To Taj -- In Dutch Company

To live in India and not to see the Taj Mahal is like to have eyes and not to know beauty. For over 25 years, I had not known beauty.

Like most people, Indian or outsider, I yearned to see the Taj. But for reasons beyond my control or for sheer laziness, it remained an unfulfilled wish. Until one morning when my boss asked me to accompany Sofie to Agra. Sofie, a chemical engineer in her late twenties, is from Netherlands.

I was both excited and nervous. Excited because I was going to see the Taj, a monument of love and beauty, for the first time in my life. I was nervous because I was to give company to a foreigner.

The tickets came in the evening. We had to leave for Agra early morning next day.

Sofie was staying in a hostel in the Asiad Village. I reached her hostel at about quarter to six. We greeted each other and got into the auto. We were a little early for the bus.

Sofie was not used to long distance journeys. She took an anti allergic pill to comfort herself. The bus began crawling through the dense traffic and finally moved out of Delhi. It stopped at a petrol pump. Sofie wanted to go to the washroom. I said let me find out because I knew most gas stations in India did not have such public conveniences. The driver told me that the bus won’t stop for long. So I came back and told Sofie that she would have to hold herself for another hour or so until the next stop. She nodded with a cold a face. There was no choice. The AC was so cold that she put on another top. It was black.

We got talking while looking out the window. There was filth and poverty around. We talked about poverty, about her country and my country. We talked about books and Hollywood. She didn’t like Tom Hanks. She had not seen Al Pacino and Robert de Niro movies. She didn’t even know about my favourite actors. That was a disappointment. We also talked about Australian movies. Some of them I had seen in a recent film festival and I talked about the stories of those films. She mentioned the TV serial “Sex and the City.” I had heard about the serial and its popularity. It was yet to be broadcast on HBO in India (Now it does on Saturdays). She said I would love to watch this serial. I guess by now she knew my taste. I talked about Desmond Morris.

The bus, after about an hour or so, pulled up for breakfast at Dilli Durbar. I ordered breakfast while she went straight to the washroom. When she did not return after fifteen minutes, I got suspicious. I went to the washroom to check her out. The place was full of tourists—a crowd was going in and coming out of the narrow room. I returned to wait for her. She came after another ten minutes. The crowd, she said with a smile. Then we had our breakfast. She had butter toast and black tea. I had an omelet and bread with a cup of milk tea. The tea was rancid, almost undrinkable. But I had it because needed the tannin. The greasy breakfast made me slightly indisposed. I hurriedly finished a cigarette.

The journey restarted. The bus driver now played Hindi film songs. They were the regular songs—songs such as “Pardesi pardesi jana nahin….”. Sofie was thrilled like a kid to hear Indian music. She said she liked this music. I shrugged. I thought there was more noise than music in the songs. How easily one is fooled by things exotic?

The bus was full of families. They were all going to the Taj in groups. There were two south Indian kids, around four or five, dusky, and cute looking. One of them had this string of white flowers tied to her hair. Sofie asked me what was that. I told her it was called gajra. I told her about husbands who brought gajras for their wives. Gajra was symbol of love and eroticism. She found the gajra cute.

Then she talked about the shopping she had done yesterday at the Arts Emporium. She had bought salwar-kameez for herself, and a dupatta for her mother. She used to repeat these Indian words to herself. She either liked the sound of these words or she was trying to commit these words to her memory so that she could correctly repeat them before her mother or her friends in Netherlands.

Out of curiosity, I asked Sofie the meaning of her name. She said Dutch people don’t have a meaning for their names. Yet she revealed to me that her name had come from the word Mary. Then she asked me the meaning of my name and I obliged. Interestingly, she told me that there was a small town in Netherlands which resembled my surname.

