Presented by Tom Adair
Marooned in traffic, sprawled in the air-conditioned maw of my four-wheeled drive, with its sleek metal sheen and fat-cat tyres, I hear the sound of the beggar’s fingers tap the window. The trick, I’ve been told, is not to look.
But the starveling face is that of a woman, the bones of her cheeks in their skeletal starkness are tissued with skin that is almost translucent. Her arm is a stem. Like a broken metronome it waves its withered stump. Goodbye, goodbye.
Never before have I been to India. Never before, as now, have I sat in the equivalent of Cinderella’s coach staring out at life slipstreaming by: the maimed, the beautiful and the heroic. Yet out of chaos something marvellous coheres. Inside the vehicle, as it purrs through the edge of Delhi, south towards fields of tinsel gold, through choking traffic, lorries, bicycles, mopeds and cars with horns like sore throats, through slapdash pedestrians cutting across the shoal of noise, do I witness my ambushing version of India.
It is a picture which, despite the explicit poverty, somehow bespeaks the continuous thrum of life lived fully, formidably, humanly. Its allure is irresistible and immediate. It is a sensory bombardment like no other.
“English Wine Sold” boasts a hoarding. English wine! “Bagpiper Whisky—Now at No 3 in the World”. Beneath the advertising awnings, as makeshift as everything else in this world of makeshift permanence, groups of men flash cut-throat razors while they shave. They chatter avidly. Dogs lick the slick of lazy soapsuds. Women hunker, knuckles reddened. These are the entrails of the city. A hum of existence beneath the heat of a near-flawless sky.
Like many another box-ticking tourist, I am here to discover the legacy of India. Agra, the former capital of the vaunted Mughal empire, and once a preserve of the British Raj, boasts four World Heritage sites, each clustered within easy reach of the whispered fame of the Taj Mahal. I must see them all.
At 2pm I enter the cloistered welcome shade of the grandiose Hotel Amarvilas. My room, in common with every other, swishly furnished and filled with understated opulence, faces across a perfectly manicured sward of lawn. Loafing like gargoyles on my balcony are monkeys baring their teeth, obscenely scratching themselves, defying hotel decorum. Lifting my gaze, I take in the reason this hotel exists: the fabulous dome and four minarets of the world’s most photographed mausoleum.
We are due to watch it fade at dusk into gathering darkness. But over lunch a dust storm from nowhere suddenly whips itself into a fury. Hotel handymen dash for cover. A veil of grit blanks out the view across the terrace, followed by rain, incessant rain and the far smack of thunder. “It never rains here,” says the manager. “Not in May!” But this is May and the terrace is now a-dance with the fury of a downpour. So we rendezvous at dawn.
I rise at five, before the wake-up call, before Harsh, with his cup of black tea and cheery greeting, taps my door. Dainty slices of scented lemon drift among tea leaves. “It will be hot,” says Harsh, peering out across the balcony, nodding his turban. “Yes, I believe it will be a scorcher.”
We totter out to the sound of Sousa from hidden speakers positioned discretely around the courtyard. Buggies ferry us down the road.
Outside the entrance to the Taj, I am instructed by a companion to shut my eyes, then led by the elbow through an archway, held in readiness, held steady. All at once I am five years old, a promised treat within my grasp. I flash open my eyes.
Like half the world, I have seen the photographs. The posters. The films. The postcards. The TV image of Princess Diana marooned on her bench in lonely, operatic splendour. The Taj Banal! But no, there it is, proportionate, elegant, symmetrical, a whisper in marbled lightness. What makes it a wonder of the world is, paradoxically, its unworldliness. So familiar, it seems like a ghost of itself; in the almost deserted gardens it wears aloofness like a trance. Reflected in water, it yearns for the sky.
Already I feel the Taj like a lurch between reality and dream—timeless, its future assured from the moment of its creation. Its teardrop-shaped dome evokes its biography—an expression of the sorrow of Shah Jahan, it is the memorial tomb to Mumtaz, his second wife, who died in childbirth. Many years later, when one of their sons had thrown him in prison inside the Red Fort, Shah Jahan could every morning look from his cell across the winding Yamuna river and clearly discern the Taj’s outline.
From the Red Fort’s ramparts I share that view the same afternoon. Celestial choirs could not have rendered the moment more poignant.
