India, 2017
Back in Jaipur, when we mentioned Agra, people didn’t argue about routes or hotels. They argued about the Taj.
They began with the story, telling it like always. “Shah Jahan built the Taj for his favorite wife, who died giving birth to their fourteenth child. He’d had hundreds but was exclusive with her. He’d raised her monument out of grief, then polished it until it bankrupted the empire.”
Then, always, inevitably, the conversation pivoted. “Why would you go there?” they concluded. “It’s a tomb. It’s a place of sorrow.”
I nodded then like it mattered, but I’d already decided—we had already decided. We were going.
~
The air greeted us first—hot and stagnant, hanging under a featureless white sky. It clung to my skin, and it smelled like sulfur.
Dani brushed it aside, tried to breathe through her hand, but soon gave up.
“Agra,” she coughed.
Nobody here walked, but still we tried—not because it was faster, but because it was harder. We walked because it felt like something we could control, but our defiance didn’t get us far. Urban decay forced us to the street, and this belonged to the cars.
With rickshaws pressing in and my wife’s voice breaking into those sharp, exhausted bursts—“Go away. Go away!”—the advice from Jaipur kept replaying in my head. “A tomb. A place of sorrow.” We’d both heard it, but what I heard underneath was something else: “Don’t go. Don’t add yourself to the crush.” Yet, here we were—walking—defiant, exhausted, crumbling.
I didn’t repeat those words to her. I didn’t even say it to myself. We were already committed. Not to the Taj—not exactly. We were committed to our own insistence—to the version of the day when she would stand in front of it and all the hassle of getting there would be worth it. That all the warnings would have been misplaced, and I would be right for having brought us here.
“We have to go to Agra.” I’d said. “I mean, we can’t go to India and not see it.”
When we finally stopped fighting the hustle and climbed into a rickshaw, Dani wiped her face with the heel of her hand and stared out at the street. I wanted to apologize—for not protecting the walk, for not stepping between her and the men who kept pace beside us, for the way they spoke to me from over her shoulder—but the driver launched into his sales pitch and my mouth stayed shut.
“Leather, shoes, handbags? … Marble? Would the lady like jewels?” He said again to me.
When I declined, he kicked us to the street to try again.
Another rickshaw. Another hustle, and another rejection. Only this time, one driver was left standing on the curb while we drove away with another. I turned then to see him growing smaller in the distance. He held his fists against his turbaned forehead, then raised them toward the sky. I couldn’t hear his words, but I understood the motion.
At the ticket booth, the price landed with a thud. A thousand rupees, when everything else here had cost a hundred. We paid anyway. What choice did we have? Then we collected our “free” water bottle. It felt more like a condolence than a prize. Just half a pint sitting in an unguarded closet near the booth that we emptied before we’d even finished the transaction.
I looked at Dani as she shook out the last drops. She smiled faintly, and I tried to soften my face too.
“Well,” I said. “It looks like we made it.”
~
The Taj arrived the way it always does—light at the end of a tunnel, then suddenly too much light to look at. Dani slowed as the form emerged, and for a moment I thought, “Here. This is the moment.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said, but her face went flat as someone jostled into her, phone held at arm’s length, their own face on the other end of the frame.
Once the tunnel opened, we moved off the central path, and the tourists thinned. As our eyes adjusted, hard white lines formed against the harsh light. We couldn’t tell the building from the sky until shadows softened its edges. The Taj took form. Then I saw them, thousands of tourists in bright shirts and saris on the platform. They looked like ants in comparison, giving the tomb scale.
By the time we reached the platform, the building had changed again. From afar, it looked pure white, but up close it exploded with color—yellow, green, pink, and gray stones set into floral patterns and calligraphy. The “whiteness” dissolved into detail as bright as the people atop it.
Here, we found the line for the tomb coiled along the edge, the colorful ants from a distance. We never intended to join them—to enter the tomb itself—but it drew us by subliminal force. Now, we stepped toward the back—because that’s what you do when that’s what’s in front of you, and we waited in the scorching sun.
A guard spotted us and waved his hand like he was shooing flies.
“Line is for Indians,” he said. “Get out!”
We stepped away, heat rushing up my neck. Before I could form an apology to anyone—for being in the wrong place, for taking up space—his tone softened.
“You go in, here.”
He guided us forward, past the crowd who’d been waiting, and he shouted at the front until bodies shifted and a hesitant gap opened. Everyone now was watching us.
Dani’s eyes flicked to mine, to the crowd, and back to the guard. She didn’t smile and she didn’t thank him. She just went where he pointed, because the day had been a series of people telling us where to go, and she was tired of resisting.
Inside, the air changed from sun to shadow in a single step. Stone screens, inlaid flowers, the slow push of bodies. We weren’t allowed to stop. Guards kept the line moving with their hands and voices, and whatever we’d come in to see slid past at shoulder height.
Then we were back outside, blinking in the daylight, the white of the marble once again too bright to stare at.
Dani stood close beside me. She was quiet, but it didn’t feel like awe.
~
We turned around one last time on the way out; a final view to remember it by. I looked at the monument, then I looked down.
In the water, the Taj trembled in the heat—perfect and whole—until someone walked past it, and the reflection broke into pieces.