Orchha – India the slow way

Today I played my first game of karom. Ram Babu, the fruit and juice vendor, turns out to be a champion and was quite happy to teach me how to play. I lost eight games in a row.(But I did improve. At the start I couldn't even hit the pieces. By the end I was turning in two or three good shots a game.)

I wandered up river, having found a little gate in the high wall that surrounds the town and its hinterland, and defends against a riverside attack; I turned right, where previously I'd turned left, through fields muddy with the previous day's rain to the banks of the Betwa. I scrabbled on shingle or plains of great rounded grey pebbles that rustled and turned under my feet, and climbed over pinkish granite rubbed clean and flat by centuries of monsoon floods. A man carrying a bucket picked his way from rock to rock as delicately as a bird; women were doing their laundry in the shallows downriver, and the towers of the Teen Mahal shimmered in reflection. I saw the spires of a temple I'd visited two days before reflected in a still pool. I saw a mysterious tower in the woods on the opposite bank, and no way to reach it. I gave up when the bank became a cliff, and the water too deep to paddle across, but I could still see shallows in the middle distance, and women in pink and yellow saris doing their washing.

Like so many Indian hikes this turned out inconclusive, reaching a dead end, so that I had to follow cow tracks back to the main road, relinquishing my plan to follow the river. I came back on the 'bye pass' (Indian spelling, as always with its own idiosyncratic charm) past a fine ruined haveli, its three storey gate tower topped by the curved roof that's typical of Bundela architecture. I looked for a way up, but the stairs had caved in. I had to make do with the natural rise of the land for my view of Orchha in the valley below.

I ate lunch from Bal Kisan, at his little stall in the busy pedestrian street that runs up from the main road to the Ramraja temple. His little girl recognised me and grinned; he's more ceremonious, said 'namaste', started making my patty. The potato patties sat already made, light golden, on the side of the huge iron pan; he swept one into the centre, chopped it into segments with what appeared to be a bolster chisel, piled chickpeas on top, then fresh chopped onions and coriander; swished it round a few times, mixed, swished, chopped again, and swept it all off the pan into a paper bowl, topping it off by ladling on sweet sauce and adding a pinch of ground coriander. Total cost: twenty rupees – which is standard for the fare, but I've rarely had such a huge and tasty version of it.

I wandered down to the chhatris at the other end of town to see the sunset. A
dog bounded towards me – a dog with neatly trimmed fur and a brass-studded collar, whose German owner turned up later. We chatted; the underlying violence of India was his story, the way he'd nearly been lynched when he tried to help a road accident victim and the mob somehow got the idea he was responsible for the accident; robbery in Manipur, a crash on the bridge by the Jhansi turnoff. I've never encountered more than hopeful 200 rupee scams in India – but that violence is always there; things can turn nasty in a moment, situations are always volatile. Someone sits in the wrong seat on the bus and suddenly fists are flying... but not in Orchha, somehow, where when my bus to Sonagiri passed the road to Ramraja Temple, one man opened the window and let fly a devout and very short prayer (and five voices joined 'Hey!' at the end) before sliding the window decisively shut again. That's as eventful as things have been in Orchha this week.

I spent an afternoon picnicking at the farm near the Laxminarayan temple that my guesthouse family own. Being one of the two vegetarians who wouldn't eat any of the mutton from the goat that had been slaughtered for us; the other being younger brother, who said later, "I saw its eyes, it looked at me, I could not eat it." Playing with the younger children, watching the chapati making – hard work, pushing into the resistant dough with whole fists – chatting with Korean students sitting on a mat under the shade of slender trees, feeling the cool breeze, listening to birdsong.

The end of the day comes. Ramraja Temple's two clear, fine treble bells ring the day to a close; ting-tang, ting-tang, ting-tang, calling to rest in the gathering dark. A sound that is sweet and melancholy and you hardly hear over the chatter and the sound of frying food in the guesthouse kitchen, unless you listen for it.

From time to time I leave Orchha for an adventure; a day of torrential rain in Gwalior, saved by a sudden outburst of sunshine that made the huge Jain rock carvings shine like gold, and the streams falling from the cliffs glitter with rainbows, and from which I returned three hours late, to be warmed at the cow-pat fire that smelt like creosote; a wonderful day climbing around Sonagiri's temple-encrusted hill; a trip to Datia with its bat-haunted palaces. But most of the time I spend just wandering, taking life easy, enjoying the fact that I've found somewhere in India I can call home.




