Agra
"I had braced myself to be disappointed by the Taj. Instead I stood there like everyone else, slightly stupid with awe."
I went to Agra a cynic. I had seen the Taj Mahal ten thousand times — on biscuit tins, in films, on the desktop wallpaper of every computer I owned as a teenager — and I was convinced that no building could survive that much advance familiarity. Lia, who is less of a snob than I am, simply wanted to see it. We arrived before dawn, queued in the dark with a few hundred others, and walked through the great red gateway just as the light came up. I am not too proud to admit I was wrong.
On being wrong about the Taj
The thing photographs cannot convey is the marble itself. It is not white; it shifts — pink at sunrise, cream at noon, faintly blue in shadow — and it is inlaid, when you get close, with flowers cut from carnelian and jasper and lapis so fine you can run a hand over the surface and feel nothing but cool stone. Shah Jahan built it for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth, and whatever you think of grand imperial grief, the building does not read as a flex. It reads, improbably, as tender. Lia stood at the rail for a long time saying nothing, which from her is the highest form of review.
We left by mid-morning, partly to beat the heat and partly because the Taj rewards a short, intense visit more than a long one — there is nothing to do there but look, and looking is enough. Outside the gates the spell breaks instantly: touts, autorickshaw drivers, a man insisting he could photograph us “holding” the dome between our fingers. India does not let you stay reverent for long, which is one of the more honest things about it.
The fort everyone skips
Agra’s other great Mughal monument gets a fraction of the attention and deserves far more. Agra Fort is a vast red-sandstone citadel a couple of kilometres upriver, and it is here that Shah Jahan was eventually imprisoned by his own son, confined to a tower with — this is the detail that stays with you — a view of the Taj across the Yamuna. We walked its ramps and courtyards in the heat of the afternoon, almost alone, and from the marble balcony where he is said to have spent his final years I looked downstream at that small white shape shimmering in the haze and found it more affecting than the monument itself.
Agra the city, it must be said, is hard work — hot, hustling, choked with traffic, and built entirely around extracting money from people who came for one building and want to leave. Most travellers do it as a day trip from Delhi, and I understand why. But staying a night, watching the Taj go gold at sunset from a rooftop café with a cold drink and no agenda, is the version I’d recommend. The monument is the reason you come. The dusty, exhausting, utterly alive city around it is the reason it feels real.
When to go: October to March for tolerable temperatures; the pre-monsoon months turn Agra into a furnace. Go to the Taj at sunrise, every time — for the light, the relative quiet, and the marble at its most chameleon. The monument is closed on Fridays.