The second wife

The Taj Mahal is a wonderful statement of love; love and grief. Shahjahan built it for his wife Mumtaz Mahal; he could not give her life, so he gave her beauty in death – the sheen and translucence of white marble, the perfume of jewelled flowers.
But Taj Mahal is more than this, and more than most tourists see, and more than the books tell you.
Under two matching domes, in the middle of two matching gardens, at the back of the entrance chowk, lie two of Shahjahan's other queens. I might never have found out if someone hadn't left a door open. A door, open, and steps leading up; how could I resist?
There at the top of the steps was a garden – a char bagh, a Mughal garden just like the Taj Mahal itself, though on a smaller scale.  A garden on the first floor, a garden above an arcade, a garden with a fountain in the middle, and a domed tomb at one end. It's a garden within a garden, a monument within a monument.
It's the tomb of Akbarabadi Mahal Begum. Another wife of Shahjahan; the wife no one has heard of.
(I looked at Mumtaz Mahal's picture in the museum – a plump little woman painted on ivory, with hard eyes and a thick neck – and wondered, as Akbarabadi Mahal Begum must have wondered, what Shahjahan saw in her.)
Here she lies in a red sandstone mausoleum, with little ornament, but with a fine white marble gravestone. All its inlays have been ripped away, and when I saw it, it was covered in dust and pigeon droppings. The adjoining buildings have become carpentry workshops for the ASI; a bench with a vice was set up outside the mausoleum. It's a sad place.
 
Sadder still when I was chased out by an ASI official who maintained, despite a large sign with an arrow and an open door, the place wasn't open. ("Down madam, fast fast!")
Yet this woman must have been respected by Shahjahan; she must have had a high status in the court. The whole area on this bank of the Yamuna is scattered with mausoleums, but hers, like Fatehpur Begum (I may need to be corrected here as I can't read my own writing), is a symmetrical element in this whole great enterprise – a place of prestige – not a separate little tomb elsewhere, like the Saheli Burj in the gardens opposite the East Gate, where a lady now lives under the verandah of the tomb and shares her blankets with her two cats – I met them one morning just after sunrise as the lady lit her fire and the cats stretched lazily. But that's another story.) The missing inlay sockets show her tombstone was finely ornamented; not quite as finely as Mumtaz Mahal's, but I think more poetically – with sprays of flowers that look almost as if someone had scattered them freely on her tomb.
Such it is to be a second wife. Not in the history books. Not in tours. Loved a little, cherished a little, not quite enough.
***
Though you could take another view. There's a rather disheartening subtext to the romance of the Taj Mahal; when Mumtaz Mahal died, it was shortly after bearing her fourteenth child, and quite probably as a result of that birth. That was, after all, her job. Love was superogatory.
I had no idea how subservient women were in Mughal civilisation. Many people claim that Nur Jahan effectively ran the Mughal empire for years, but the towering height of Shahjahan's grave marker compared to Mumtaz Mahal's shows you the irreparable gulf in status between the two. Women didn't even have the right to their own names; Mumtaz Mahal was originally kown as Arjumand Bann Begum, and Nur Jahan was originally Mehrunissa, renamed Nur Mahal (light of the palace) on her marriage to Jahangir, and Nur Jahan on her promotion to chief wife.
Perhaps Akarabadi Mahal Begum is, after all, quite glad not to have a man about the place for all eternity.

Gracious Islam

In today's world it's easy to see Islam as a backward looking superstition, an irrational fundamentalism, a narrow-minded puritanism that has no relation to reality. Look back a few hundred years, though, and Islam holds out a promise of modernity, of reason, of grace.

(I can't help being reminded of the way certain Christians have hijacked the forgiving, gracious religion of Jesus – preferring their own righteousness to his admonition, 'judge not that ye be not judged'.)

One of the things I always notice in early Islamic art in India is how often the Tree of Life figures in it. In a little mosque in Ahmedabad, for instance, each filigree screen of the mihrab wall has a fine curving slender tree, its branches alive and waving as if in the wind.  Even the stepwells in Ahmedabad are decorated with these lovely trees. I found them again in the mosque of the Taj Mahal, painted on the spandrels of the great central arch.
These are the gardens of paradise; the Taj Mahal's char bagh, the fine gardens of Sikandra where Akbar has his tomb, the trees and flowers of the mosques. It's a gentle vision; without angels, without a figure of God, simply a garden of rest. Serenity is at the heart of it; the serenity of life without fear.

