Feel your soul soar
The Taj Mahal, a memorial to a beloved late wife, can prompt an emotional response in those who visit
AGRA, INDIA—“Selfie?” 12-year-old Poonam Das looked up with a smile, waggling her phone.
She was visiting the Taj Mahal with her family but seemed more interested in taking photos with foreign visitors than the famous monument.
We put our cheeks together for her photo. Then did the same with my phone. A young family approached. More smiles. Could we all sit on a marble bench for a picture with the Taj in the background? Other parents nestled their chubby baby into my travelling companion’s arms for a snapshot.
Anew experience for me, I later learned it’s not unusual for Indians to want photos with tourists. Whatever their reasons, it was a joyous feeling of kinship to be asked to pose with them and become part of a shared memory of the mesmerizing Taj Mahal.
Behind us, the Taj seemed to be changing colour once again. It was nearing sunset during our second visit that day and now looked buttery yellow.
We had been there shortly after dawn, when the onion-domed mausoleum seemed made of silvery paper. Why had I thought it was just a plain, unadorned white building? The Taj Mahal is brilliantly colourful.
Made of white marble that glitters in the sun from certain angles, the building’s surfaces are inlaid with swirling floral tendrils made of deepblue lapis lazuli, red agate and turquoise. Dark geometric patterns and verses from the Qur’an in swooping calligraphy frame the doorways. The square marble base of the mausoleum and its entrance are embellished with ebony-coloured inset bands and decorative bas-relief carvings of plants and vines, a lush jungle created by artists nearly 400 years before.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Taj Mahal is a sublime realization of Persian and Mughal architecture. Began in 1631, it was ordered built by the mourning Shah Jahan as a tomb for his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child the year before.
Assumptions about the Indian monument to love and testament to grief were erased with its first full view, perfectly centred in the massive doorway arch of the red sandstone Gate of the Mausoleum entryway. Tourists, who moments before were focused on hurrying to get inside, just stopped to stare, cameras and smart phones reflexively raised.
This cynic’s expectation that this so-familiar site from posters, schoolbooks and snow globes could never possibly live up to its romanticized reputation evaporated.
The memorial to a beloved late wife draws more than seven million visitors a year and seeing it can prompt an emotional response. I wasn’t the only one in our small group who was surprised to press tears away from the corners of my eyes. The effect of seeing the building 19th-century Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore called “the teardrop on the cheek of time” is overwhelming.
“It’s beautiful, and it’s not by chance. It’s calculated,” explained Vinjay Singh, a guide with luxury tour company Abercrombie & Kent. For more than 30 years, he’s been taking visitors around the “memorial to a beautiful lady” designed as a replica of heaven on Earth.
“I’ve seen people crying, literally,” he continued. “This is beauty. This touches your nerves. It is all calculated and all related to human nature.”
Initially I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to the Taj Mahal, convinced it would be packed, kitschy and touristy. I was wrong. Go. And you need to visit twice to fully experience it; at sunrise and sunset.
The dawn visit tends to have a more focused approach: seeing the monument and getting photos. We put on paper shoe covers (some prefer to go barefoot) to enter the domed mausoleum for a look at the empty sarcophagi of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, whose graves are below and can’t be visited. The marble rectangles are covered in an exquisite garden of floral inlays worked in inlaid semi-precious stones. They’re set behind an octagonal screen made of an intricately carved, seamless piece of polished marble covered with more delicate inlaid flowers.
No photography is allowed inside. Guards blow shrill whistles when people frequently disobey. It’s also dimly lit, and I was so focused on staring at the designs, I missed a marble lip in the floor and went flying. My camera and ego were the only things damaged.
The 5 p.m. visit later the same day had a different vibe, a relaxed summer festival-like spirit. Buff-coloured monkeys played around reflecting pools as couples waited their turn to pose for photos on the marble “Diana bench” where the Princess of Wales had her famous solo photo taken in 1992.
Some visitors said they were most moved by the love story. What more deeply affected me was the physical ideal and beautiful symmetry of what British painter William Hodges described as “a perfect pearl on an azure ground.”
The site is based on mathematical perfection, with nothing visible behind the dome but sky. Gardens and rectangular pools create reflections of the building as they lead visitors to the Taj and the identical sandstone buildings bracketing it.
The red building to the west is a mosque; its twin an empty shell constructed as mirror image to bring balance. Four minarets rise from the corners of the mausoleum’s massive marble base, one temporarily encased in scaffolding for cleaning.
Locals and tourists from all over the world, including foreigners wearing colourful saris, move along walkways towards the Taj. It’s crowded around favourite picture spots and the entrance, although the site feels calm compared to the busy city outside.
Singh’s advice is to not follow the crowd and try to stay ahead of packs of tourists. If they go right, turn left. It’s a good idea. And when you need some peace, take a break in a secret paradise.
Singh led us to an unexpected quiet spot, a peaceful garden at the east side of the monument in the morning and the matching one on the western side at sunset. Fruit and jasmine trees framed an unfamiliar side view of the Taj dome. “It’s so serene here, even with a crowd,” Singh said quietly. “You feel like you’re somewhere in paradise.”
The Taj Mahal, thankfully not illuminated at night, was about to slip into dusk. It was time to go, but impossible to not want to linger.
“Feel you are in paradise. Don’t feel you are just tourists to take some pictures and go,” Singh said. “You have made a complete tour when you are here with your soul and body. It’s very spiritual. It’s not just the building.” Linda Barnard was hosted by Abercrombie & Kent Luxury Tailor Made Travel and Oberoi Hotels & Resorts, which did not review or approve this story.