Kathmandu:

It was a while before I realised that I had been gaping and that too for quite some time. And I couldn’t close my mouth, no matter how I tried. Such an impact it had for me, an awesome trepidation that enslaves you straight away. Words, I said to myself, those rags that we use to wipe the regular dirt of our lives. No way.

Canadian poet Clyde Rose had abruptly stopped reciting the lines of a new poem on the poor people he had seen outside the Agra railway station. A sea of humanity, he might as well have stumbled over their brittle sleep. Nelson Doucet of Fitzhenry & Whiteside Publishers had moved ahead whereas Caroline and Maria of Frankfurt Book Fair were stuck somewhere behind with the Indian guide.

And there came into the field of my vision the wonder of the world.

I had heard so much of Taj all my life. It lay only a few kilometers from Jaipur, the place where I studied. Any Shatabadi train would have taken me there from Delhi, the place I visit more than four times a year.

But somehow I had evaded it like the much-hyped bestsellers. Probably I considered it to be a cliché, a touristy rage. Or had I taken it to be a mission impossible and kept postponing it for decades to grab its glory in some great glorious moment?

But here at the New Delhi World Book Fair, one evening Clyde had expressed a desire to see the Taj, and a team to see this tear frozen on the face of eternity (Tagore) had emerged instantly.

The guide Mr Sharma, popularly known as ‘Captain’, came to us free with the Tata Sumo. He croaked in his professional voice lessons of history he had learnt by heart. Taj Mahal was built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved queen Mumtaj Mahal. It took 22 years to build it, employing 20,000 workers and was completed in 1653 at a staggering cost of 32 million Indian rupees. Shah Jahan married Mumtaj while she was in her an early teens, bore the emperor 14 children, and died in her late thirties. “She died giving birth to the Emperor’s last baby in 1631,” Sharma added.

“This woman remained pregnant most of her life,” Clyde discerned.

I had heard — rehearsed and impromptu — candor before, from poets and politicians. Having made Taj Mahal, an emperor had made fun of us, poor lovers, a famous Urdu poet had said. And the great energy and public wealth that went into making of this mausoleum, was it just a waste? The question has been debated endlessly. The hands of the artisans were chopped off, as some historians point out. And currently some of them are bent upon proving the mausoleum to be a Shiva’s shrine, predating Shah Jahan.

Sharma, however, was soft on the Mugal emperor. “Only the right thumb of the chief artisan was cut so that he wouldn’t make another such monument again.”

He had herded us into a dubious Modern Crafts Centre where contemporary artisans of Agra were busy shaping miniatures of Taj Mahals for the modern-day tourism industry.

But the moment I saw the full-fledged Taj, I was mesmerised. How could I close my mouth when the inner eye had opened? Was it not like facing the great sofa of Himal from close quarters? Was it not a human victory over time? Was it not a manmade Himal?

The immaculate marble marvel, radiant in the morning glory, evoked the image of Annapurnas or Everest. If nature made Himal, I presumed, human beings made this great snowy artwork in marble with human hands. Like his forefathers Shah Jahan could have spent his state treasure on warfare or other petty pursuits of power and hegemony over other castes and clans. But here, by the banks of a putrid Yamuna, carrying the reeking garbage of all the bustling and busy cities, the mausoleum of eternal love stands, shaming us all for turning the great crystal rivers coming out of the Himalayas into dreary, dull canals.

(The writer can be reached at yuyutsurd@yahoo.com)