India reaches you. What you see is what you feel. It is a dangerous condition because it disposes you towards conclusions, towards rapid judgements. For, here is a patch on the crust of the earth where society stratifies into complexities of religion, social order, superstition, of expectation based on subtle shifts in decorum. Around the entrance to the Red Fort, like almost every other tourist lure, you will see with a physical jolt a swarm of beggars, vendors, distraits. Street urchins collar you, lepers huddle in shadowy corners, your conscience pounds. Across the street, kicking their heels, men with the killer eyes of reptiles wait for the pay-off.
The scene is repeated the following day at Fatephur Sikri, the long-abandoned Mughal city, a great walled citadel on the crest of a stony ridge. I scurry across the windy concourse of the interior Mughal palace, all the way from its outer precinct, the footfall of vendors in my wake. What is so striking is their forbearance, their lack of resentment. I have imposed myself on their world, parading my privilege, my inconceivable wealth. And yet they smile.
“Very good price.” Bent like a stick, he holds out a peeling-knife; there are flies on his face, a padlock in his hand; it is shaped like a god—one of the hundreds of Hindu gods. He lowers his price. He needs the money. To yield will provide no absolution. And yet I must. The scale of his need is inconceivably immense.
I try to forget this as I stare at the fabulous ruin, consulting my guide book. Fatephur Sikri’s brief, bloody history, I read, is a tale of power inextricably tied to Emperor Akbar’s self-serving vision, a tale of harems, of executions using elephants to smash the emperor’s enemies to the ground then tread them to death. The tale is necklaced with lavish dances, scenes of carousing, and, at the last, with the swift abandonment of the palace when Akbar shifted his court to Lahore in the winter of 1585.
Since then the city has softly succumbed to the hungry elements: to the wind that pours like time through its windows and doorways, a whittling presence abetted by rain. You can only imagine how overwhelming it all must have seemed in its glorious, hedonistic heyday to the dwellers in straggled villages on the plains. No one took time to write their version. No one cared.
Time in India strikes you as slippery, a bewildering simultaneity of historical time, biographical time and mythical time embroiled in the almost accidental present. The future seems left to take care of itself.
I am on a rickshaw-bike, in warm rain, in the Keoladeo National Park, on the look-out for birds of the rarest species, when Mr Shivare tells me that time is at best provisional. Mr Shivare is pedalling furiously, pointing gravely to a strutting bar-necked goose. “It flies at 23,000 feet. You could easily see one from a big jet.” He pauses dramatically. I supply the expected nod of amazed approval.
Keoladeo, in the Fatephur Sikri hinterland, is one of the world’s great breeding grounds, home to hyena, jackal, antelope, to 2,000 painted storks, one of which nests beside the track as we slo-mo by. Then Mr Shivare spots a dead cow at the edge of a water-hole. We stop. He shakes his head. Ankle-deep, bent to their task, two men are hauling the cow up the bank observed by a vulture. “Time is provisional. Yes, indeed.” Shivare sighs. We pedal on. The land and the men seem joined to eternity, somehow held in this prayerful moment. “There is a tiger in the park,” Shivare says. “We must tread with care.”
Outside the gates we draw up gently beside a table on which, neatly placed are a dozen elegant metal antelopes, and beside them carvings of mystery birds and an elephant made from jade. I quickly deduce they are for sale. “End of the day. Going very cheap,” Shivare says. The vendor bows in turn to each of us. “My cousin,” Shivare says. The man bows again. I make my selection. The deal is done.
Driving back through dying light to bustling Agra, I ponder how geography yields to history. How the land feels overwhelmed by the groan of its people, by the army stacked in convoy by the roadside, by dancing bears, laden-down camels, the city pounded by its factories, by the throttle of everyday life twisted into a roar. And yet the effect is that of life in a graph of ascendance. Of human dignity. Of a certain intrinsic grace. Children play cricket on a waste ground. Music amplifies the dusk. A string of light bulbs necklace a lorry as it vrooms past waving youths. “We all rub along,” Shivare had said. “Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew. Can’t afford not to.” This soothing sentiment flouted the rules of normal existence in a society tied to the scuffle for scarce resources. Yet it seemed true. India somehow seemed elegiac in its mess.
Now, years later, I sometimes wake remembering dawn, the light rising over the Yamuna River, copper-specked clouds and the sunlight’s softness igniting the tops of the teetering minarets of the Taj—like flame-tipped candles on the birthday cake of a giant as dawn light purls across the dome. Or maybe I blink, and find myself driving on some dusty road, caught in a wind that tastes of the scampering ghost-cries of children, of jacaranda trees, the hills, and catching the tap of a beggar’s knuckle against my window, know I have rooted the tip of one toe—nothing less, nothing more—in the earth of India’s ineluctable, irresistible vibration.
March 2017
Objects and Stories 