Disclaimer: just a happy customer of Temple View Guest House and consumer of the complimentary chai offered - no affiliation, and no money off my bill for writing this. :-)

The toughest pilgrimage - climbing Parasnath

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I was late starting. I'd got up at six, was checked into a dharamshala in Parasnath by eight, on my way up the mountain by nine; but that was still late. Some people start at five, just as the sky begins to lighten a little before sunrise; others start at four, even three-thirty.

Breakfast was a packet of biscuits and orange juice. Then up the street between white marble and red sandstone temples, dhabas selling samosas and shops selling walking sticks and toeless, heel-less socks, to a place where a gate opened on to the forest and a steeper slope.

That's the way you start your pilgrimage. Others were still going up; two naked Digamber Jains, burnt brown as conkers by the sun, passed me, one walking and carrying a huge peacock feather fan, the other sitting in a litter slung between two bearers who kept time with their sticks tapping on the path, tick, tick, tick.

(He was frowning furiously. I don't know what it is about Jains; some are very charming people, but there's one in ten who looks at the world from behind a scowl. I noticed most of the dholi-borne were scowling, though some weren't – one resplendent gentleman in white asked me 'How are you enjoying?' and smiled to show that he, at least, was enjoying – while the walkers seemed happier.)

It was still cool morning, slightly misty, the path shaded by tall trees. The first three kilometres went quickly. I'd already climbed the little hill I'd seen from the village. Ahead, the path kept going, winding, corkscrewing back on itself, climbing.

Either side, teahouses. Perhaps that's too dignified a name for them; they're just rough shacks made of untrimmed branches, black plastic sheet, leftover oil tins and woven plastic rice sacks, whatever was spare at the time. Sometimes there's one at a bend in the track, or a scatter of them where the path descends to cross a ravine. Not all will be open; but flat-topped mud walls, or huge rough planks, polished and cracked and sagging with age, offer the chance of a rest, with or without chai, tea, mineral water, or juice.

The sun ascends the sky fast in India; by ten it's almost directly overhead. The day heated up; as the trees grew sparser, higher up the slopes, sweat started to sting my eyes. The gradient was relentless; deep enough to test the hamstrings but not deep enough for real climbing, and with a camber that had me staggering sideways as I my legs tired.

Still the hills were misty; the views suggestive but blurred. High up, I'd caught sight of the temples; but I seemed to be between mountain peaks – to the left, one white spire topped a mountain; to the right, another spire; and another, further ahead. Among the confusion of smaller temples, though, one dominated the rest; it seemed so high I'd never make it.

An Indian lady passing on her way down had already warned me; "You need to start back by two o'clock. Three hours you need to get down the mountain, even quick quick. Three or four hours." We chatted for a little while before she moved on, and as she left she shouted back at me: "Remember – two o'clock." 

Now it was getting towards two, and that white spire seemed as far above me as ever. Tears came to my eyes and I thought well, let's at least get the crying over with, and found a little corner of a wall where I could sob quietly for a couple of minutes without anyone noticing.

A couple of minutes later I met a lovely family from the US – sister, brother, auntie, and Dad, who had flown over specifically for the pilgrimage day; the older members of the family in litters, the younger pair walking, brother resplendent in white and gold, but barefoot – "so Dad can't say young people have it too easy these days," he said, without rancour. I've forgotten their names, but not the encouragement they gave me. Without that, I doubt I'd have reached the top. I chatted with the girl – just moved to San Francisco after years on the east coast, and loving it.

"You know you can get a massage afterwards?" she said.

I wondered if this was the kind of massage I was always being offered by dubious looking Nepali men I bumped into.

"No, the dharamshalas offer it as part of the service. Ladies get a lady masseur, men get a man, really helps you recover."

(When I got back to the dharamshala a lady did in fact offer me massage, but I was simply too tired to take up the offer.)

I missed out the penultimate shrine – I wasn't following the map, had in fact missed out two of the routes that loop off the main climb to visit other hilltops. I was beginning to see, by now, how the paths were laid out below; connecting each foothill, each subsidiary peak. This isn't a simple up-there-and-back-again pilgrimage like climbing Everest; it's a whole sacred landscape, a gradual and graduated progress. (I regret, now, I didn't stay a few more days and do it again, the proper way.)

