for human / love, go elsewhere

*title from Sharon Olds’ poem, My Father Speaks to Me From the Dead

 

I woke last Wednesday at 4 AM. Two full days left in India after almost two months, and I waited until the last minute, until the temperature was in the nineties, to see the Taj Mahal.

For a long time, nothing in India reminded me of anything else. Like Italy (the first real trip my mother and I took together), New York, and Petrovskoe (the small Eastern Ukrainian town my family is from), India reminded me of nothing but itself. Unlike Belfast, which reminded me alternately of Dublin, Brooklyn, and Petrovskoe; unlike Cape Town and Johannesburg, which grafted different parts of California together into strange, funhouse-mirror-esque configurations. India – Delhi, Jaipur, Amritsar, Chennai, Puducherry – was everything and nothing like what I had imagined.

The Taj was like that, too. I cried when I saw it, gleaming white against the smoggy blue sky. It was like a bed time story come to life; the film of every photo I’d ever seen reeled before my eyes and still, it was amazing. It was hot, too, little shade on the long walk down from the West Gate towards the mausoleum, and chock-full of tourists already. Everyone wanted a photo with the Taj, and some kind of herd-instinct drew us all to the same spots to pose, elbow to elbow with strangers.

With your exorbitantly priced ticket comes a pair of slip-on booties to wear over your shoes when you get to the mausoleum, to preserve the white marble. I wore them for a few minutes over my Chacos – resurrected for the second time in six months by a street-cobbler – and then I realized I could go barefoot. I shucked my shoes off and shoved them in my bag. Walking on cold marble is a strange, wonderful pleasure; a small intimacy, almost, in a place that belongs to so many millions.

In the center of the mausoleum lie the (false) tombs of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, surrounded by a lattice-work wall of marble, thick with flowers of semi-precious stones inlaid into the walls. I circled their tombs twice, then sat outside in a pocket of shade, watching the Yamuna river rush by. I would’ve taken out my notebook to write, but both Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” and my slim journal were banned from entering: I’d had to exit the Taj and find the so-called locker room for people with over-large bags and apparently, possibly dangerous novels.

Two hours later I retrieved my books, hunted down my driver, who insisted I call him Ali Baba, and drove to the Sheroes Hangout. Sheroes is a café run by and for acid attack survivors; they operate on a pay-as-you-will basis, serve as a community and empowerment space, and generally rock. I got a cup of coffee and a gulab jamun, hid from the beating heat outside, and read for about an hour. When I came in, the cafe was empty, but while I devoured my dessert two different groups of French people came in; one was a journalist, interviewing a woman working at the cafe. She and her translator sat behind me, and I drifted out of my novel to listen to Hindi and French dancing towards each other through the journalist’s translator. On the back of the Sheroes’ menu, it says that setting up the café here, within spitting distance of the Taj, was a conscious choice: in the city of love, a space for women attacked by those with a twisted idea of it.

Taj Mahal at a distance, thanks to Ali

After my coffee break, Ali insisted on driving me around Agra and almost taking me to the “baby Taj” and the garden behind the Taj. I say almost because somehow, Ali contrived to drive me halfway to both places, direct me to take photos of the Taj from far, far away, often with a desolate landscape between us, and then drive me somewhere else, very slowly. I was getting swindled, and I knew it, but I couldn’t bring myself to get mad about it. Later, when he refused to take me to the Jama Masjid because he wanted to drop me off at some bazaar and whizz away for two hours, I did get a little angry. But at this point in the day, having just seen the Taj and some truly awesome women,  I was willing to let it go. The A/C blasted hot air, the passenger side door sometimes swung open mid-drive, the bumper on both ends of the car was missing, and Ali obviously had a plan for the day that I was not allowed to dent, but still: the car reminded me of my uncle’s, the car I’d spent so many summers in, bumping along the Ukrainian countryside, dripping all over the interiors after lake-swims, packed in the back with my cousins like sardines.

It was a hot, hot day, and I had no sunscreen, and I was wearing all black, and so of course I was dripping all over the city. At the Agra Fort, one of the only sites Ali did take me to, I sat in the shade, admired the pattern of my developing sunburn, and wrote in my notebook. Tourists of all stripes – in-country, out-of-country – kept stopping to watch me write. Some people took pictures. Some people asked me to take pictures with them, or their children. A couple just leaned in, ignoring all boundaries of personal space, and tried to read what I was writing.

The mosque at the Taj Mahal

Some excerpts from my notebook, then:

“So many different types of tourists. Elderly Brits clutching guide books, dressed for a safari and not a city, prepared for anything. Local families, young, mothers in glittering flashy saris, small children with kohl-rimmed eyes, older children in ruffles, fathers in denim carrying a tired child in each arm. Red-cheeked Russian tourists, panting in the heat, hiding in the shade just like me. Loud, impeccably dressed Spaniards, sleek in their denim and sneakers and blowouts, not a drop of sweat to be found: fuck them! Older Indian women in kurtis and salwar kameezes, sailing slowly down the marble path, giving me soft smiles when they see me in the shadows.”

Hours later, I was on the platform at the Agra train station, a kilo of rasbharis (cape gooseberries, apparently) swinging from my hand, when something hit me from behind and almost tore the bag out of my grasp. I whirled around, and spotted my assailant: a monkey! They were all up in the rafters, and this one had decided my berries looked delicious. The smart, safe thing to do would have been to leave my fruit and walk away, but as anyone who’s spent time with me knows, that wasn’t an option. I stared the monkey down instead, and when he backed away, I boarded my train. The remaining rasbharis (thrice washed) were delicious.