Golden Afternoon (15 page)

The Taj is, of course, a monument raised by a Muslim Emperor to the memory of his Muslim Queen; and I have heard that it reminds some Hindus of the Muslim conquest, and revolts the bigoted among them.
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But I will not believe that even the most intolerant Hindu can be so petty and small-minded. It belongs, after all, to all Asia.

India obviously took the Taj for granted, and could not be bothered to visit it. Her people had never shown much interest in their ancient cities and monuments, especially those that were deserted or ruined. To them the past was the past and they saw no reason to be sentimental about it, let alone take steps to preserve it. An attitude that, but for tourism, would, I suspect, still prevail today: since except for the really spectacular relics of her magnificent past — the ‘money-spinners' which lure millions of tourists to India, where they yearly spend incredibly large sums of money on accommodation, entrance fees, and souvenirs (in addition to providing employment to many more millions of the populace) — many other fabulous palaces and forts that lie off the beaten track have been allowed to crumble into ruins and become the home of squatters, dacoits and beggars, and the haunt of bats, owls, pigeons and the monkey-folk.

Agra retained all its old magic for us. But after spending a long weekend at Sikandar, in the walled park which surrounds the tomb of the Emperor Akbar, I was never quite sure which tomb I loved best: the Taj, or Akbar's tomb at Sikandar. This was largely because the Archaeological Department owned a small bungalow
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inside the park, and that year they lent it to Tacklow for a weekend. It was an enchanting little house, built on a wide platform of red sandstone and shaded by the branches of a tree that grew out of a hole in its thatched roof. Flights of stone steps led up to it from
each side, and the carved stone balustrades that edged the platform dripped with flowering creepers.

We had been careful to pick a weekend when the moon was full for our visit to Sikandar, and accompanied by Abdul Karim, with Mother driving the Hudson, we had arrived there on a Friday evening, intending to spend the best part of that night at the Taj, and the following one in the Dâk-bungalow at Fatehpur-Sîkrî — the wonderful, deserted city that Akbar built on a ridge of high ground to the west of Agra and which he was eventually forced to abandon when several successive monsoons failed, the tanks and wells dried up and there was not enough water for the people's needs.

But in the event we spent both nights at Sikandar, because we had not realized that the four great gates in the massive battlemented wall enclosing the tomb and its surrounding park were closed each day at sunset and would not be opened again until nine o'clock on the following morning. This put paid to any idea of visiting the Taj and getting back before the gates were shut. But it also meant that while they remained closed we could make-believe that we were the undisputed Lords of Sikandar. It was an alluring prospect, and as we had arrived there a good hour and a half before sunset, we were able to do a good deal of sightseeing by daylight.

The tomb of the greatest of the Great Moguls was not in the least like any of the other famous tombs that I had seen, and if I had not known whose it was, I would have taken it to be a memorial
chattri
raised above the spot on which some Hindu ruler had been cremated. But then Akbar's views on religion were surprisingly liberal, so perhaps his mausoleum — on which work had begun during his lifetime — had been intended to convey this. Built of red sandstone and white marble, it is made up of four decorative pavilions set one above the other, and the topmost, which is mostly of white marble, consists of a great marble-paved floor as big as a ballroom, left open to the sky and surrounded by a pillared cloister, the outer arches of which are filled in by exquisite marble filigree, so fine that you can see through them as easily as if they had been made from lace instead of carved from slabs of polished stone. In the centre of the courtyard, standing on a raised platform and cut from a single block of white marble, stands a copy of the true tomb, which can be found in a dark vault below ground level. The mock tomb is decorated with carved flowers and texts and, in addition to Akbar's name, the ninety-nine names
of God — the hundredth, according to legend, is known only to the camels, which accounts for those animals' haughtily held heads and insufferably superior expressions.

