Agra & the Taj

The Taj Mahal is a plan before it is a building: a walled garden of four rivers, the paradise the Quran describes, with a marble tomb not at its centre, where a Mughal tomb belongs, but at its far end on the bank of the Yamuna, so that the whole garden becomes the approach and the river becomes the mirror. Shah Jahan built it between 1632 and 1653 for a wife who died giving birth to their fourteenth child; twenty thousand hands, a thousand elephants, marble from Makrana and stones from everywhere; and then his son locked him in the fort two kilometres upstream, from whose window he watched it for eight years until they carried him across to lie beside her. Around it, Agra keeps a fort of red sandstone that is a city in itself, a smaller tomb of the same marble that came first, and, forty kilometres west, an emperor's abandoned capital.

The traveller comes through the great gateway at six, when the doors open, and sees the Taj appear all at once in the arch, which is the whole design; walks the garden slowly to the plinth, shoes off, and round the tomb, and sits by the mosque as the marble goes from grey to gold; crosses the river to Mehtab Bagh in the afternoon for the view Shah Jahan meant, and comes back at dusk; sees the fort in the late light, and the window; gives Itmad-ud-Daulah, the 'baby Taj', its hour of quiet inlay; eats petha, the city's crystallised pumpkin sweet, in the Kinari bazaar; and, with a day, drives to Fatehpur Sikri, where Akbar built a red city and left it after fourteen years for want of water.

The Guide's honesty: the Taj takes eight million visitors a year and the queue at the gate is the price — buy the ticket online, go to the east gate at opening, and know that the three-hour visitor limit is real; the marble is cleaned with mud packs against a polluted sky and the river beside it is not the river it was; the guides at the gate are licensed and the touts are not — choose by badge; Agra is a hot, hard, honest city with a monument at its heart, not a garden with a city attached — sleep in Taj Ganj for the rooftop dawn and eat where the Agrans eat; and the Taj is also, on five nights around each full moon, open by moonlight — book that, if the calendar allows, and say nothing for an hour.