By that time, the AC had started to become less effective. On and off, we were looking out. The landscape outside the window had nothing new to offer to me—the same stretch of fields, buffalos chewing cud or bathing lazily in muddy pools, old men sitting on charpoys and enjoying drags from a hookah, and womenfolk either cooking or washing dishes and clothes, or tending to the animals. Perhaps Sofie too had got tired of looking at symbols of poverty here and there. But one thing was consistently there—the signboards of Coca Cola and Pepsi. Their red and blue logos were strewn around in such profusion as if they were so vital to the life here. All these sign boards looked out of place, mocking the filth and poverty around.

We were getting bored now. Both of us would doze off for a few minutes before we resumed out talks. Because of the temperature soaring up, Sofie was lifting up her skirt above her knees. I wanted to tell her that it was indecent to do so in India, but somehow I could not tell her lest she should feel offended. I was also wary about the leering glances of some of my fellow passengers who would crane their necks an extra mile to get the view of a foreigner’s juicy thighs.

Then the question popped up. Do you have a girlfriend?

“No,” I said. “But I’ve a wife.”

“Oh, I see,” she said.

“How long have you been married?”

“Four years now.”

“Did your wife feel jealous knowing about this trip with me?”

“I did not tell her,” I said. “Moreover, she is not in town.”

“You are naughty,” Sofie said, laughing.

I smiled. Then she told me about her boyfriend. She was living-in with him for about four years now. In Netherlands, living-in relationships were more popular than traditional marriages.

“So your wife need not get jealous about me because I’m practically married,” she said. Both of us laughed.

We talked about our families and spouses. She told me about her younger sister who was interested in ice skating and motor cycle races. We also discussed our work, and I told her about my books and the books I planned to write in future. She gave me a patient hearing.

Slowly, we were getting overwhelmed and tired by the journey, and our interest in talking waned. A time came when we fell silent, and she dozed off. I also closed my eyes.

Our bus stopped in front of the Agra fort. We got down the bus along with other tourists. She bought a roll for her camera after bargaining over the rates. I was afraid the film was a fake Kodak. But it worked. A guide took us through the fort. A professional photographer followed us constantly, pestering for photographs. We had our own cameras and so we refused. The photographer wanted to click us together in a single photo, in the backdrop of the Taj. We refused. “You don’t want a record that we were here together, right?” she teased with a smile.

Afterwards we were taken to a three star hotel for lunch. She had naan and mixed vegetables. I had biriyani. We couldn’t eat even a quarter of what we had been served.

Half an hour later we were in the Taj compound. We were ecstatic. It was a hot summer afternoon and our feet almost burnt on the naked marble floor. We scurried around, soaking in the beauty of the monument. We took photographs of the Taj from all possible angles. We were exhausted after an hour or so.

On our way back, our bus stopped at Mathura for the famous Krishna temples. I was not interested in entering the temple complex and so I left her at the gate and walked back to the bus. I had a cup of tea and a cigarette when I saw her coming back. She said that she was mobbed by the beggars and the priests. I took her to the empty bus and we sat on our seats. I opened a packet of wafers and began to snack. One by one the tourists began to return to the bus. A sadhu, who might have been following her, came to us, and taking us for a couple, began to bless us, hoping for some alms in return. We laughed at the joke.

As the evening set in, and the bus hurtled along the highway, our tiredness subsided and mirth returned. We talked about life, work, happiness, marriage and commitment, the whole hog. Most of the time we talked about books. She had heard of Rushdie. But she did not know any of his work or the work of any other Indian author. She asked me to send her a list of Indian books. She told me about the bookcase that her boyfriend recently made for her. She had the book case overflowing with books which rather angered her boyfriend. She recommended some books to me such as Sophie’s World; Red Roses and Tortillas; and The Son of His Father. I promised I would read those books.

About ten at night we reached Delhi. We had a light dinner in the open courtyard of Dilli Haat. Afterwards, I dropped her at the hostel. She had her flight the next morning.

As Rushdie has written somewhere, at the end of such a journey you either hate each other passionately or you discover you’re in love.

Speaking for myself, neither was true. But we sure became friends.