Slowly, painfully, stopping every hundred yards or so for a quick breather, I grappled with the way. At last, I was at the bottom of the tiled stairs that led the final fifty yards steeply up to the temple. A banister to cling to, at last. Shoes off; the tiles cool on my feet, even though the sun had been beating down on them for hours. And into the shrine; surprisingly simple, surprisingly dark, surprisingly empty.

At last, from here, I could see the mountain spread out below. Heat haze hid the Bihari plains, but there were the five great peaks, temple-topped, linked by white meanders and wriggles of path, and below that the wooded foothills, misty and dark. The shrine where I'd met that family fifteen minutes ago seemed miles below, tiny; the furthest shrines so far that it seemed impossible I'd passed them the same day. It was a little like looking down on the horseshoe of the Tayside Munros from Ben Lawers, but it seemed higher; the temples, perhaps, make everything seem further away just by giving it a scale by which you can judge.

India isn't blessed with many mountains, outside the Himalayas. The Ganges basin is flat, wretchedly, interminably flat, except where rivers have carved their way through the layers of soil, or where little fists and nuggets of rock thrust up out of the interminably flat plain. But no real mountains. And yet here, at Parasnath, there's a 1,000 metre mountain bursting out of the level. No wonder it's held to be sacred.

The way down was much easier, which isn't always the case. I went swinging along, followed by two inquisitive dogs who stayed with me most of the way to the bottom. (A glass of sugar cane juice just below the summit had restored my optimism, if not my knees, which continued to groan and hiss and complain.) I chatted to a couple of Delhi girls; one on her fourth pilgrimage here.

"And you know," she said, "some people do it eleven times."

"In their lives?"

"No, they stay here two weeks and climb the mountain every day for eleven days."

Horrible thought. (I did climb again the next day, but only as far as the first temples, just 3 km in, and even then it was hard enough.)

Then there was the noisy great group of pilgrims who decided to take the steep, rocky, dusty short cut rather than the easy curve of the path. I was going easily now, in big swinging strides, and reached the bottom of the slide before they did.

"Short cut!" I yelled. They laughed. We were all in good humour now, just one or two kilometres from home and a hot shower and food and bed.

When I got back, though, I'd lost my appetite. I couldn't find anything that wasn't fried - samosas, puris, pakoras – and my stomach writhed at the thought. In the end I grabbed a couple of samosas and had my friend the juice man (for some reason, I always manage to make friends with a juice man) package up the flesh from a green coconut after I drank the milk. I slept a bit first, dragging an extra mattress on to the bed in the dharamshala; about ten, I woke up, ate the pastry off the samosas and most of the coconut, and went back to sleep.

I ended thoroughly worn out, mentally and physically. A wreck. I'd lost my appetite completely – could just about dare to think of melon sorbet or elderflower cordial, certainly not eat puri subji for breakfast; I wouldn't find my appetite again till three days later, in Allahabad Station, I found some dahi wada (dumplings in yogurt with sweet-sour tamarind sauce). My legs were tense, my muscles tight as bunches of stretched elastic bands, and my back ached. I might have wondered why I'd put myself through all this.

But I didn't. There was something about Parasnath – the quiet of the forest, the chance to meet Indian pilgrims on the path, the obvious enjoyment of so many of them – that impressed me, in a way more obvious tourist sights like the Taj Mahal haven't. Whether or not I could say at the time that I was 'enjoying', it is a day I'll never forget.

The meaning of a hill – a few thoughts

There's something qualitatively different, I think, in the way different religions approach the hill. Its meaning shifts and changes.

Hindu temples are often built on hills; the whole landscape of Orchha is dominated by hill temples – the immense bulk of Chaterbuj temple, the smaller hilltop temples just outside the town – and the temples of Khajuraho are built on their own artificial mounds, up steep steps, so that you have to crick your neck as you approach to see the sanctuary doors.

But every Hindu temple is its own hill, an imitation of Mount Meru, the hill at the centre of the world-mandala. Its spire is a hill, its sanctuary is a cave. It doesn't really matter if the temple is on a hill, an island, on the flat; it is the world-mountain in little. And while a pilgrimage may climb steps up to the temple, that's just the nature of where the temple is; it doesn't seem to be part and parcel of the experience.

