by M. M. Kaye
There were several reasons for this: the first, strangely enough, being that Indians in general took no interest at all in this marvel of marvels and rarely bothered to visit it. Yet there it was, free for anyone to walk into and explore. No entrance fee to pay, nothing to prevent the humblest, poorest and grubbiest young citizen from wandering in. I know; because I went there again and again and spent hours and days there and played in the gardens with the children of the few (the very few!) Indian families who occasionally dropped in. And had Bets or I ever seen one of the sleepy custodians of the Taj, who spent their days dozing peacefully in the shade of the great entrance gate, turn away an Indian of whatever age or caste, we would have asked to know why. We knew everyone who worked at the Taj, from the head chowkidar down to the youngest and lowliest gardener’s boy; including the old Mulvi and his assistant who had charge of the underground burial chamber in which Mumtaz Mahal, ‘Ornament of the Palace’, lies beside the husband who raised this marvellous tomb for her, and by doing so made her name immortal. If any of these people had actively discouraged their own countrymen from visiting the Taj we could not have failed to notice the fact, and be curious about it. And if we had discovered that ‘only Sahib-log’ were permitted to enter freely, I suspect we would have felt slightly grand and exclusive.
Until a Viceroy, Lord Curzon, began urging India to appreciate and preserve the marvellous monuments of her past, very few Indians seem to have taken any interest in ancient buildings. Temples and mosques being places of worship were OK, since Hindus and Muslims are very devout. A few tombs too, and here and there the odd fort. But that was it, and many a ruling Prince pulled down the glorious palaces that his forefathers had raised and replaced them with some frightful copy of late-Victorian wedding-cakery. Only when mass tourism broke out in the wake of Independence and Partition, and swept round the world like the Black Death, did India begin to take an interest in her historic treasures. Today the crowds that swarm through and around the Taj are three parts Indian to one of Western and Far Eastern sightseers, and hordes of shrill-voiced souvenir-sellers, with their shops and stalls and uproar, insult the approach to their Ivory Gate. Worst of all, the marble itself is being destroyed by the pollution that pours into the air and water from the giant chemical works which, with all India to choose from, some soulless, greedy, money-grubbing politician and/or industrialist thought fit to site a few miles upstream of a building that ranks as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Anyone, given the money, can build a chemical works. But there is only one Taj Mahal, and when it crumbles the whole world will be the poorer.
However, let me return gratefully to the days of my childhood when so few people visited the Taj that, wandering through the gardens and climbing up the narrow stairway that came out at the foot of the great dome, I could sit on the broad top of the central arch and look back at the entrance gate and the Saheli Burj, one of four monuments erected in memory of the maids of honour in the service of Mumtaz Mahal, or down, down and down the sheer cliff of marble decorated with verses from the Koran, to the wide white terrace below and the long channel of water between a double avenue of cypress trees. When tired of sitting there I could walk round to the opposite side of the dome, from where one could look down on the River Terrace and the water lapping below it, and out across the placid reaches of the Jumna to where, downstream, lay the clustered trees and little half-ruined pavilions that marked the site of one of the gardens that the Emperor Barber, who loved gardens and the sound of running water, had made long, long ago at Agra — long before his grandson Akbar built the great Red Fort, or his great-great-grandson Shah Jehan, the Taj Mahal.
Upstream, a mile or so away and facing the Taj across the white shimmering sandbanks and green patches of cultivated land, the fort rose up like a line of red cliffs along the Jumna. And much nearer at hand, directly opposite the River Terrace and with only the river and the sandbanks between, lay the ruined foundations of the tomb that Shah Jehan had meant to build for himself on the far bank. A second Taj exactly like the first one in every detail — only this one was to have been built from black marble instead of white, with a marble bridge across the river to connect the two. In the event he got no further than the foundations before one of his four sons, Aurenzeb, running true to Mogul family form, deposed and imprisoned him. He was confined to the Jasmine Tower of Agra fort, where he ended his days; and he was lucky not to share the fate of his other three sons, all of whom were murdered by their brother Aurenzeb. I felt sorry for the poor old man; but glad that he had not been able to finish building a black Taj opposite the white one, for it seemed to me that a black copy of the pearl-tinted soap-bubble at my back would have turned out to be a hideous, heavy blot on the landscape. And what would he have done about the bridge? Made it particoloured, or half black and half white?
