6th September

We got up in the dark at half past five to get to the Taj Mahal for opening. We hadn’t appreciated in the dark how close everything was to us, so we literally walked out our hostel and 30 seconds later we were at the West Gate. Tried to convince the man at the ticket counter to give us an Indian ticket on the merit of our student cards but that went down like a lead balloon and they got quite aggressive and began to yell at us until we went to the foreigners booth. There were all these guys wandering around saying “Government approved guide!” which is code for scam-monger. Anything that says ‘Government Approved’ here is most likely not government approved and is most probably a scam for naive tourists. These poor Japanese people in front of us attracted the attention of one of the men and he hounded them for about half an hour and taking advantage of their broken English. It was a real shame. He did tell them something useful though: you get a free bottle of water when you go in the Taj from a stand next to the ticket office. This is a deal done by the people running the Taj thing themselves, so it is actually ok to drink it.
You go through a large red stone gate, like stone used at the Qutb Minar and the mosque in Delhi. There is white marble effacing even on these, decorated in an intricate flower pattern. You go into a kind of outer courtyard, then pass out of yet another red arch way into very lush green gardens. There is a red stone building to the left of you, and you go up the steps into it, it also being covered in the geometrically arranged flower patterning, and then pass out the other side and you see it. The Taj Mahal. A great shining white beacon against the dawn light. It was completely beautiful, far more than I had anticipated. There are several blocks of gardens lined with frangipani and dotted with rectangular pools that reflect the Taj Mahal and the red buildings that surround it completely accurately in the stillness of the water. As we walked forward, the dawn changed the colour of the white marble to blue, lilac and gold and the sky became a fantastic deep blue as the day set in. It wasn’t too hot, though there were many flies that you had to keep shooing off. There were hardly any tourists in the compound; we had been among the first six inside. We could take pictures with no one in them for a good half hour. There was dew in the grass as well, and we walked through, barefoot, as you have to take off your shoes. We walked around for hours, going up into the mausoleum itself and looking at the marble graves. Everything was decorated with the carefully painted flowers. It is a work of extraordinary craftsmanship. When it was completed the emperor had all the hands of the craftsmen chopped off so that such a thing could never be built again. It is strange, but now that we are here seeing this, I really feel an overwhelming sense of being “in India” that I don’t feel so much in the city. I suppose because the Taj Mahal is such a symbol of all the romance of the East that it really resonates in my mind as being particularly exotic. I think this might be Orientalist, which I find a bit amusing seeing as it is what I am interested in studying for the next year and a bit. I don’t know, I think I am just being a bit silly. Or maybe it just feels like I am on holiday here, rather than in the city where I live and work.
We came home from the Taj Mahal and went straight to sleep for two hours in the hostel. When we woke up we thought it was like 4pm, but it was actually half eleven. Decided to get to the train station as fast as possible incase there was a twelve o’clock train home. When we got to the station everyone was trying to direct us all over the place to get tickets from their friends rather than from the booth or to get us to take a taxi (!) back to Delhi. Ridiculous! We finally fought our way to the front of the queue though and got our tickets, which were surprisingly cheap at 62Rs each. All was revealed however when we got on the train at second class and they told us we all had to pay a fine of 330Rs each. We could have killed someone. So stupid! For future reference: if anyone sells you a ticket to/from Agra for less then 100Rs then you are being conned. You will get on a train and the conductor will appear and fine you. You argue with him for a long time and you get the fine down to an ‘upgrade’ whereupon he can no longer fill in his form to say he fined someone so he can pocket the cash instead. Complete money-making scam. An Indian guy who was sitting by us argued with him for a while on our behalf and in the end we paid 600Rs all together. Its still too much, but at least it wasn’t general class. Ben decided he would try out general class anyway and got into a nice routine with a man using spitting his pan (betel juice) out the window Ben was sitting by to try and steal his seat. A little boy with a painted face and a hat with a bead on it that he swung round as he walked came begging on the train. He had a tiffin tin and two sticks to make a make-shift drum kit. He stopped by us and beat the tin and I gave him a dried apricot and he did a backwards roll for me. It was quite cute. The Indians next to us gave him a packet of biscuits that he promptly put in his tin and wandered off, still swinging the bead. He was a cute little thing, and I was glad I had food on me. I don’t like giving money, because you don’t know where that will go. But if you give the kids food, you are pretty sure they are going to benefit from it themselves.
When we came back into Delhi, we girls made it back to the hostel just in time for afternoon tea. Lauren and I decided to stop and get an orange juice at the stall across the road from us beforehand. When we drank it though, it had salt in it! Absolutely disgusting. We had to subtly pour it in the gutter. I don’t think we are ever going back for shame. We need to know how to say ‘no salt’ in Hindi. Urgh. It is in everything here as well.
I managed to finish my book on the train, and it is was brilliant. It is so relevant to everything we are studying right now in history: the attitudes of the Europeans, the changing social structures of colonial elites, the cooperation of the native population in domination of the other. The other great thing about it is that it is entirely unsympathetic. You love and hate both English and native characters in equal measure. Each can be as evil, as shallow-minded and as ‘barbarous’ as each other in their methods. Flory, the main character of the book is a spineless and unlikable man, but he is the only character to show any kind of sympathy for the natives that doesn’t feel wholly Oriental in nature. Of course, such a man cannot exist within the colonial system and therefore he must be destroyed. Those that survive in this world are cunning, ruthless and assured of their racial and rank superiority of those they rule over. It is an incredibly interesting book, and I think I now need to go and read more Orwell as a matter of urgency. I should really read my history stuff first though and some more theory. Fun times!
There is apparently loads of confusion about my English mid-term assessment. No one seems to know what is happening, and as far as I can tell English and History depts. May actually be following different calendars and giving differently spaced mid-term holidays. I called mum to tell her about my difficulties as it may mean I can’t spend all my time with them when they are here, which would suck major ass. I am really annoyed and frustrated: why does no one ever know what is going on??? Argh.