These are also geometrical gardens, and the architecture – after Akbar's initial use of Hindu styles from Gujarat, at least – is an architecture of geometry, an architecture of reason. The writhing, bulging organic forms of earlier work have been banished; instead,  precision and reason underlie the arts of building, painting, and calligraphy. Each of the flowers on Mumtaz Mahal's tomb is a geometrical work; the fuchsias, if they are fuchsias, hang down in exact curves, leaves are designed on the segments of a circle. This is a world in which God's creation is seen as rational; it's a world where perfection is to be sought, and to be found.
(It's that pursuit of perfection which sometimes makes Mughal work intensely boring. Any damn fool, after all, can take a pair of compasses and a ruler and start drawing octagons. Just as any damn fool can make a concrete box. It takes a genius like Le Corbusier or Shahjahan – or possibly Shahjahan's architect – to make a work of art.)

Am I reading too much into the delights of Mughal architecture? No doubt Akbar, interesting though he is, was not a modern liberal in either his attitude to women (he appears to have collected them as keenly as he did books) or his methods of waging war. But it does seem to me that there's an aspiration behind this architecture which is intensely sympathetic; the desire to make life perfect, calm, and full of ease -  the hope that a life lived in a godly way will be a life lived well and fully.

A vision of paradise

Agra is almost synonymous with the Taj Mahal. Crowded, but still beautiful. I'm staying in Taj Ganj; you can see the Taj from the roof top restaurant in my hotel.

But Agra has another great mausoleum worth visiting; Sikandra, where the emperor Akbar is buried.
Akbar doesn't have such a great story as the love story of the Taj (built by emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal), but his historical importance is far greater; it was Akbar who created the first great Mughal empire, or as the charming language of the ASI information plaque has it:
"He planted his kingship in the Indian soil and made it an indigenous thing... he made a nation out of  a mob, which is why he is style 'Akbar the Great'."

He was also an enlightened monarch. Every guide (official and unofficial) at Sikandra will tell you he had three wives – a Muslim, a Hindu and a Christian – and the ASI again has a charmingly old-fashioned way of referring to his multiculturalism:
"His state functioned on the sacred principle of peaceful co-existence  with his non-believing subjects."

Your first sight of Sikandra is from a busy highway, full of trucks with 'please horn' signs on their back bumpers and plenty of motorists and motorbike riders taking full advantage of that invitation as they weave anarchic paths around each other, and any cyclists, cycle rickshaws or horsecarts that happen to be in the way. The sight of four tall marble minarets is unexpected. Even less expected, the fact that they belong not to a mosque but to a huge gateway: Buland Darwaza, the Gate of Magnificence.
Every inch is decorated; there are panels of curving flower patterns, and panels of star patterns, and even two panels in which Islamic geometry is created with the Hindu swastika (sign of good fortune here, long before Hitler coopted it) at its centre, a syncretism of which Akbar presumably approved. And then there's a long strip of fine Persian calligraphy in white marble, which reads; "These are the gardens of Eden: enter them and live forever."

That's the clue to Sikandra. This is a garden of Eden, a garden of Paradise; for Akbar, the garden of his everlasting life.

This is perhaps the best of the Mughal char bagh; gardens of the four quarters, visions of paradise. The ones I've seen are gardens with a mausoleum at the centre, such as at Safdarjang's or Humayun's tombs in Delhi, or Itmad ud Daulah and the Taj Mahal here in Agra. Every such garden is a square, divided into four quadrants by watercourses; Eden, with the four rivers flowing to the four cardinal directions – four rivers of milk, honey, wine and water. (Wine, apparently, is allowed in heaven; Omar Khayyam and Rumi would have allowed it on earth, too, but I suppose many more orthodox Muslims would call them heretics.)

The geometrical perfection of such gardens would have contrasted with the movement of the water and the natural curves and colours of the plants and trees; but most such gardens now are devoid of their water, and have only dusty earth where once there would have been vegetation.

