the only place in the world where such stonework continues to be practiced.

"No," says Leigh. "This is not how my life happens. . "

In the early evening, we drove across the river to the manicured gardens that boast a glorious, opposite river-bank view of the Taj.  My original plan had been to propose to Leigh at this precise moment, but my mother and sister talked me off the ledge months previous.  Leigh and I strolled in the darkening summer night and absorbed the incomparable beauty of the world's greatest monument to love.

On the way home we stopped for an Indian feast at Pinch of Spice.  Before bed we checked in quickly on the hotel rooftop to hear a tabla and sitar player plying their musical trade with the black silhouette of the un-illuminated Taj cutting the night sky.  Tomorrow at dawn we would enter the Taj. . .