The Jains on the other hand seem to seek out hills; Parasnath, Girnar, Mount Abu. There's something ascetic in the religion which demands the hard work of climbing; and perhaps, too, something about purity that demands the thinner, clearer mountain air.

Christianity has its hill temples too. I remember as a child cross-country running up Glastonbury Tor, with its tower on top the only remains of St Michael's sanctuary, and the views across the Somerset Levels. It's almost always St Michael who gets hilltop dedications – at Sacra San Michele in Piedmont, at St Michael's Mount and Mont Saint Michel, at the Gargano shrine (a cave below a hill) - Michael the archangel, a fiery vision, a protector. Some people think he took over from an autochthonous snake deity or sun god, the same god as Delphic Apollo. But these hilltop shrines don't seem to fit a single pattern, and there doesn't seem to be a single Christian practice of hilltop pilgrimage; it's only Munroists, in Britain, who make the hills their focus of worship. (If you think Munroism isn't a religion, you haven't met enough Munro-baggers.)

And there are also hill-top Calvaries, like the Calvary steps in Rijeka, built in the seventeenth century by the Jesuits; the recreation of the way to the Cross was part of Ignatian spiritual practice, that used meditation on the life of Christ as a way to salvation, and in Central and Eastern Europe such monuments use the physical effort of ascent to make the worshipper share the experience of Christ - they are not merely a passive device like the Stations of the Cross in a church. By following the ascent, the worshipper is brought into sympathy with Christ's sufferings; the hill becomes not a symbol but a re-creation of the original Calvary.

The ticket scam

Somehow Indian shops and businesses have never heard of the concept of a float. You can never get change – even splitting a 10 rupee note is a problem in Agra. So I wasn't surprised when at Fatehpur Sikri, the Archaeological Survey of India ticket office didn't have change for 200 rupees. Could I come back later for the change?

Well, I thought, I'll trust the guy – but just ask him to write '50 rupees change' on the back of my ticket so we both know exactly how much. (He was as good as his word. When I came back a couple of hours later, he had the note in his hand before I had a chance to say anything. An honest gentleman.)

That's how I discovered the ticket scam. When I handed in my ticket for cancellation at the entrance, I got back a ticket that didn't  have '50 rupees change' written on the back. I objected – and saw my intact ticket, off which the guard now proceeded to tear the stub, before handing me the correct ticket.

Okay, a mistake. Or something. But then I remembered all the children in Fatehpur Sikri who had been asking me for my old ticket – for the Fatehpur Sikri Palace, or the Taj Mahal,  wherever. I'd thought at the time that was rather cute and sad, as if they were collecting Archaeological Survey of India top trumps.
Now I realised what was going on. They were collecting used tickets and presumably selling them to the guard for a few annas on the rupee, so to speak. The guard could then retain visitors' tickets uncancelled, and either sell them back to the ASI ticket office man (if he wasn't as honest with his employers as he had been with me) or to touts who could sell them to tourists at guesthouses or outside office hours.

Of course this means ASI isn't getting the money. And though you can easily criticise ASI – it sometimes seems more concerned with nice lawns and municipal flower displays than conserving the monuments, and its archaeological methodology is stuck not even in the 1950s, but in the 1860s – at least it does a basic job of stopping India's heritage falling into decay.

The same scam is being worked at Sarnath. Only this time, I was asked for "Ticket, madam" by a rather official looking gent at the gate as I went out – at least, official looking till I saw the jogging bottoms under his suit jacket. How sad. Somehow I'd managed to lose my ticket...

The science of mindlessness

I've spent the day in Bodh Gaya. In the process I received not enlightenment, but tea, from the monks of the Bhutanese monastery, who were busy playing with plasticene, or rather making ritual models for a ceremony at their chorten tomorrow, to which I'm invited. You've never seen a happier bunch of monks; like many of the sadhus I've met, they are content, smiling – I won't say jolly, that's too Friar Tuck, but they have a deep, childish enjoyment of life.

As with Kumbh Mela, Bodh Gaya is full of different kinds of Buddhists going about things in their own way. There are Tibetans stroking prayer wheels into action; Japanese Nichiren Buddhists chanting; there are Buddhists who sing hymns, Buddhists who chant scriptures, one solitary Buddhist singing from a sutra with a bell and a small drum. There are those who just sit (seon in Korean, Zen in Japanese). There are monks and nuns in saffron, in red, in white, in grey.; only their shaven heads – such a contrast with the long-haired, long-bearded Hindu sadhus – a common denominator. On one level it's chaos; but there's no conflict. Everyone seems to get along, tolerating other sects' or nations' ways of doing things.

