Peacocks no longer call on the way to Agra.
Instead, there is the buzz of sleek sedans zipping past each other on the super-fast, six-lane Yamuna Expressway. Garishly emblazoned tourist buses block the middle lane. Tractor-trailers trundle their produce from one ancient village to another. Agra is no longer a destination, but a four-hour distraction from Delhi.
“People prefer to make a quick trip from Delhi and get back after a dekko at the country’s most famous monument, the incomparable Taj Mahal,” says a tour operator.
“We call it the accident expressway,” proclaims Sahadev, the driver of our hired taxi. The skeletons of cars have been left on the median like colourful dragonflies. The concrete surface is flecked with fly ash from thermal power stations that cause automobile tyres to explode unless they are properly maintained.
We halt at the midway points. We are in cow belt country but the refreshments are of global brands, offering coffee and doughnuts. There are also kiosks selling kullad chai , sweet and hot from slow-fired clay cups. The owners lounge in crackling white kurta-pyjama s, reinforcing the idea of the aspirational society of the nouveau U.P. farmer-turned-entrepreneur. There, a Pajero in the cowshed, while a farmhand stands by holding a cell-phone. When the air conditioning cuts off, the generator coughs apologetically and the electricity returns. But in the washrooms, a miracle: clean toilets!
The Yamuna Express is a red light warning of the Disneyfication of India’s iconic cultural landmark.
It is not just the peacocks that have left, but also the foreign tourists. There has been a fall of some 50,000 international visitors this year. According to some forecasts, the number is likely to double.
Luxury hotels dot the landscape. Each major hotel chain is represented, mirroring the opulence of the Mughal style in their distinctive architecture, their gardens, their marble-trellised courtyards and superb cultural offerings.
Will the demands for e-ticketing bring the foreigners back? Or might the belated attempts to clean and green the Taj Trapezium, or sacred ground reserved for the foreign tourist, tempt them to return? No one seems to care that of the 80 lakh tourists who visited Agra in 2014, only 8 lakh were foreign. Even some of these were of the backpacker variety. Just as Agra itself has been oversold as India’s ace tourist destination, within the city there is a three-monument pyramid of favoured sites — the Taj Mahal, the Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri.
Once you get off the Expressway, there is an abrupt descent from the 21st century to more familiar scenes from a panorama of the past. But what a past it is.
Like a fading courtesan in one of the kotha s from the days of the Mughals, Agra beckons the traveller with a dusty charm. In the harsh glare of the midday sun, all that the visitor sees are the pockmarks of history, the fissures caused by the neglect of time and the burden of excess. The moat circling the first and most ambitious of the Mughal Forts, the Red Fort, is filled with a stench so powerful it recalls the Mughal custom of piling up the heads of their enemies at the gates of their cities as a warning.
The smell permeates Agra’s open gutters and landfills, polluting the crumbling banks of the Yamuna with a black ooze of dirt that is now mixed with industrial pollutants. Pigs snort with undisguised glee at the feast that awaits them at the garbage dumps. Cows roam at their leisure through the crowded markets, preferring sometimes to chew on McDonald’s throwaway cups and wrappers. Maybe they too have developed a taste for the satisfying crunch of wax-covered global brands.
Even Agra’s famous mithai-wallah s are being pushed to the walls of the Agra Fort, holding on to the gelatinous sweetmeat called petha . There are, by all accounts, some 50,000 petha- makers stirring their vats of quicklime and alum and, finally, boiling sugar syrup to make the shiny sweetmeats. They supply 500 petha , the pethas ready-packed in round plastic containers that are stacked like marble columns.
“You can’t leave Agra without taking a box of its famous sweet,” advises a shopkeeper, pointing to his glistening rows of yellow petha . The bullet-shaped sweet is made from what Tamilians call pooshnikai (ash gourd), used in the South puja to ward off the evil eye. The Tamil contribution to Agra’s fame is that the humble pooshnikai is grown on fields in Madurai and sent North.
Emperor Shah Jahan is said to have inspired the making of the petha during the construction of the Taj. When the 21,000 workers were slaving away for 22 years to create his masterpiece, he heard that they were about to revolt against their daily dal-roti diet. Shah Jahan turned to his architect Ustad Isa Effendi to find a solution. He, in turn, put the question to a holy man, the Pir Naqshabandi, who plucked the recipe out of the air while in a trance. The petha was immortalised, or should we say Shahjehanised.
Today the petha- makers of Agra are in revolt against the administration that is trying to shift them across the Yamuna and away from the backyard of the Taj. The coal fires from their kitchens are staining the white marble dome of the Taj Mahal with a tinge of what may be called petha- yellow.
“Do you know how they clean the Taj Mahal?” asks Chanchal Srivastava, our tour guide at Agra. “They use multani mitti, yes, the same mudpack that you use in beauty parlours.” He shows us how the massive face of the platform on which the Taj stands has already been scrubbed clean of the yellow patina of time.
Though Srivastava is an accredited tour guide with excellent credentials — he can tell you, for instance, what exactly it is to be a tour guide to Tom Cruise (“nice man but very short!”) or to Oprah (“large!”) — he is part of the local Agra scene that gets a bad press. They form a group, known as ‘touts and guides’, which descends upon the unwary ‘foreign’ tourist with all the tenacity of a locust attack.
There are other moments, of course, when Agra catches at your throat and unfurls the formal splendour of its gardens of light and shadowed marble pavilions. It forces you to blink back tears as the voices of trained actors resound in the darkness of the Sound and Light show at the Red Fort and Shah Jahan’s sorrow finds expression in the marbled perfection of his love for Mumtaz Mahal. As the deep-throated voices of the subcontinent’s maestros fill the dark night, you become a part of those armies marching into Agra, taking the shining Kohinoor from her pliant coffers and planting the seeds of both the prosperity of the next 200 years of Mughal rule and the poisoned tubers of religious hatred that would seep slowly into the fertile Indian soil.
Or in that moment, the hour just after dawn, as the first of the visitors crosses into the dew-dampened stone paths leading from the East entry and the West to catch the first glimpse of the Taj. The crowds are yet to come. But when they do, what is evident is the sheer variety of the different groups. There are young women, so skimpily clad you wonder if they think they are on a beach in Phuket. The men with them are unshaved and apparently unwashed, but both get the same careful pat-down by the security personnel. They are followed by groups of Middle Eastern families with the women in head scarves and dark body-covering garments, with the men again partially grizzled. Some groups wear white or pastel identikits, still others exude an aura of expensive perfume and designer wear. Everyone carries cameras, or takes the now ubiquitous selfie. Professional photographers make their guests pose at the best locations and shoot unlikely pictures, promising to deliver the results before departure.
As the morning progresses, the group that is most prominent in the crowd are the gaudy multitudes of India’s own travellers — farmers from almost every part of the country, new brides, young mothers and children.
At close quarters, the Taj’s perfection is dazzling. Each chiselled facet presents another view, another face, both familiar and yet impenetrable. At the heart of the immense whiteness of the marble, despite all the crowds, there is a perfect emptiness. The secret of the Taj is that it does not profess any cult or religion, promote narrow sectarian interests or promise salvation.
It’s a smile on the face of time as mysterious as the Mona Lisa, as enduring as the Sphinx.