Sikandra has lost its water. But the lawns in front of the central mausoleum are grazed by antelope and deer; parakeets fly shouting from tree to tree, and mynahs chatter, and unusually silent peacocks strut the grass. (I found a breast feather from one on the red sandstone paving, and pressed it into my notebook, a better souvenir than any the postcard and marble elephant salesmen could have offered.) Close your eyes at Sikandra and you hear only birdsong.

In the slowly dispersing mist of a January afternoon, this was truly a vision of paradise.
How wonderful it would have been with the waters; flowing down the centre of each of the high causeways out from the centre; lying still in the great tanks in front of each of the iwans (the entrance gate and its three mirror images); and leaping and dazzling down the waterfalls. How wonderful it would have been to listen to those liquid sounds as well as the birdsong. In a dry country, how much the more a paradise; lush lawns and plentiful waters.

And Sikandra has depth; the causeways stand six feet high above the surrounding gardens, so that no tree can grow half as high as the mausoleum or the gates. You're looking down on to the gardens; everything is contained, so though the gardens are huge, you have a feeling of their boundedness. Everything is bound together – a haven, a place set apart.

In the centre stands Akbar's mausoleum. A strange construction; the bottom bulky and square, with huge red sandstone gates reflecting those of the outer garden wall – power was Akbar's keynote. But the ensemble is topped by a fantasy of small cupolas at different levels, and on the very topmost floor a fine white marble pavilion with delicate screened windows – the single use of white in the whole building, and what an amazing vision it is.

That same contrast of delicacy and power is evident in the tomb chambers. Akbar's daughters are buried to each side of the main vestibule, in roomy tomb chapels where delicate jali screens dapple the light; but Akbar himself lies deep in the centre of the mass, in a plain vaulted chamber lit by a single slanted window to the east. His marble grave marker is quite plain; no carved ornament, nothing but simple rolled mouldings and the gleam of a single massive piece of marble. Three incense sticks at the bottom wafted their smoke into the gloom.

Perhaps Sikandra lacks the Taj's romance? But then, I saw many living romances at Sikandra – it's a place where Indian couples come, holding hands, sitting side by side on the steps or in the great gateways' alcoves, or feeding the tame squirrels with namkeen. That's as much romance as you need when you're in Paradise.

Reconstructing Salzburg

Salzburg is Mozartkugeln. Marzipan; a bit too sweet. Salzburg is Mozart. That's all you hear about.

In fact, Mozart may have been born here, but he didn't spend all that much time here - travelling about Europe as an infant prodigy, and getting out of Salzburg as soon as he could to make his fortune in Vienna. (A good plan, slightly spoiled in the execution, though according to some scholars he wasn't as poor as has been made out in the hagiographies.)

If we look at Salzburg through Mozartian glasses we will miss the most interesting historical moment - the moment when Salzburg changed decisively from a medieval cathedral city to a modern urban landscape. And if we get stuck into Mozart's Salzburg we'll also miss another composer worth listening to, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber.

There's something revolutionary about Biber's music. His use of scordatura for instance, in which he uses different violin tunings to achieve particular effects (something guitarists are more used to, these days); he makes the violin a fully polyphonal instrument, creating huge landscapes of counterpoint out of just a few touched-in notes. He uses programmatic devices, such as the Battaglia, a depiction of military action in music, in which he introduced polytonality four centuries before Bartok and Stravinsky got hold of the idea, or uses birdsong as a base for a melody. He was fascinated by the attempt to create great metaphysical structures for his music; in the Mystery Sonatas, he portrays the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary, starting in normal tuning and then moving through different scordature till he returns, in the final great Passacaglia, to normal tuning. He struck out on his own path, and it's a fascinating journey. (Listen to Andrew Manze playing the Passacaglia and you'll find it's a mystic mandala, slowly spiralling round until it has you completely hypnotised.)

Biber was born and spent the earliest part of his career in Bohemia; but he knew a good thing when he saw it, and having come to Salzburg on business, decided to stay on. That was in 1670; Biber spent the remaining 34 years of his life working for the Archbishop.

Salzburg then was way ahead of other cities in its development. That started with Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Archbishop from 1587 to 1617, who commissioned a new baroque design for the cathedral and built the Mirabell palace, and started laying out the city with fine public squares and fountains - a development that continued under the next two archbishops, over the next half century. When Biber arrived in Salzburg the city had been transformed; it was the first fully baroque city north of the Alps, and he gave it the music it deserved.