What much Buddhist practice seems to have in common is a science of mindlessness. Trying to distract the conscious thoughts, the conscious cravings of the mind, by occupying the mind with mindless tasks. I saw one monk repeatedly filling a bracelet with beads, setting a little stupa on top, muttering a mantra, and then tipping the beads back into his lap to start again. It's a meditation on the nature of transience, but it also fills the mind; you can't think connected thoughts while you're doing it, so that thoughts flicker across the surface of the mind like swallows over water, and disappear.

Wooden prostration boards are laid out around the Mahabodi temple like sunloungers round a German swimming pool. Devotees – not just monks and not just Tibetans – raise their hands, palms together, to head, then to their chests, and then kneel and prostrate themselves, pushing their hands out towards the temple and laying their foreheads on the ground. Again and again and again and again. Some were even using electronic counters, like pedometers; spiritual exercise in every sense.

The monk with his little hand drum and bell, chanting, had three different rhythms working against each other, two different physical movements to make. Another with a prayer wheel and a rosary, again, had to keep both separate movements going at the same time; on the one hand a trivial exercise, like the old trick of rubbing your head and patting your belly at the same time, but on the other hand, an activity that keeps the concentration from wandering.

A nun was carefully walking on a kerb, placing one foot exactly in front of the other, pacing extremely slowly, drawing out every movement.

(Thinking about it now, in the quiet of the Burmese monastery guest house, I recognise quite a few of these exercises from my experience as an actor. Actors do them for a different purpose – but perhaps when an actor talks about 'being in the moment' what they mean is not all that far from Buddhist enlightenment.)

I had another free gift today. I was sitting under the bodhi tree (not the original, but grown from a sapling of the original taken to Sri Lanka but the emperor Ashoka's daughter) when a leaf fell, touching me on the knee before rattling on to the ground. I picked it up. Like tea with the Bhutanese monks, a gift of grace.

Droplets of Ganga

 

Kumbh Mela is the Ganges. Kumbh Mela, in a sense, is India. Like India, it's utterly diverse; both sacred and secular, human and divine, fantastically organised and completely chaotic. Each droplet reflects a different fragment of India, and only through those reflections does the Kumbh reveal itself, over a period of days or even weeks.

So I can't tell you what Kumbh Mela is. I can only tell my own experiences; the things I saw, people met. Filtered through my lack of Hindi, through others' faltering English, through the lack of signposts (noted in the Hindustan Times) and the fact that I couldn't, no one could, see the whole thing, only parts of it, like the blind men and the elephant.

It's the Norfolk Showground, but not as we know it; corrugated iron corrals, exhibitions on Uttar Pradesh Tourism or exciting agricultural machinery, dusty temporary roads, roped off and fenced off areas, fast food stalls and drinks stands. There are candyfloss salesmen and boys selling toy helicopters which they demonstrate perpetually, sometimes managing to land one on an innocent (and irate) bystander, kids selling toy whistles or balloons or parakeets made of blue neoprene. (Parakeet smurfs?)

There's even a funfair on Triveni Road, with a Wall of Death and two big wheels, waltzers and a monorail and, this being India, a Shaivite temple featuring a Mount Meru made of plaster of Paris, and with a real priest and two white doves inside as well as a massive plaster of Paris lingam that looks as if it's made of varnished Christmas cake icing, entry ten rupees.

Except it's the Norfolk Showground with naked men wandering around. The naga babas are what the tourists go to see. And they are, undeniably, impressive; long dreadlocks (I saw one doing yoga; a disciple had to get the baba's hair out of the way of his gymnastics, as it was twice as long as he was), long beards, their skin white or grey with ashes.

I sat with one naga baba at his hearth – a campfire that doubles as altar, with two huge logs smouldering. From time to time he took his tongs and trimmed the burned ends of the logs, or held a bidi or chillum in the tongs to light it from the embers. But he was most interested in showing me pictures of himself, and even better, his press cuttings; here he was at Haridwar, at Rishikesh, at Varanasi, and here, lighting a huge chillum and wreathed in narcotic smoke.


(A sight in Varanasi: 'government bhang shop'. I can't quite imagine an NHS cannabis outlet in Norwich.)

