Fog and The Taj Mahal

On a foggy chilly gray day in January, six of us stood with our guide and realized each in our own ways that yes, we were standing in front of the Taj Mahal. It's not entirely real, that. So many images and stories reach into life about the greatest tomb; a testament to true love, craftsmanship and mystery, that to think of marble, stone and streets lined with shops and hawkers, monkeys, street dogs and other groggy tourists glad for the chance to be surrounded by less large crowds than expected, disappointed at the sunrise that did little more than lighten the sky's shade of gray instead of marveling at the wonder of the Taj Mahal, is almost blasphemy. I could not do anything but.

Symmetry is a design principal that always seems a better idea than reality to me. It is a condition of living a life that finds its center on the z-axis, somewhere in the neighborhood of vellum. All respect, then, to the architects and planners who made something of the sublime out of what could have been nothing more than parallel lines, centered on a tomb.

Centered? Not exactly. In fact, if you believe that the Yamuna River is the northern boundary of the grounds, then the whole thing is off - it is out of balance. The reflecting pools are the center, and the Taj itself stands at the edge. This is an asymmetry which puzzles people, and has for centuries. Why follow so many rules of precise planning and balance, only to put the largest building, the focal point of the work, anywhere outside of the center? And just what is that on the other side of the river?

There is a legend about a tomb that was to be built there, on the other side of the river, that would balance the Taj and create a unified whole. The legend calls it the Black Taj. The guide book that I skimmed before we visited suggested that the legend of the Black Taj was utterly untrue and suggested that we not trust anyone who told us the story presuming we would accept it in good faith. While we were fairly tour guide savvy at that point (remind me to not tell you about Dimple someday), it was with a certain degree of sadness that I heard our very nice Taj guide tell us about the tomb that Shah Jahan had planned for himself. It was to be on the other side of the Yamuna, and was to be built of black marble. His son, Aurangzeb, took power from his father and imprisoned him in Agra Fort before work could be begun in earnest. It is easy to forget your status as 'tourist' even in a place where everyone you see does not, by definition, live there.

It is a lovely story, though, and if there was to be no tomb in that place, what are the ruins? Elizabeth Moynihan has a theory that the gardens did continue to the other side of the river, and that the layout of the garden includes the river as an important element. She wrote a book called The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at The Taj Mahal.

In this place, I learned more of what it is too look not just at the frames of the world, but at the world the frames show. Doors do not exist simply for the purpose of defining their own thresholds. They offer a perspective, the kind that I find in film: the potential to consider what is on the other side, and how the person or animal or flower will change that view by entering it.

We walked around the grounds, all of us in our own ways. We marveled at the workmanship, the scope, the marble, the red flashing sign. It was cold enough that my toes started to cramp and I had to slow down to loosen them. We did not stay long. Even had our guide not given us slightly less time than we would all normally have liked, it was too cold to do the kind of slow, systematic study of water erosion, bird life, plant diversity, tourist watching, that is the preferred method of sightseeing. We ate well at lunch.