I have never been able to explain to myself why I find the Taj so satisfying to look at, because there is no doubt that it is, in essence, a biscuit-tin on which someone has plonked half an ostrich egg, and then placed on a chopping-board with a pepper-pot at each corner. Alabaster copies of the thing make hideous souvenirs, and I remember Tacklow being presented with a two-foot-high model of it in solid silver mounted on an ebony plinth, which turned out to be a cruet in disguise. Every bit of it unscrewed and could be used either as a pepper-pot, salt-cellar or sugar-sifter, or a container for vinegar or salad oil — or fruit, if you turned the dome upside down! And you actually could keep biscuits in the main body of the tomb. I’ve never seen anything more horrific, and I considered Tacklow to be straying from the truth when he returned it to sender with the usual polite note saying how very kind it was of Rai-Bahadur-Whatever to permit us to examine and admire this superlative example of the silversmith’s art — etc., etc. But perhaps it is just because I cannot explain its allure that the original appeals to me so much. One can’t pin down the Taj. It changes shape and colour with every hour of the day and every change of the weather; and though its sheer weight in tons must be stupendous, it still manages to look as though it is as perishable and impermanent as a soap bubble, and as easily blown away.
As children we came to know it intimately; every single nook and cranny of it. And because we so often had it to ourselves, we regarded it almost as much a personal possession as our secret hideaway above the arch in the Kudsia Bagh.
There were three other places in Agra which we knew and loved and never failed to visit whenever we went there. A garden, hardly more than a ghost of one (if a garden can have a ghost?) that Barber had laid out. The jewel-box tomb of Itmad-ud-Daula, Persian-born father of Jehangir’s Empress, Nur-Jehan, and grandfather of the Lady of the Taj, which is a marvel of intricate, Persian-style inlay-work in coloured marbles and semi-precious stones. And Akbar’s great red sandstone fort, crammed with enough palaces, halls of audience, mosques, pleasure gardens, stables, zenana quarters and baths to keep the most earnest and avidly curious of tourists happily occupied for days on end. Nowadays, I’m afraid, the package-tourist is given little time in which to do as we did; wander at leisure through its enchanted and enchanting halls while Tacklow told us stories about the men and women who had once lived and loved, intrigued and plotted and died there: peopling the rooms with lovely ladies who wore silks and gauzes and glittered with jewels and gold-dust, gaily turbaned warriors and statesmen in armour or embroidered achkans, scores of priests and pages, servitors, grooms, mahouts and men-at-arms; and legions of courtiers and sari-clad waiting-women. All of them at the beck and call of the Mogul himself — Emperor of India and ‘Ruler of the World’.
Tacklow also told us about the Mutiny years, and showed us a little mosque which a British military doctor, who had escaped being massacred by the mutineers in Gwalior and managed to reach the safety of Agra fort, had used as a surgery and temporary hospital for the treatment of wounded and dying men, and which ever after had been regarded as defiled and shunned as a place of worship by Muslims; even though many of that faith owed their lives to
the treatment they received there!* But I am afraid that of all the fort stories, the one that intrigued us most was the tale of a British sentry who claimed to have found one of the many secret passages which, according to legend and folklore, riddle the walls of Akbar’s fort; some of them, it is said, leading to hidden and long-forgotten vaults full of hoarded treasure. The soldier, who should have been on duty, asked a fellow sentry to cover for him while he investigated his find, and the friend agreed to do so. But when the relief sentry arrived to take over, the treasure-seeker had still not returned. Nor was he ever seen again, though a most stringent search was made of the fort, which he could not conceivably have left since it was still under siege by mutineers, and its garrison, fearing another enemy assault, had been at pains to double-lock, bar and place a guard on every possible and impossible exit and entrance.