Anorak. Sandals. Nice wristwatch. Designer specs. An Indian now resident in the US showed me round the akhada where he was staying for two months; he'd taken time off from his real estate business.  He was full of information; how the akhada was organised (run by the maharaja, with his adjutants, sadhus of different ranks – just like the Indian police or army, he said, every sadhu has a rank within the akhada), the mythology of the Kumbh Mela, the division between Shaivite (the majority) and Vaishnavite (the minority) akhadas, the different bathing dates, the event his maharaja was launching that afternoon to protest against female foeticide and infanticide. Another fragment of Kumbh, another distinct fragment of India.

Fog that doesn't clear till midday. My hair wet with the mist. Two elephants sway up the road, looming in fog; a roadsweeper gives one a coin, which it takes gently with its trunk and swings sinuously up to the mahout. A blessing.

The maharajah and his new socks. In one place I was given prasad with another twenty or so people, sitting on the dirt of the main alley through the akhada, food whacked out of tin pails on to the stitched-leaf platters in front of us, scooping the rice and dal up with our fingers. (Prasad is given to all, every mealtime, by the various akhadas; always similar, though details differ - Ram gives jalebi, while Krishna offers no dessert; some serve rice, others roti.) Afterwards I sat in front of the maharaja as he held court, or offered darshan as his devotees would say; he bickered happily with his disciples, laughed, smiled, was in good humour.

Two Mongolian-looking women came in; stocky, flat-faced, carrying a pair of gaudy knitted socks. Cue disruption. They kneel before the maharajah to touch his feet; that's normal. They then grab a foot each and start pulling his beige socks off and pushing the new socks on. The socks are too tight. The maharajah is laughing still, his beard twitching with merriment. Two of his disciples start pulling each leg. Or perhaps they're  pulling the socks, but there are now so many people kneeling and pulling and fidgeting around his legs and feet that I can't work out quite what is going on. Someone else is holding the back of the maharajah's swivel chair to stop him being pulled away entirely. I see the word 'happy' in pink and yellow paper cut outs above his head. (Happy what? I wonder.)

An English-speaking devotee sits next to me and explains. "Maharajah is loving devotees. They are coming two thousand kilometer to see him. From Manali they come. They are bringing present. Socks are too tight. But Maharajah is wearing them to make devotees happy. When Maharajah gives blessing, he is making only one blessing, be happy."

Another fragment of the Kumbh. Be happy.

I'm surprised, so often, by the sadhus' sense of humour. Their sense of fun. Prahalad Puri puts his arm round his retired police inspector disciple and kisses him – "my little brother," he says, though he's not much more than half his disciple's age.

A young boy leads two blind sadhus. I put a coin in their tiffin box.

At the sangam, a family take a disabled man to bathe. He is supported for the five painful and slow steps from his wheelchair to the water's edge, where he's sat on a plastic chair. A woman brings water in a bucket, with a jug she puts in his hand; he tips Ganga water over himself. She sees me, and smiles, and puts her palms together in greeting. A big, open smile that makes her eyes crease. All heart. I'm touched. (Forty-five minutes later, I pass again. He's having his trousers pulled up, and the wheelchair is brought. What tender care. What love.)

Man and wife light a flame, put marigolds and roses in a little flaming boat and set it afloat on the water. Their heads nearly touch as they squat at the waterline. A little domestic moment. Ten million people at Kumbh Mela but this is their small space. Another drop of Ganga.

The sheer size of the place. Ganga wider than the Thames or the Seine. The speed of the current; it makes a wake behind two men who are standing still, swirls offerings away towards the ocean. Sandbanks that stretch for ever.

A naked sadhu doing push-ups and handstands, like an Olympic gymnast gone weird. He brushes his hands with silt just as a gymnast chalks his palms before pulling up on the bars.

Night falls. On every akhada and ashram gateway lights begin to blaze. A peacock whose fanned tail lights up gradually, a Krishna in lights, revolving wheels. It's the Blackpool Illuminations with added deities. The sangam lit by huge lights like a sandy oversize football pitch. Down on the silt six priests offer aarti, wafting huge candelabra at the river, which is both the river and the goddess they worship. (Everything is everything else in India; there is no either/or.)

Some young Indians dance to the last hymn. They invite me to join them; want their photos taken with me. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is happy. The sun has set. Another day of Kumbh.

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.