The sky is despondent in Agra. I also saw an Indian vulture perch on the Taj Mahal and camouflage itself against the cornelian and onyx marble inlay. It has made me pensive. Maybe it should. After all, two of the main sites here are mausoleums: The Taj Mahal and the Tomb of I’timād-ud-Daulah, often misnamed “Baby Taj”, despite being the predecessor.
So little is said about the latter, but it literally sets in stone the transition period of Mughal architecture from red sandstone to intricately inlaid marble. Its details made me gasp! And to my surprise, no one else was in sight!
But the Taj, the Taj… when you’ve seen it so many times in friends’ pictures, and in books, you think you already know what it looks like. Nothing prepared me for how much it moved me! Something stirred in me when I came closer, when I felt the inlaid precious stones with my fingers, when I looked through the delicate lattices carved from entire slabs of marble… now I know what Victor Hugo meant when he described architecture as, “the handwriting of the past.”
We all know the story: 20,000 workers, 24 hours a day for 22 years. Its maintenance workers of today are descendants of the original construction workers 17 generations down. All these, to eternalize this handwriting of love… which, of course, Mumtaz never read, or laid eyes on.
It is interesting how this particular Mahal, the Taj, the crown of all Mahals, is ironically inaccurate in Urdu and accurate in Filipino.
The Book-Butterfly 