We lingered on the top storey that first evening at Sikandar, watching the other visitors leaving as the sun sank down towards the horizon and the sky above us turned from blue to a duck-egg green scribbled all over by the innumerable dark dots and thin, wavering lines of birds flying home from the city to roost in the park. As the light faded, leaving the tomb and the park in shadow, and bats flittered out to meet the night, we heard the great doors in the main gate clang shut and saw the full moon rise in the last wash of the sunset; and by the time we reached the garden the shrubs and flowerbeds were spangled with fireflies.

The raised platform on which the Archaeological bungalow stood formed a wide stone terrace on which we dined under the stars, and afterwards we explored the great tomb again and wandered about the gardens and the park and along the dry stone water-courses along which once — but no longer — lines of fountains had played. The moon was so bright that you could have read a newspaper, and there was a ring round it. I had heard of such a thing, but this was the first time I had ever seen it — and to this day, I have never seen anything quite like it again. For this was no hazy or rainbow-like halo, but an enormous circle, as thin and sharp as though it had been drawn on that cloudless sky by a gigantic mapping-pen dipped in gold ink.

Even Tacklow, who had given me my first lesson in astronomy (thereby hooking me on it for life) could not remember ever having seen anything quite like that before, though he added that a ring around the moon was supposed to warn of bad weather to come. But, looking at this one, I refused to believe that anything so beautiful could be ill-omened. For me, it added an extra touch of magic to a magical night, and writing about it after all these years I can remember it as clearly as though I was back again at Sikandar, standing once more by Akbar's mock tomb with the heady scent of
Rhat-ki-Rani
drifting up from the garden below, and that incredible gold-ringed moon in the sky overhead.

The night had been so quiet that in order not to disturb that silence, we had taken off our shoes and walked up the dark stone stairways and across the marble floors in our stockinged feet. Perhaps because of this, when we left the building and were on our way back to the bungalow, we suddenly became aware that there was a herd of black-buck in the
park. We never saw them by day. But by night they emerged by ones and twos to graze on the lawns and flowerbeds of the formal garden surrounding the tomb, and if you stood quite still in a patch of shadow they would come close enough for you to catch the glint of their eyes and see the moonlight gleam on their long, twisted, backward-sloping horns. To watch them, and to walk shoeless across the lawn and along the stone pavements that bordered the ornamental water-courses, listening to all the many small noises which added together make up the sum total of silence, was so fascinating that it was difficult to tear ourselves away and go tamely to bed, even after the ghostly black-buck had vanished and the shadow of the tomb had begun to stretch out across the moon-flooded spaces. Yet Sikandar in the early morning turned out to be even more entrancing than it had been by the light of that haloed full moon.

The sun was still well below the horizon and the sky a pale lemon yellow, as clear as glass, when we were woken by what sounded like every bird in India saluting the dawn. Dew spangled and glittered on every leaf and blade of grass, a light belt of mist lay like a gauzy scarf above the awakening land and everywhere one looked there were birds twittering, screeching, chirruping, warbling. Abdul Karim and the
chowkidar
served us with
chota-hazri
on the verandah, and afterwards, since the gates would not be opened for another two hours and the park was still ours alone, we walked across the lawns and around the tomb in our dressing-gowns, smelling the morning and listening to the birds. Every dome, every pillar and every carved screen of the four-storeyed tomb was alive with parakeets, gossiping to each other and peering down at us with bright inquisitive eyes. The gardens were full of butterflies and from behind the high surrounding walls we could hear the sounds of India waking: the creaking of well-wheels and bullock-carts, a donkey braying, the twanging bell of a passing
tonga
, and the occasional toot of a car-horn or rumble of a lorry as traffic began to flow along the Muttra road. But inside there were only the birds and squirrels and ourselves — and the memory of a great Emperor.

It was many years later that I heard for the first time the hymn ‘Morning has Broken', written by novelist Eleanor Farjeon, and was instantly reminded of that long-ago morning at Sikandar. I have often heard it since then, but whenever I do I am always back in that glittering morning. And at the beginning of my days, not the end.