Trying to see Salzburg through Biber's eyes is instructive. While Mozart saw a city under the autocratic, archaic rule of Archbishop Colloredo - and saw it from the perspective of a young man who had been feted in London, Paris, Munich and Vienna - Biber had spent his time in Kromeriz, a fine little town dominated by its Archbishop's Palace, but nothing like Salzburg. (It didn't even have a cathedral; the palace was only the summer palace for the Archbishop of Olomouc.) Biber would have seen Fischer von Erlach's Trinity Church with its dynamic curved facade being built - it was finished in 1702, two years before Biber's death; he would have seen the new Cajetaner church going up; he saw Fischer's Collegienkirche in the building, too, though he didn't live to see it finished. Baroque Salzburg was still a work in progress for Biber; for Mozart, it was a bit of the past.

When we travel, we reinvent cities, or reconstruct them. The Indian restaurants and sari shops of Whitechapel disappear when we explore Jack the Ripper's London; when we look at Shakespeare's London we don't see the Shard, or the Hop Exchange and the nineteenth-century industrial heritage of Southwark. Mozart's and Biber's Salzburgs are other constructs; but the difference is that in the case of Mozart, Salzburg has made an industry out of that reconstruction, while in the case of Biber, I had to do the work myself.

Sometimes the DIY reconstruction is the best; using the eyes of the imagination and a guidebook, or Wikipedia, to reconstruct the city of a certain time. (I worked with my father to do this on the Podtours Norwich 1450 guide - and that was fun, including the discovery of a medieval political chant and some major aldermanic skulduggery.) You are an archaeologist of the imagination. Defoe's London, or Blake's, would be interesting; or Mozart's Prague - if you must do Mozart...

You may be wondering what set off this post. Quite simple; on my last visit to Salzburg, noticing a plaque on a wall near the Franciscan church, commemorating Biber. And then having to put up with Eine Kleine Bloody Nachtmusik, for the hundred and eighty-ninth time, belching out of the loudspeakers at lunch.

Travel expands to fill the time available

Bucket lists are the in thing. Ten places to see before you die. A hundred places... Or a thousand places to see before you die, a book that has become terribly popular.

It's a neat idea; that there's a finite list. That you can do them all. Tick, tick, tick. Done.

So I'm making the final preparations for my second trip to India. Last time I saw the south, and Rajasthan, and a little (far too little) of Gujarat. This time for the north, and the great central plains, and the Himalayas. I have six months this time - three last time - and even so, I'm wondering how I will cram it all in.

India lends itself to lists. The Taj Mahal. Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, the 'golden triangle'. The lovely thing about listing India is that it's quite authentic; you can't be in the country long before you realise that it's a country whose geography has been seen in numbers and lists for centuries, even millennia; the twelve jyotirlingas, the four great Char Dham shrines that mark the extremes of the country, the Seven Sacred Rivers.

So you might think it's a question of marking up the Rough Guide, and then ticking the boxes.

But it doesn't quite work like that. Once you get interested in an area, you find more and more things added to the list. For instance, take Kedarnath, the northern sanctuary. I'm going to try to get there round about the time the shrine opens, which is currently estimated as 28th April; it's closed during the snows of winter. Now, getting to Kedarnath you'd think would be enough. But then I read that hardier pilgrims go on from Kedarnath to perform the Five Kedars pilgrimage - visiting Tunganāth, Rudranāth, Kalpeshvar, and Madhyameshvar - reflecting the fivefold nature of Shiva. Five more shrines. How could I not be drawn to them?

And so though you start with a single place, you end up with far too much on the list.

I could end up with an infinity of places to visit. I vow: "I'll go back" - back to visit the Tamil temples I missed last time (including Gangaikondacholapuram of the glorious name), to visit the Keralan hills, the Orissan marshes...But I've said I will not go back, not this time. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new...

Even in Rome and Venice, cities I've been revisiting for twenty years or more, there are places I haven't yet been, small churches and tucked away corners that are on my list, that most first-time travellers wouldn't even know existed. Come to that, every year I look at the Heritage Weekend open days for Norwich and realise there are still surprises for me in my own city.

