The Taj Mahal at Dawn

We will take you on a step-by-step tour of the Taj. You get the chills at first glance. The Taj was built by Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan, his name means Emperor of the World, to honor his favorite wife Mumtaz who died having his 14th child. But, he may have had other intentions... The Shah's tomb is next to hers but was never intended to be there. It's off center and not part of the original plan. I'm sure his loving son who imprisoned him might have built something grander as his final resting place. Wrong! His least favorite son, Aurangzeb, killed his brother, took the throne, imprisioned his dad in the red fort and proceeded to rule with an iron fist and a complete hard-on for all non-muslims. He killed hundreds of thousands who did not want to convert to Islam. He was no Akbar.

You walk barefoot on the marble floors and visit his wife's tomb where there are inscriptions from Chapter 89 of the Koran, "The Dawn" where among other hellfire and brimstone admonishing, god speaks directly to the people and says, "Join My servants and enter My paradise". Who knew that the Taj is laid out following some old Sufi text that approximates what Paradise would look like from the descriptions in the Koran. The flowing, crossing streams are all laid out in front of the tomb. Ahh, it was nice to stand at the confluence of water, wine, honey and milk! If you threw in some "high bosomed maidens" and "bashful dark-eyed virgins as chaste as the sheltered eggs of ostriches" mentioned in the Koran, we might have stuck around a while. Like India itself, the translucent marble has many skin tones and is incredible in any light. The gemstone flower patterns carved into the marble (pictured below) were painstakingly pieced together with as many as 60 pieces per flower . Sadly enough, the Indian government raised prices to enter the Taj to improve restoration, but instead is pocketing the money. The marble has a fungus, as you can see in the photo, and they didn't even have water in the fountain leading up to the Taj.

It cost $1 million to build in 1653 and the British had the whole thing up for auction at one point! Below is a view of the river and the Red Fort behind it in the distance that you can hardly see because of all the dirt in the air.

After the Taj, we took a walk to the Red Fort where we were pestered by touts and saw shitloads of human feces and smelled piss everywhere. Agra is the dirtiest of them all. We had a yummy thali, went shopping in the bazar, hopped on a train, and didnt even spend1 night in this place!