Taj Mahal - girl

The Taj Mahal. A reminder of the dangers of not using contraception: Old Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of Shah Jahan, died giving birth to their 14^th child. He built a mausoleum for her. Currently in India there’s a trend amongst the poorest to have families with fourteen or so kids. One newspaper interview went something along the lines of: “‘so Mrs. So and So, why don’t you ask your husband to use birth control?’ ‘Ooooh, no, he wouldn’t like that. I couldn’t’.” As in other parts of the developing world, life expectancy goes up, child mortality goes down but birth rates are slow to show such positive change so the numbers of children living in extremely poor families increases. And this means yet another generation of poverty despite the astounding leaps India has been making in poverty alleviation in the past ten years. It is estimated that only 22% of the population lives under the absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) but when the entire population is over 1 billion, that’s still a lot of people barely making ends meet. These people live a long way from the computer-tec world of Mumbai.

My views on large families aside, the Taj Mahal is an incredible monument, one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen and I’m so glad C and I decided it was worth a detour to go and see something he’s already seen before. All wasn’t smooth sailing though. We went from one mishap to another. We began with the discovery that the UP tourist people thought it was a good idea to move the ticket office for the Taj to a km away from the Taj. Why? We certainly don’t know. My only guess is that it’s to give rickshaw-wallahs a chance to make money of lazy tourists who can’t be assed to walk 20 mins.

First hurdle passed. We bought our extremely expensive tickets. We walked back, joined the queue to enter, had our bags searched, I had my bag broken by the bitch checking them. Her conversation with the woman in front of me should have indicated her mood/attitude: ‘what’s this?’ she said, holding up an item from the woman’s bag. Woman answered in a southern Indian language. ‘Well I can’t understand that language, don’t you speak E-N-G-L-I-S-H?’ she said with a sneer on her face! Nice. She wasn’t at interested in the fact that she’d broken my lovely running rucksack, only in the playing cards she’d found in said bag. Apparently they’re banned in the Taj. I refused point-blank to hand them over and in the midst of making a fuss about her breaking my bag, I slipped them back in to my stuff. Hah. That’ll teach ‘em to have stupid rules.

I don’t appear to have any reverence genes but I do have a whole host of irreverent bones. And C’s the same. Means visiting holy or sacred places can be both amusing and extremely frustrating. This place seemed to have irreverence wasps though, designed to seek out those people not sufficiently pious and bug them to the hell we don’t believe in. We tried to sit and read in the shade, nope, wasps didn’t approve, we tried walking around admiring the building from the outside, wasps attached themselves to our clothing (everyone found C’s little dance particularly amusing).  We decided the wasps didn’t want us there so we left.

After exerting ourselves with the Taj we spent around 2 hours in a western coffee shop and then made our way to Pizza Hut - three weeks of curry will do that to your taste buds, make you want to eat cheap western shit. And man, was that shit good!

Only other thing of note in Agra was C getting awfully annoyed at me for not having folded his sleeping bag liner properly, which meant it wasn’t soft enough anymore. I was definitely in the dog house for a little while but my sweetness and good apologising skills got me out fairly quickly.