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Location: Taj Mahal, Agra, North India
If there is a war between the traveler and the tourist, Agra,
home of the Taj Mahal, must be a key battlefield. There
are not many places in the world where Jesus booted backpackers
rub shoulders with Khaki clad Sony camcorder gripping tourist
herds in such concentrated numbers, but the grounds of the
Taj Mahal is certainly one of them.
All day, and everyday, the beauty of India’s most amazing
monument plays second fiddle to the Indian tourists who gawk
at the western "Have's" and the "Have More's"
whose vastly differing styles of dress is puzzling to the
extreme.
‘You must have caste system in your country too,’
wondered a young man who was visiting the Taj with his new
wife.
‘Is this what it means to be filthy rich?’ asked
another, who was proudly off to San Diego State for a degree,
trying to make a joke out of the tie-dyed shirts with cigarette
burns and worn out flip flops whose owners carried American
Express cards.
And all the while, the two opposing armies of westerners
tried their best to ignore each other, one with their noses
stuck into their Lonely Planets, the other straining to hear
their guides commentary blasted out of a megaphone.
‘Oh my gawd therz a caow lickin mah leyg!’ shouted
some woman who was beet red and frantically waving a fan to
keep off the heat as her behemoth tour bus was being turned
around for trip back to Delhi. A calf was in fact licking
her leg and her husband was nowhere to be found to shoo it
away.
‘Do you take dollars?’ shouted a man at the ticket
booth. ‘AMERICAN DOLLARS?’ he shouted, waving the
bills as though they would open any door in the world.
‘Walter. Walter. I can’t get the focus right on
the camcorder. Walter….’
If you are deemed to be a ‘half caste’ i.e. someone
who falls somewhere in between these two oil-and-water groups,
expect to get asked lots of questions by visitors milling
around the Taj, and more importantly to those asking them,
politely requested to pose in their holiday pictures. In less
than three hours, I was snapped more than a dozen times, standing
next to grandmothers and uncles and babies, winding up in
scrap books as far away as Bangalore and Chennai.
Others came from even further away: during the day, I mingled
with: mustached, turbaned Rajastanis; bearded Sikhs; middle
class Delhi families with wizened grandmothers in tow; fat
businessmen from Kolkatta; Diesel clad teenagers from Mumbai,
a troupe of Kathikali dancers from Kerala and even a Bollywood
model was there, pouting prettily while having her picture
taken in a designer sari. It was like microcosm of the sub-continent.
The monsoon broke over Taj the day I was there, with the
fierce morning heat scorching the white marble. The glare
was so bright you could barely look at it, but once the thunder
and lightning moved in the cooling showers drenched the monument,
turning it almost translucent. It was a strange metaphor for
what is going on in India at the moment: fierce drought is
expected in Rajastan, while record monsoon flooding in Assam
has killed hundreds and left millions homeless, all in the
same week.
Unlike Varanasi, where part of the attraction of the place
is the worn edged down at heels feel the town exudes, Agra’s
charm ends at the gates of the Taj Mahal: the town is polluted,
concrete ugly, and the touts particularly vicious, claiming
their meat the moment their prey step off the train until
the moment they leave, earning commissions off restaurants,
souvenir stalls, internet stations, and more.
Even worse are the auto rickshaw drivers, who were as deft
at snatching up tourists as the flying monkeys were in The
Wizard of Oz. No one stands a chance once they emerge from
the safety of the Fort Railway Station, where they get leeched
onto immediately.
And, of course, your name changes too:
‘Hello, Change Money.’
“Hello, Visa Cash Advance.’
‘Hello, ATM, over here.’
Outwitting these vampires was all people talked about in Agra,
and actually it was easier than you think. Once they know
you aren’t interested in being dragged to their cousins
gem shop, or to buy some hideous marble model of the Taj,
you get dropped like a stone, and may experience what happened
to me: when I made an appointment to view the Taj from across
the river at 6am, my driver simply disappeared, happier to
sit at the train station at dawn, waiting for the next wave
of fresh arrivals.
Thankfully his colleagues were numerous, and I was only slightly
delayed for the sunrise. As I watched the domes turn pink
and orange in the morning light, a troupe of villagers crossed
the river, carrying brass pots filled with water on their
heads. A few hundred meters away, a fight broke out between
four dogs, they had found a windfall: an unidentified carcass
had washed up on the opposite shore, and for a moment, I thought
it was human (especially after coming from Varanasi, when
one morning a human body did float past) and turned to go,
but was happy to see a pair of horns. Further up the river
I watched a grandmother supervise her grandchildren wash the
family water buffaloes. When she saw me, she said something
to her grandchildren, who stuck their hands out and shrilly
screamed, "MONEY!!!!”
Like a lot of countries, India is also one of those places
where you see the same faces in different places when you
travel, with many of the people staying in Varanasi moved
there: five Spanish nuns who were taking a break from Mother
Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta; an American woman living
in Rome who had just arrived in India to shoot her first silent
feature film; six Scottish students who were studying the
Koran in Pakistan and were doing a comparative religions project
in India; a British couple who were DJs in Ibiza, a French
woman who was traveling with her Indian boy toy, a sitar player
at Baba’s School of Music in Varanasi, and last, a Chinese
guy from Shanghai who had bathed with the locals each morning
in the Ganges and who spoke passable Hindi.
The beauty of the Taj was never a topic of conversation,
only the treachery and deceit each had witnessed at the hands
of these touts. But eventually the conversation turned to
what it always seemed to in India: spiritualism. It’s
what kept most of these people talking to each other, despite
such diverse backgrounds, cultures, and their love of travel.
All, it seemed, had come to India to soak up the religious
vibes that the country was famous for. The question was then
posed, what sect do you follow, who is your spiritual advisor,
in short, who is your Guru?
Then the talking would go on for endless hours, trashing
Catholicism, reworking Judaism, rewriting Buddhism to include
Christian elements, reviving pagan rituals merged with crystal
therapy. It went on and on and on. Each, it seemed, had found
their drug of choice, in the form of ashrams, gurus and spiritual
leaders, which in most cases were the underlying reason these
people had come to India in the first place.
The American lady swore by her ashram, she’d been there
as a child, dragged halfway around the world by her mother
who had ended up meeting her second husband in the ashram
south of Goa. The Chinese guy wanted to start his own, and
the British couple started talking enthusiastically about
their ashram, that was somewhere west of Chennai.
'Do you want my guru’s email address? I have it if you
want it.’
'My parents think I’m crazy, but my ashram never asks
for money, just donations.’
'Just because these places make you take an AIDS test doesn’t
mean people sleep around there, we meditate most of the day
anyway.’
‘My ashram's just got a website, you can find it through
Google.’
Only the Scots were unconvinced, and argued fiercely against
these places, claiming them to be shams, scams, and actually
removed people from the country they had come to visit. They
went on bragging how they were in India with ‘real’
intentions, eating with the people, living with the people,
and learning the language. Nothing they said or did ever compromised
these principles, and two intended to spend at least two more
years in Pakistan at the University in Karachi, despite the
attacks on westerners there. To further prove this point,
all their clothes were Pakistani.
The next morning, the six moved on, and the hotel manager
came in at breakfast laughing: ‘Ey Hey Hey! your friends
left behind some interesting stuff in their rooms. Five boxes
from Pizza Hut!".
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