Saturday 30th December Part 3: Agra and Bharatpur

We left the hotel at the crack of dawn the next day (28/12) to get the train to Agra which travelled through some interesting landscape, featuring peculiar round thatched huts. We were met at a seething Agra Fort station by a driver we had booked for the day. He made a hash of getting out of the station, but eventually extricated his car from the throng and drove in the direction of the Taj Mahal. I caught a brief, teasing glimpse through some trees en route, which gave me a little jolt of excitement, so that I silently shook To’s arm and pointed at the now impenetrable wall of trees. Arriving at the car park gave us a taste of the frustrations we would face, as everybody wanted to take us the short distance to the entrance for outrageous sums. In the end we went in a horse-drawn cart for a fairly ridiculous price – I’d have rather walked, but seemed to be in the minority. The queue caused greater hassle, as it was segregated by sex, and we had heard some (false) rumour that there was a time-limit on each visit. What would happen if one half of the family got in first? The idea of not seeing the Taj Mahal together seemed absurd – more than absurd, actually, distressing. We realised further down the queue that we had to leave our bags in a cloakroom – nothing of this had been mentioned before – so To had to rush off and take our bags, while I got closer and closer to the entrance, and more and more jittery. He came back in time and Carol and Rosemary joined our queue for a while but ended up being shunted back across to their queue, much further ahead than they would have been had they not joined us. An Italian couple in front of us had done exactly the same, after a long and unsettlingly emotional argument with the queue guards. The Indian women in the queue were understandably unhappy about all this – “You come from a civilised country,” one said to the Italian girl, “so we expect good things from you.”
“How can we be good when the system is so uncivilised?” I felt like shouting.
   Three of us eventually managed to get through, but Carol was sent back to deposit her MP3 player with our bags – no easy task, as she hadn’t put them away in the first place. Finally, fuming, she arrived inside, and the four of us made a pact not to let the horrendousness of the last hour detract from the beauty ahead. We walked on and turned a corner, and there it was: through an arch, shimmering. In To’s own account of this trip, he states that there would be utterly no point trying to describe what is one of the most famous buildings in the world. I agree, almost fully, but perhaps that refusal puts it on a pedestal the way people put Bach, Shakespeare, Gandhi and others on pedestals. It is almost universally regarded as the sublime peak of Mughal architecture,  a remarkable building whose journey can be traced through the mosques, forts and mausolea of Delhi and Lahore. What can I do but agree? While inside, admiring the exquisite pietro dura - gemstones inlaid on the white marble by Italian artisans - I remembered a story I had read somewhere: the emperor Shah Jahan, wanting to check up on the progress of his builders went to the site in disguise. He approached one stonemason and asked:
   “What are you doing?”
   “Building a palace for the emperor,” came the answer. “What are you doing?”
The conversation lasted several minutes, the stonemason all the time unaware of his companion’s identity. After a while, the emperor left and approached another worker, asking the same question.
   “Building the palace for the emperor,” came the answer again. “I’ve got my work cut out for me, so can’t waste my time answering your questions.”
  Finally, the King of the World asked a third labourer the same question and received this astonishing reply:
   “I’m helping to build the greatest building ever built, for the greatest ruler ever to have lived, and if you don’t stop pestering me it will never be finished. Bugger off.”
   Shah Jahan was not impressed at all with the first builder, as he was idle and easily distracted, and had no pride in his work. The second showed admirable focus on his labour and impressed the emperor more, but it was only the third, who understood the magnitude of his task, that truly won his admiration.
   Another stock classic about the Taj Mahal is that when Aurangzeb (Shah Jahan’s least favourite son, a ruthless dictator and Islamic hard-liner according to orthodox histories) overthrew Shah Jahan, he imprisoned him in Agra Fort, and Shah Jahan spent the rest of his days languishing in captivity, gazing over the river at his immortal creation, lamenting the loss of his beloved wife buried inside. Cynical historians disagree: Shah Jahan is more likely to have spent his last days whoring and drinking himself to death. From everything I have read about the Mughals, I am inclined to favour this latter version, although I must admit that the reason I find it the more appealing is its challenge to the conventional romantic account rather than its greater inherent plausibility.

No introduction needed...