Since everyone’s dream is to find a secret passage ending in a room full of fabulous jewels, Bets and I, conquering our fear of spiders and accompanied by Moko and Teddy, hunted high and low for the one that the sentry had found over half a century ago. But though we found numberless dark and narrow little stairways that dived downward or climbed upward inside the thickness of those formidable walls, they always ended tamely in some open courtyard or deserted ante-room; never in a vault full of golden goblets, bracelets, sword-belts and nose-rings set with emeralds and diamonds. Or even a dungeon containing a skeleton dressed in the uniform of some forgotten East India Company regiment! Oh well, we had a lot of fun and scared ourselves silly trying.
One last ‘special place’ was Fatehpur Sikri, which is not technically in Agra at all since it lies more than fifteen miles to the south-west, within sight of the borders of Bharatpur. The story goes that a much-revered saint, one Salim Christi who lived here, foretold the birth of a son to Akbar the Great, who when the prophecy came true built a city on this auspicious spot. But after it had been built and occupied for only a few years, a shortage of water made life impossible, and it was abruptly abandoned; the court returning to Agra and leaving the splendid new city to the foxes and the owls. It was a hot, silent, wind-whispering and bird-haunted place, and in our day few people visited it; for the same reason that few tourists visited Agra — there was a war on.
Here nothing moved except the slow shadows of the red sandstone walls or the swift ones of a pigeon or a parrot flying overhead, and one walked on tip-toe and spoke softly. Which is not as silly as it sounds, for time has dealt so gently with the deserted city that even now you can almost swear that its inhabitants have merely withdrawn for an hour or two to take a siesta, and will emerge again to ‘eat the evening air’ as soon as the sun moves lower down the sky and the shadows draw out across the stone flags of the courtyards. The stables and the camel and elephant lines, Jodh-Bai’s palace, the lovely Panch Mahal, and the great red courtyard marked out like a huge pachisi board (pachisi is not unlike chess) so that the Mogul and his friends could play that game with beautiful serving-girls as living pieces, all look as new and as unblurred by time as though they had been built well within one’s own lifetime instead of that of Elizabeth Tudor, over a decade before that redoubtable Queen granted a charter with rights of exclusive trading to a ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’.
Once while Mother was sorting through a bag of miscellaneous kag (the Kaye word for odds and ends: ‘kag-bag’), she came across an early photograph of the Taj Mahal taken sometime in the 1860s or early 1870s.* It was a revelation, and I only wish I had had the sense to get my hands on it and stick it in some album for safe keeping. For it showed the Taj as some sort of lost palace, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, shut away for a hundred years behind an impenetrable hedge of briar roses. The marble water channels were full of reeds and waterlilies, and the trees and shrubs crowded close to their edges; the higher branches overgrown with trails of creepers dripping down towards the water so that one caught glimpses of the Taj through a veil of leaves and flowers. It could only have looked as beautiful — and as overgrown and neglected! — because of its nearness to the river and the fact that those marble water channels must have silted up and flooded the gardens during the monsoons. But out at Fatehpur Sikri there was little or no water, so weeds and saplings were never able to take it over. Here no creepers veil the walls and grass has not invaded the deserted halls whose stone-paved floors are swept clean by the wind.
Salim Christi, the saint whose prophecy led to its being built, and who died in 1571, lies buried in an exquisite little tomb whose lattice-work walls, each one carved from a single slab of white marble, look as fragile as lace. The tomb stands in the enormous open courtyard of Fatehpur Sikri’s Dargah Mosque, mirrored in a marble-lined pool and looking for all the world like a pearl thrown down on a red carpet, for the courtyard, like the palaces and halls and stables, is paved with red sandstone. Mosque, tomb, pool and courtyard are dwarfed by the towering Gate of Victory which the self-styled ‘King of Kings, Shadow of God, Ja-la-din Akbar the Emperor’, built to commemorate his conquest of the Kingdom of the South, and upon one wall of which he had inscribed the words: ‘Hazrat Isa,† on whom be the Peace, said: “The World is a bridge; pass over it, but build no house thereon."’‡ And, ‘The World endures but an hour, spend it in devotion.’