So travel somehow has a way of expanding to fill the time available, if you let it. What seems to be a relatively tractable list of sights to see branches out, becoming more detailed, like a river flowing to the sea through a delta of more and more choices, till at last, you have an infinity of possible places to go, and you're up against the constraints of mortality. Too many places... too little life.

I can't believe Alexander sat and wept that there were no more worlds to conquer. What a limited mind he must have had.

Weird English

Famously, the Académie Française is said to have banned the term 'weekend' from the French language. (I can't actually find chapter and verse on this anywhere, just a lot of people saying that weekend is banned. Actually, the truth appears to be more complex; the AF wanted it spelt week-end, not weekend, and has recently come round to relaxing that rule. At least according to some reports. However, I've not found definitive chapter and verse on that, either. Quebec French, with or without the Academie Francaise, doesn't use the word weekend anyway - it's la fin de semaine.)

Anyway... what gets me going is not the use of English words in French. It's the way the French make up words out of English, but which aren't actually in the English language.

For instance, le relooking. J'ai fait le relooking de ma maison - I gave my house a makeover. Yes, I know that you can get 'the look', and I know that the prefix re- means 'again', but I'm sorry, relooking is not English. It's not French either.

Or then there's the 'best of' (sometimes 'bestoff'). In L'express recently I found that chocolatier Pierre Marcolini "boyage une cinquantaine de jours par an pour éditer des tablettes 'signées', fruits de rencontres à haute émotion avec des irréductibles de la qualité qui lui ont cédé au prix fort leur best of." Now in English, the word 'of' generally needs a noun after it; but 'best of' has become a noun in French. It doesn't have to be the best OF anything.

I've just discovered another great one; when you make a documentary about the making of a film, it's called "le making-of."

As for 'le fooding' - don't get me started!

Fossils

I've a new interest in country walks at the moment. Most of the fields near our French house are coming under the plough; the old colza stubble and the fallow is being ploughed under, before the new crops are planted. The landscape glints with grey flint brought to the surface.

Every so often, a fossil turns up. They're sea urchins; some rounded, some more conical, and a very few (a distinct species, micraster) are charmingly heart-shaped. I'm intrigued by the variety; some are in hard white or cream coloured stone, others seem porous as if made of sandstone; very rarely, I find one black as jet or the shining white of quartz.

I've started collecting them. I've also started noting my finds on a Google map (https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=215861518575701132761.0004cdaf98b8cce5d5d7d&msa=0); it's fascinating how some fields turn up fossils every couple of yards, while others are completely devoid of any fossil interest at all. The valley of our little winterburn for instance has almost no fossils; the fields above the marl pits are full of them.

I took a look at the marl pits the other day; there's a little lane goes past them, hardly unused except by dog-walkers and families going blackberrying. The cliff faces, glaring wet white, stand back from the path, separated from it by underbrush and sparse, thin trees. They're pure white, till about thirty centimetres from the top, where there's a single dark streak of flint. It looks about ten centimetres deep; that, I suppose, is where the fossils lurk. The layer is so thin; above and below it, nothing.

There's something a bit magical about these urchins. When you pick one out of the plough, and it's not chipped or fractured by the ploughshare, but complete, well rounded, it has a wholly satisfactory heft and weight to it as you pick it up. It's a perfect geometrical form; if you're lucky, all five radiating lines of spine sockets will be clear and deep. Sometimes, particularly with the micraster, the marks are so finely etched that you can hardly believe they've survived so many millennia; tiny patterns as delicate as snowflakes.

Micraster is a Late Cretaceous fossil; that's 60 to 100 million years ago.That doesn't mean much to me; I can't put it into context. But today, I found a different fossil; a tiny cockleshell attached to a small chip of flint. And suddenly, those years seemed to telescope - a shell in a field, just like the shells I used to find on holiday at Wells next the Sea; living and dead, ancient and modern, held together in a single moment. Strangely, in that single moment I appreciated for the first time the immense age of these fossils.

By spring I'll be laughing at this sudden enthusiasm of mine for fossil collecting. But it's taught me something; something I'd never have found out without a few days' obsession, walking along the furrows with my head down and my eyes open.