Agra: Part 4 - Back to the Taj

I regret to admit that I was in a massive grump in the car on the way back to Agra, much more so than the glory of what I'd been seeing all day justified.  I was still unhappy about having agreed to leave Fatehpur Sikri so soon.  I was wet and cold and tired (it had been raining again) and every minute stuck in Agra's traffic only increased my irritation (and at an hour and a half in the car, that was a lot of minutes).  It also didn't help that the driver seemed to have had some superglue stuck between his finger and the horn, which didn't exactly help my headache.

To make matters worse, the cloud was full of dark clouds that seemed to be warning me that the sunset I had so hoped to see over the Taj was going to be at the very least disappointing and quite probably totally non-existent, and getting to see the monument under the light of that night's full moon seemed equally unlikely.

But such is the magnificence of the Taj Mahal that the moment we stepped onto the river bank and saw the monument in all its glory, the preceding frustrations almost entirely evaporated in its splendour.  Once again, the Taj looked spectacularly moody and brooding under the dark clouds.

I just had time to take a couple of photos before the skies opened once again.  The sun was just starting to set and I was glad that at least for a period of 2 seconds I got the chance to appreciate what I'd come to see, though the light of the red sun unfortunately still wasn't shining on the Taj itself.  The downpour was torrential and we ran from the beach as quickly as we could and Jya arranged for us to take shelter in the first place we could find, namely a tent in which a few men dwelt.  

This turned out to be one of those unexpected and surprising moments that make traveling such an adventure.  I wiped the rain from my eyes and took stock of my surroundings.  In the tent there were ten rickety camp beds, two rows of five, packed very tightly together.  There were roughly half a dozen Indian men in there, one of them dressed in a uniform.  Across the top of the tent there was a rail from which some clothes hung, including a few sets of that same uniform.  That was all there was to the place.

The men were all very fascinated by me and were keen that I should make myself comfortable.  Through the translation efforts of Jya, we got a conversation going.  They were all security guards for the Taj Mahal and they all lived in this tent.  From the mouth of the tent we could see the Taj and there was something totally incongruous about the magnificence of this monument compared to the poverty in which these men who guarded it lived.

Once the rain stopped, I wanted to go back to the river bank.  The sunset was looking more promising at this point but Jya was once again worried about the time and anyway we were probably both too cold and wet to make any more Taj-viewing a pleasurable experience.

Jya's worries about time were completely unfounded and I ended up spending my last hour and a half in Agra killing time, first in a coffee shop and then on the station platform, waiting for my train back to Delhi.  It was an unfortunate end to the day and I couldn't help in retrospect wishing that we'd done things differently.  We could easily have stayed longer in Fatehpur Sikri, got to the bank of the Taj in time to see the better bit of the sunset and not have had to waste so much time at the end of the day.  

I managed to put such thoughts out of my head.  Overall it had been a superb day.  I'd got to see the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri, all places of almost incomprehensible magnificence.  It's not every day that you can say that.