A Sigh made Stone 1

                     “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is
                       where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
                                                                                   Henry David Thoreau


“Chaiyuh...Chaiya...Chaiyuh...”
The droning automatism of the chai wallahs penetrated the dingy gray dawn on the platform. Layered between the diesel and the shit were ephemeral passing fragrances of cardamom and sugar and hot buffalo milk. I loved the way they poured it in an aerobatic flourish, giving you your money’s worth of gravity.
As the purgatory of sleeping beggars fell further behind, we emerged from the station, clacking into the sun towards the east. I glanced at my ticket. Taj Express.
Our destination was two hundred kilometers further into Uttar Pradesh, and much further into utter pandemonium. With over 200 million people, Uttar Pradesh, were it a nation in its own right, would have been the world's fifth most populous country, ahead of Brazil, and bereft of samba. We were headed to ancient Agrevana, mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, as ‘the border of the forest’. The Mughals had called it Akbarabad. The train conductor announced our arrival to Agra, late morning.
A bank of cycle rickshaw wallahs were waiting for us outside the station, peddling their pedals. Julie and Robyn and I put our packs in one conveyance, jumped in another, and slowly- slowly began to accelerate towards another one of Smiling Steve’s sanctuaries- the Akbar International, home of owner and sage, Ali Baba, a spacious room facing the garden, all the necessities of life, and some of the absurdities.
One of the latter was loitering in the dining room. Percy was an Aussie primary schoolteacher, Tin Man’s heart, generosity of Scrooge, and Billy Carter’s sense of aesthetics, thirty-eight going on twelve. He volunteered to accompany us on our afternoon touring.
Outside the Akbar, the original rickshaw wallahs from the station had waited, in the hope of scoring more lucrative shop commissions, by diverting unsuspecting passengers from their planned itineraries. We called them on it.
“If you go to four of your sights, you must be coming to four of ours.” One offered. We went down the drive, and hired two younger ones, thin Dravidian waifs with checkered tea-towel dhotis, from an eighteen-year old entrepreneur with a more well rounded understanding of rickshaw market forces. We turned a tight corner on a narrow street, and right into a two white Indian horned oxen, yoked to an overloaded cart of thirty stacked burlap bags, a turbaned driver, and three passengers, riding high in the air. Not France.
We braked at the Amar Singh Gate of the Red fort, two and a half crescentic kilometers of ringed red double ramparts, punctuated by castellated bastions. Commissioned by Akbar, and converted into a walled city palace by Shah Jahan, almost a million and a half builders took eight years to finish it, in 1573. We crossed a wooden drawbridge to the inner ascending right-angled Hathi Pol Elephant Gate, designed to disable any elephant from acquiring the attack speed necessary to crush the fort’s defensive entry. The forbidding Red Fort exterior concealed an inner paradise of marble and pietra dura inlaid minipalaces of pearls and mirrors and pools and fountains, and had once contained the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the Peacock Throne.
We visited the Musamman Burj, the balconied tower where, imprisoned by his son for the last eight years of his life, Shah Jahan had a view of the mausoleum he had built for his wife, a mile down the river. Even from here, you could feel its floating magnificence, castle in the air.
The heat, and the sheer size of the place, began to take its toll. Bats, chirping above us in the various interiors, and the rich Vegemite smell of their droppings, encouraged us along. I jumped on an oxen-powered lawnmower, not expecting the reaction I received, from the giant white bullocks collared to it. They burst into forward propulsion, and it took me what seemed forever to gain their control, and guide them into a steady cascading pattern of grass clipping exhaust, in rows of my own making. Steer steering. Robyn brought me a Limca on a wide turn.
Back outside the gate, we found a whip-wielding crazy man, where our rickshaw waif wallahs had been. Percy was just about to teach him some Aussie rules, when they reappeared through the dust. After a brief rest on the terrace of Jahangir’s Palace, our skinny black cyclists brought us across to the Yamuna’s left bank, and into a large cruciform garden, crisscrossed by watercourses and walkways. In the middle stood an alabaster jewel box, with hexagonal towers rising forty feet on each corner.
The Itmud-Ud-Daulah was the geometrically perfect tomb of the grandfather of Mumtaz Mahal, whose own mausoleum would become the most famous in the world. ‘Pillar of the State,’ it was half way to, and architecturally and historically half way through, the distance from the Red fort to the Taj. It’s Rajasthani white marble, encrusted with lapis lazuli, topaz, cornelian, onyx, and jasper, was carved into wine bottles and cypress trees, fruit and bouquets of flowers, and delicate jali screen latticework, filtering light into the interior. Percy thought it was ‘for poofters.’
He though even less of the Chini-ka-Rauza dome of Persian blue-glazed tiles. Our rickshaw wallahs had trouble finding it and, when we did, it was a mess- the tilework only hinted at its former glory. Screaming hordes of idle kids outside apparently belonged to the sleeping squatters inside.
Nearby was the oldest Mugal garden in India, the Ram Bagh Garden of Relaxation, where Akbar lay without moving for six days, until his third wife, a gardener there, agreed to marry him. We were shouted at, on our way through to admire a peacock, by a gardener who was clearly not prepared for us to lie around for a week.
Our waif wallahs were getting tired, so I switched off pedaling with them, so they could catch their breath. Percy needed ‘tucker,’ so we cycled back across the bridges until he found a name he could recognize. Enter Bob’s Restaurant.
The place was filthy, the service miserably slow, the food slowly miserable, and the electricity, like the charm, came in particles. I tried to warn him, but Percy was determined to have ‘real’ food. He called out for Bob, and met the real owner’s tubercular horking instead. He wanted ‘spag bol’ and got a version thereof. The girls and I had sag paneer and rice, and three fermented Limcas. Percy refused to contribute to the veg cutlets we bought for the rickshaw waif wallahs. The next we heard of him, from Ali Baba the next day, Percy was still in the loo, reaping the karma of bubble and squeak. But that would be tomorrow, and we were about to transcend the day. Any and all days. After hammering the cotterpins back into the wheel of one of the rickshaws, we set off along the river towards a big red sandstone gate. Heaven lay in ambush, just beyond.