In the days of the Raj you could climb up to the very top of the Gate of Victory; though the gate-keeper was always careful to warn you to watch out for the nests built by wild bees among the carvings and in the cornices of the galleries, for the fierce wild bees of India can be killers — as anyone who has read Kipling’s story ‘Red Dog’ in The Second Jungle Book will know! But provided one took care not to disturb them the view from the top of the Bulund Dawarza was worth the risk, for the huge gate stands at the top of a great flight of stone steps which sweep down to reach the road below, making the height of stairway and gate together a staggering one hundred and seventy-two feet from the road up. Standing on the top, one could look away and away across the roofs of Sikri and Fatehpur and the endless miles of plain, and catch a shimmer of water that showed where the canal and the Bharatpur Gahna lay, with beyond it nothing but the far horizon.
Yet even the Bulund Dawarza was not as popular with us as the Panch Mahal, the ‘Five Palaces’, which consisted of five graceful red sandstone pavilions perched one on top of the other in the manner of a house made of cards, each one smaller than the one below, and connected to it by flights of sandstone stairways. We liked to picnic in the topmost pavilion, where we could look down on the other buildings of Akbar’s red city and, far down the hillside (for the city is built on a ridge), to the Hāthi Minar, ‘the Elephant Tower’, a circular tower rather like the famous round towers of Ireland, but studded all over with the tusks of elephants. We liked elephants and had mentally put a black mark against Akbar’s name for shooting those endearing creatures just to stick their tusks all over his hunting tower. But he went back up near the top of my ‘favourite people’ list after we found the broken end of a tusk among the grass at the foot of the tower, and realized that it was carved out of stone and not ivory at all!
The very little time we could spare from re-visiting our favourite places in Agra during those weekends was spent in the shops, where our carefully hoarded pocket-money went on mementoes of the visit. If we wanted one (and we always did) it was a hard-and-fast rule that we paid for it ourselves. Each year, on our final visit of the season, we would buy one of those alabaster models of the Taj, and I still remember my envy and anguish when Bets, a more prudent saver than I, bought a far larger one than I could afford and returned proudly to Delhi with a seven-by-five-inch model while I returned sourly with one of the four-by-two jobs — my parents, quite rightly, having refused to make up the difference in price.
I don’t know why we should have thought it necessary to acquire yet another of these fragile (and, let’s face it, not particularly attractive) objects every year; unless it was because we invariably broke them or lost one or more of the detachable
minarets. They never lasted long, but that last visit of the season would not have been complete unless we bought a Taj. It was part of the ritual: like visitors to Rome throwing a coin into the fountain of Trevi to ensure that they will return one day. Not that it ever crossed our minds that we would not return to Agra again — many times. To tell the truth, it still does not; and as I write this I feel sure that I shall see it again.
* It is only recently that I heard the rest of the story from that same doctor’s son — who is still very much alive! However, I shall keep it to tell in its proper place, which is well into the 1980s.
* For, or by, my Kaye grandmother.
† Jesus Christ.
‡ A sixteenth-century sentiment that is engraved in slightly different words above the door of an Elizabethan manor-house near my home in Sussex: ‘Herein we have no abidence’.
Chapter 18
Yes, we’ll gather by the river
The beautiful, the beautiful river.
Sankey, Sacred Songs and Solos
Agra was not the only place we visited regularly. Once a year during the cold weather we would go to Narora, a small settlement at the head of the Ganges Canal where the head Canal officer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Perrin, lived. The Perrins were friends of my parents and they would put us up in one of the thatched bungalows reserved for visiting inspectors, and feed us in their home, ‘Number 1 bungalow’, a few hundred yards further along the Canal.
In those days, with very few cars, there was no pukka road between the nearest railway station and Narora, so the only way to get there was on a narrow trolley line, riding in an open trolley propelled by a lever pushed to and fro by one of the Canal coolies and an assistant. We would reach the nearest station late at night, and having transferred into the waiting trolley would do that last leg of the journey by moonlight across open and apparently totally unoccupied country. (Since this part of the journey was always done by moonlight I can only suppose that Tacklow selected a date for the Narora visit for a time when the moon was full, because the trip was too hazardous on a dark night.)
