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| Annie Did Not Like Feifel Going West With Us |
We were pretty excited about heading to Agra, aside from Feifel, the mouse that freaked out Annie on the train. Agra is home
to the Taj Mahal. Three and a half weeks earlier we had been doing a
slide show at Colorado Mesa University about our Mexican Shoe Caravan this
last summer and after it was done, the director of the OutDoor Program, Chad Thatcher,
invited us along on this trip. The rest was a blur as we prepared our
visas and finished out our terms and finals… now we were in India and we
were finally catching up with ourselves; unreal.
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| One of the Gates Heading into the Taj |
But back to reality: in Agra,
we hailed a cab and ended up unwittingly hiring a male chauvinist
ba-donk-i-donk (donkey's rear) for a driver, as he refused to
acknowledge Annie’s questions and when he did answer her he did so by
speaking to me. For those that do not know, India is a very male
dominated society and suffers because of it. 100,000 women are treated
for burns every year because they over cooked their husbands food or did
something equally petty that their spouse was not pleased with.
The male/female ratio is off by 20% in favor of the men
because 13 million baby girls have been murdered through infanticide in
the last 20 years as having a son brings prestige, while having a girl
means debts by way of dowries that cannot be paid by poor families at
the time of marriage. Recently the dowry was made illegal in India to
help address the problem, but the biases felt toward women will likely
continue on for generations.
All that aside, I cannot begin to
describe the beauty of the Taj; so many times in life you feel
disappointed when you see something with your own eyes after it has been
bragged up by the world. This was not one of those times. It takes
your breath away. It is massive! It is gargantuous (I don’t think this
is a word, at least according to spell-checker) and it rises into the
air as if you are seeing some heavenly majestic white marble edifice
that should not possibly exist in this world. The Taj is solid marble
covered in black onyx verses from the Koran. It is truly second to
none.
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| Check Out That Smog! |
For around $2 we hired a guide and just like
in "Slumdog Millionaire" he made up the history of the place as we
toured one of the seven man-made wonders of the world. He told us that
the king who built the place had 14 children, but another guide walked
by, laughed, and said, “He only had 6 children.”
Our
guide, Asif (Au-sif, like Auto with a
sif), quickly countered with, “Oh yes, they had 14 children but 8
died immediately after childbirth… the queen was very sad.”
We laughed and enjoyed ourselves as our guide took pictures of us
jumping over the Taj, or holding it in our hands, or holding it up over
our heads, or cupping the main minaret with our pinky finger and thumb.
The Taj is a mausoleum that was built
for the king of India’s third wife. He loved her dearly and she had
three final requests (after burying her 8 imaginary kids) before she
died. She asked that he take care of their 6 kids; she asked that he
never marry again; and finally, she asked that he build a final resting
place for her that the whole world would never forget. He did exactly
that. He had planned on building a black marble replica for his own
mausoleum, but before he could bankrupt India with the second monumental
feat, his son overthrew him and locked him away in prison, where he
died alone. Very sad, I know.
I do not know how much of this
information is correct as I have never studied Indian history, aside
from the British colonization of the country from the 17th c.—1947, when
it became an independent nation, but I think most of his information
was somewhat in the vicinity of the truth. There is a saying here in
India: "An Indian will never tell a lie but if he does not have the
answer he will make one up.”
Okay, I made that quote up, but only because of the loss of my 8 children.