   After a bland lunch in a tourist place that our driver insisted upon, we drove to Agra Fort, which, free from the burden of deep cultural resonance was a very fine, solid complex of buildings. According to a sign outside, there has been a fort at Agra since 1080 when it was built by the Chauhans, a Rajput clan from Ajmer. It came to prominence when Sikander Lodi (1487-1517), Afghan ruler of Hindustan, shifted his capital there from Delhi. When Hindustan seceded to the Mughals, Agra served as the capital until the middle of Shah Jahan’s reign, when he transferred power back to Delhi and built “Shahjahanabad”, today’s Old Delhi. Akbar, Shah Jahan’s illustrious grandfather, has left quite an architectural legacy here, with red sandstone palaces such as the Bengali Mahal, which combines very typical Islamic arches and elements of Hindu-Jain temple architecture to great effect. Shah Jahan has left a number of white marble mosques and, more importantly, beguiling views of the Taj, which no doubt provided an excellent backdrop for his mourning or moaning.
   We rejoined our driver in the late afternoon and set off towards our final destination: Bharatpur.  Sadly our mode of travel that day, while wonderfully efficient and eminently the most sensible way of allowing us to see Agra’s key landmarks in the limited time available, did not leave room for exploring some of its less exalted parts and did not afford us even a glimpse of the city’s soul. The route to Bharatpur was not especially interesting, although we passed by Fatehpur Sikri, a dream alternative capital not fully realised by Akbar, and now a detour on the Golden Triangle (Delhi, Agra, Jaipur) for those with a particular interest in the Mughal legacy. We arrived at the Hotel Spoonbill, where we were to stay two nights, in the early evening. It was rather shabby in comparison to the Jaipur hotel, although more upmarket than most of the places I had stayed in previously. We had a cheery supper at the old Spoonbill, just down the road, where we were able to wait for our food by the campfire, sipping beer.
   We got up early the next day and headed off to the Keolodeo Ghana National Park, the reason for visiting this otherwise undistinguished town. We decided to travel into the centre of the sanctuary in two cycle-rickshaws. The drivers were both Punjabi Sikhs, and clearly very used to the sanctuary’s fauna, as they were able to point out numerous species en route, including birds such as the orange-headed thrush, remarkably well-camouflaged in the surrounding leaf litter, and the delightfully named rufous tree pie. We also saw a number of mammals such as the nilgai (literally “blue cow” but actually an antelope) and the large-antlered sambar deer. After such a rich crop, the rickshaw drivers evidently expected more than the Rs100 we had agreed and pretended to be very hurt that we only gave them an extra 50% tip.
   We spent the rest of the day out own masters on foot and saw a great many other interesting, mainly avian, species, returning the Spoonbill in the late afternoon for our final evening together. This we spent in the old Spoonbill restaurant – more beer, campfire and merriment, and the inevitable looking back over a successful holiday that had been something of a milestone. We praised Carol for her excellent organisation – a tremendous feat of long-distance co-ordination long in advance of the actual holiday, resulting in all our trains, cars and hotels being booked, hugely reducing the stress that would have resulted from more a spontaneous kind of travelling in the most touristy part of India at the busiest time of year. I would have felt guilty for not having played a more active role in the organisation had I not known how much she enjoys this aspect of things.
   This morning, our final morning, was spent back in the bird sanctuary followed by a brief lunch at the hotel before getting a taxi to the station where I saw the others onto the “Golden Mail Express” (presumably destined ultimately for Amritsar) and ran alongside the train as it pulled off until it became too fast for me to keep up with.

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And so I am about to go home to Udaipur. I can almost write that and believe in the “home”, because I now realise how essential the idea of having Udaipur to return to has been to my sense of self in the past week. I have used it to separate myself from the other tourists I have seen and, more importantly, from the rest of my family. Without any malice I have allowed myself to imagine a special depth to my experiences compared to the others’ because of my deeper connection to the country and also because I know that I will still be here, in an official capacity, long after they have left.
  The reasoning behind this is dubious, and quite apart from that I have actually been racked with insecurities over the last few days about my work in Udaipur. Last night, in particular, I slept very badly, letting worry pile on worry - about money, about the future, but most of all about my vocation. The question of whether this is really what I want to be doing has almost without my noticing it matured from a shameful doubt to a healthy desire to revise my career aspirations. My Plan B has always been to return to England, preferably London, and find work in the field of Climate Change mitigation (perhaps some kind of “Sustainable Energy Manager” if such exist). Until now I had always regarded this as something I would turn to when, after years of international development work and the accompanying world travel, the hypocrisy of trying to save the world in between long-haul flights became too much to handle. It seems that the moment has come much sooner than anticipated, and this is having the dangerous effect of making me view my Vikas Samiti work as a naughty indulgence when compared to the real jobs the rest of my family are returning to. Thus the demarcation is turned on its head...

*

   I am still in the seedy bar, pretty much ready to head off to the station. Bharatpur is nothing special, but interesting enough to while away part of an afternoon in. There is a big fort built by a king called Suraj Mal, who was a Jat. I had thought the Jats were a Punjabi farming caste, but there seem to be Jats down here as well. There are genuine Punjabi Sikhs in Bharatpur too – someone told me that 20% of Bharatpur’s population is Sikh – and I’ve seen a lot of them, instantly recognisable by their style of turban, just like the Sikhs in England. The main palace is open to the public in a way that makes as little effort as possible and it gives the impression of being about to fall down at any minute. Part of it has been commandeered by some kind of government office.

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As usual, I can’t resist a postscript: I got to the station very early, around 8.30pm, and had a wander round the quiet streets nearby. I met one Ravinder Singh, who insisted on taking me for a spin on his motorbike, introducing me to all his friends in Pidgin English before taking me back to the station and giving me his number (extracting promises of frequent phonecalls from me) before profuse farewells. As an afterthought he asked me to look out for English girlfriends for him – the way he asked made it absolutely obvious it was an afterthought, not an ulterior motive. It struck me that none of the above would have taken place in England. I would have felt more on edge strolling round the side-streets near a station (take King’s Cross for example) and the idea of somebody in a spirit of disinterested fun offering me a ride on a motorobike is hopelessly implausible. Much more implausible still is the idea that I would have accepted it!