*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.
Look Back || Move Forward 