Eighteen months later, Dani found it—buried in the lower floors of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.
Russia of all places.
The museum stretched endlessly, room after room of imperial accumulation, but the basements held the strangest pieces.
Serbian coffins carved from logs, still smelling of resin.
Samurai armor behind glass, the helmet visor down.
Entire rooms of Indian paintings, the colors vivid in a way that felt wrong this far north.
Dani stopped in front of a painting and called me over.
Hundreds of figures pressed into a single plane—merchants tossing coins, priests raising their arms, bodies stacked without depth. At the center, an emperor rode through sandstone gates on an elephant.
Dani recognized the setting before I did.
“Is that Agra Fort?”
I’d seen a reproduction of this painting before.
“Jahangir’s Coronation.”
I never expected to see it in real life, especially not here.
~
Eighteen months earlier, Dani and I had been to Agra Fort.
The entrance sat a half-mile walk from the train station, along a path beside its sandstone walls.
The sun beat down. We’d been traveling all night.
A vendor appeared along the path toting a cart of pomegranates.
Dani held out two fingers, then pointed at a pair of fruits.
“Two pomegranates, please.”
The vendor picked them up and set them on a balance scale hanging from one hand.
He stacked the fruit on one side and used makeshift weights to counterbalance the other.
First, he tried a rock.
Then he replaced it with a large hex nut from a rickshaw.
He added three coins.
He removed one.
At last, he nodded.
“Eighty rupees.”
We ate them as we walked.
~
At the fort, it took four guards to admit us.
One scanned our ticket. A second punched holes through it with a paper punch. A third collected it. A fourth patted us down.
Then we joined another line, staffed the same way, and were patted down again.
Our pomegranates bulged from the mesh pouches on my bag.
Signs warned against bringing food.
Nobody found them.
Maybe, nobody cared.
We kept walking.
The crowd entered behind us and didn’t thin.
At each junction, one path was open. The others had ropes, or soldiers, or nothing at all — just a look that meant “no.”
So we kept moving.
In a shady pavilion against the railings sat a slab of black onyx inscribed with Persian script—the throne of Jahangir.
Signs nearby presented described him:
A distant ruler who had made a chain that once hung between the Fort and a stone anchor at the bank of the river. It was made of pure gold and strung with bells. Anyone could shake the chain and summon their king, to petition their case to his ear.
A rope stretched across the base of a staircase I remembered climbing years before.
No sign.
No explanation.
A soldier stood beside it, not quite looking at us.
The corridor beyond bent left, toward what I thought was the Moti Masjid.
Another barrier.
We followed the only open direction and ended up back where we’d started.
I left Dani sitting in the shade and ran back alone for a photograph.
The crowds had thickened in the few minutes since I’d passed through.
Monkeys ran across the pavilion.
People sat against the pillars. They crowded the railings.
I raised my camera.
Someone bumped my elbow.
I tried again.
Someone was in my shot.
I tried to stay. My view never cleared. The crowd kept pushing.
~
Eighteen months later, in the Hermitage, I stood in front of Jahangir’s coronation and didn’t move on.