By the time we returned again to Delhi, the cold weather season was drawing to a close and the tents were becoming uncomfortably hot. Olive Targett was already packing up to leave for Bombay and England, to be married and become Lady Something-or-other to do with biscuits, and since she had not yet seen the Taj, Bob arranged a Last Weekend Visit to Agra as a farewell party for her.

I've forgotten which of her many swains she chose to accompany her, but I remember that there were four car-loads of us, one driven by Mother, who had been asked to chaperon the party, and that we all put up at Lowry's Hotel. Our visit coincided with the last full moon before the annual exodus to the hills began, and in addition to doing the rounds of all the obligatory Agra sights, such as the Fort, Akbar's tomb at Sikandar, the tomb of Itima-ud-Daula and the deserted city of Fatehpur-Sîkrî, we spent an entire night, from sunset to sunrise, in the garden of the Taj. After wandering hand-in-hand with Bob through those romantic flower-scented and moon-drenched spaces, I received, in the shadow of the great dome, what I was to discover later was a remarkably chaste kiss (it was in fact the first I had received as a ‘grown-up') and, somewhat naturally, I leapt to the conclusion that this must be Love.

I returned to Delhi in a state of total euphoria in Bob's car, with our luggage and Pete, Bob's bull terrier, on the back seat. We had been the last of our party to leave, but as Bob's car was capable of a lot more speed than my parents' seven-seater Hudson, or the car driven by Olive's swain, we had expected to catch up with the others on the road. But we were held up by level crossing gates that had been prematurely closed on the orders of an extremely pompous little Punjabi, a small, tubby and very minor railway official who, backed by an escort of two uniformed members of the railway police, and intent on showing his zeal for the ‘
Kaiser-i-Hind
' (the Viceroy), had insisted on closing the crossing because
the Viceregal train was timed to pass that way at four o'clock precisely. The fact that it was not yet three made no difference to his decision. He did not seem to think it in the least important, and though Bob argued, pleaded, ordered and finally (I suspect) resorted to bribery, the little man refused to budge.

Compared with the flood-tide of traffic that pours down the Grand Trunk Road in these degenerate days, there were remarkably few travellers on the road that day, and most of those were pedestrians who simply ducked below the barrier and walked across, no man saying them nay. Nevertheless, as the minutes crawled by, the road on either side of the track filled up inexorably into an impressive traffic-block consisting of bullock-carts,
tongas
, country carts, assorted
gharis
, cars and lorries, a smattering of bicycles, several camels and a solitary elephant, all of which served to block us in. Indians are, in general, a patient race. They have never been averse to squatting down to wait for a train or a bus, or merely permission to move, and now they hunkered down happily to await the passing of the Burra Lat Sahib's train and (it was to be hoped) the subsequent lifting of the barrier.

Immersed in the idiotic throes of first love, I should have been only too pleased to be delayed for an extra hour or two with the object of my affections. And I would have been, if there had been even an inch of shade. But though the Grand Trunk Road was lined for most of its length with a double row of shade trees, this particular stretch of road happened to be treeless; probably because the constructors of the signal-box and the two small brick buildings had cut down the surrounding trees and used them for fuel.

For a good half-mile in either direction the landscape was treeless, and the sun beat down fiercely out of a cloudless sky. The heat shimmered and danced on the rails and the cinder-strewn track, the parched earth and brittle grass and the patient ranks of waiting traffic. And, as we waited, the bullocks, ponies and camels, the elephant and some humans answered the call of nature, and strewed the ground with droppings and urine. The temperature must have been well above a hundred, and the thin canvas roof of Bob's car — for very few cars in those days had solid, built-in roofs — provided little protection from the scorching heat and none at all from the tormenting swarms of flies that accompanied the assembled livestock. The white dust of the Grand Trunk Road rose in choking clouds from under the many restless, fidgeting hooves, and Pete, whose
tongue had been lolling out as he panted distressfully in the back seat, began to express his displeasure with the heat and the smell by whining and scrabbling at the sides of the car, and finally being sick all over the luggage.