Wah, Taj!

So the Taj Mahal has made it to the list of the magnificent seven. The Seven Wonders of the Modern World, that is. Over the past few months we have been hearing, seeing and reading little else. The campaign to get one of our tourist treasures on that list – never mind who made it and how significant it really is – has been long and sustained, with text messages, emails, newspaper reports, magazine articles, advertisement hoardings, television teasers and much more exhorting all and sundry and everyone else in between to send in a neat little SMS to vote for the Taj to be part of the illustrious roster. Never mind that someone – quite a few someones, actually – made a boatload of money on the very concept of making the public feel that a vote, aka an opinion, would make the difference. And, after all the hype, it has.

My last visit to the Taj was some years ago, en route to Delhi. We stayed at a hotel not too far away from the famous monument and managed to find two rooms – one for the parents, one for my soul sister who was visiting from the United States, and me. While the room itself was a standard hotel chamber, the bathroom had Karen and me awed. It was in shades of the most exotic greys and blues, seemingly an underwater ambience, complete with deep tub and bidet and, strangely enough for India and even a multi-star hotel, it all worked swimmingly well…until very late at night, when I woke up with an urgent need to use the loo. I switched on the light and walked into the bathroom, which was still plunged in perfect darkness. Suddenly, just when I was hopping about saying rude things in what I fondly imagined to be an undertone so as not to wake Karen, the light flashed on and I found myself face to face with the creature of all my favourite nightmares: a rather large red spider. It looked beadily at me, I looked saucer-eyed at it and we both fled, hopefully in opposite directions, though I had my eyes closed at that point and couldn’t be sure of that fact. Of course, I did manage to develop a wonderful case of constipation from that day on, until I got to my own bathroom in my own home.

Very early in the morning, rather bug-eyed since that little late-night encounter, we were roused and shuttled off to the Taj Mahal. It was still night, half an hour or so before the sun was scheduled to rise. Then, as we stood on that magnificent marble plinth, it did, slowly, gently, a round orange-pink orb that moved gradually upwards from its resting place over the horizon. And with fabulous beauty, each tiny chip of gem embedded in the walls of the building flashed fire, sparkling in tones of silver, god, red and green, the delicate marble of pearl tracery and gorgeous white marble of the main structure glittering icily in the growing light. Blasé as we were after years of city living and with all the cynical of still-young minds sharpened by many nights of television news detailing death, destruction and delusion, we still gasped, gaping, as that poem of love carved in stone came alive to greet another morning.

And today it is on a list that a new generation of people has devised. Does that make it another form of expression of a love that transcends time and space? Does the will of Shah Jahan to make the tomb of his wife the most beautiful mausoleum ever built still hold credence today? Or is it all about making a buck from the memory of the past? My cynical mind did not let me send a sms to vote. But it does exult in the fact that something from my own country has won attention and accolades, once again.