Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

  ‘What did he say?’ Annie wanted to know.

  ‘He say do not drink the water.’

  She laughed. ‘After the one hundred million people have bathed in it? That seems reasonable.’

  ‘No, ma’am, before the one hundred million people have bathed in it. After Delhi he say do not drink the water.’

  They were stuck now on the bridge off-ramp in a traffic jam the likes of which Annie had never seen, even on a bad day in Mumbai.

  On her right, the oncoming traffic was at a total standstill, on her left, on the road below, with which they were attempting to merge, two oxen were being swarmed by motorbikes and rickshaws, each one stuffed with more people than the last.

  Cars were trying to barge their way through, even a cow was jammed between an old truck piled high with broken chairs, a tractor, two 4WDs and a fleet of scooters.

  ‘The Taj Mahal is near here?’ she asked. It seemed most unlikely that anything of beauty would reside nearby.

  ‘Yes, madam. Just a few kilometres further along the river.’ He and Deepak enjoyed another heated exchange, then Sanjay turned to look at her in the back seat.

  ‘There are a lot of weddings in Agra today so the traffic is very bad,’ he said. ‘In this case, I will tell you now the story of the Taj Mahal so that when we go there in the morning, you will be prepared.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Annie said. It wasn’t as though she was rushing to anything, or anyone. A wave of anxiety rippled through her. She’d had a few since leaving Lands End, but what had surprised her was that they were only ripples. They came, and they went.

  ‘So, Shah Jahan was a very good king in the Mughul reign, very popular with the peoples,’ Sanjay said. ‘His father was Jahangir and his grandfather Akbar. You might have heard of Akbar, Akbar the Great? He also too was very popular with the peoples. But this Jahangir he gives the Mughuls a bad name with his loving for wine and women and opium.’

  ‘Really? In that order?’

  ‘Yes, most respected madam, really in that order. He drinks twenty-four bottles of wine a day, but when Akbar says to him, “Please my son, do not drink so much,” he replies, “God gave me two lips, Father, one for tasting wine and one for tasting women!”’

  ‘So he wasn’t inclined to give either up then?’

  ‘No Betty Ford Centers here, respected madam!’

  ‘But Jahangir’s son, Shah Jahan, was a good guy.’

  ‘He was a very good guy, madam. He chooses one wife, Big Wife, and another wife, Simple Wife, and he is good to them but they cannot give him childrens, so one day he goes to the Tricky Bazaar to get another wife.’

  ‘The Tricky Bazaar?’

  ‘Yes, madam, this is when all the most beautiful girls in the world are put together in a line and Shah Jahan gets to choose one. So he goes to the Tricky Bazaar with Big Wife, and Simple Wife, and they stand behind him as he looks at all the beautiful girls in the line.’

  Sanjay did a lively impersonation of a king scrutinising the potential at a tricky bazaar.

  ‘And then he sees the most beautiful girl of them all. She is the daughter of a lowly Persian peasant, madam, but once he sees her he can see nothing else, and like this he just breathes the word “Mumtaz”, and from then on, this is her name.’

  ‘Mumtaz?’

  ‘Not just Mumtaz. Muummmtaaaazzz!’

  ‘Muuummmmtaaaazzz!’

  ‘Yes, respected madam. Very good. “Mum” for beautiful and “taz” for royal.’

  Annie jumped as a passing elbow bumped her window. It belonged to a girl in a flowing sari sitting on the back of a motorbike. As she and the man on the front of the bike squeezed through a gap in front of them, Annie saw she was holding a baby in her arms.

  They were nestled so close, the three of them, such a tight little unit in that whirl of frightening traffic. The girl rested her head on the man’s back, her eyes closed, the baby sleeping squashed up between them.

  Annie felt another ripple.

  Had she ever trusted Hugh like that? Would she ever have ridden past two bullocks and a combine harvester with Daisy or Ben squashed between them? Could Hugh even ride a motorbike?

  Sanjay had been momentarily distracted by the traffic himself, but was now ready to continue his story. ‘So, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz have a very happy marriage, a very good marriage, a very long marriage and, better still, most respected madam, Mumtaz gives Shah Jahan fourteen childrens.’

  ‘So she was a good choice.’

  ‘She was an excellent choice, madam. Only in giving birth to her fourteenth child at the age of thirty-nine, she feels very unwell and she knows that her time is come, so she sends for Shah Jahan and he comes very quickly to her bedside.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Yes. Oh dear. Mumtaz tells Shah Jahan he must grant her three wishes before she dies. One, he must build a monument to prove his love to her. Two, he must never remarry because that would not be proving his love to her. And three, he must take care of their fourteen children.’

  ‘That’s quite sneaky, the not remarrying one.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, but understand that this marriage between Shah Jahan and Mumtaz it was not a political marriage, it was not an arranged marriage, it was a love marriage. And this is why the Taj Mahal is called the Palace of Love and Agra is called the city of love.’

  Annie looked out the window. ‘It should be called the city of traffic jams.’

  ‘Yes, but why are there traffic jams? Because so many peoples are getting married. And why are they getting married? Because they are in love!’

  ‘What if the marriages are arranged?’

  ‘Of course. Most of the marriages are arranged.’

  ‘Then where does the love come into it?’

  ‘There is love in arranged marriages, most respected madam. Of course there is love. The difference is that the marriage comes first, and the love comes after. But this is OK. This is good.’

  ‘Are you married, Sanjay?’

  ‘Yes, madam. I have a Mumtaz!’

  ‘And was your marriage arranged?’

  ‘Yes, madam. And when we first married, we were like this.’ He held his hands far apart. ‘But after eight years we are now like this.’ He clasped one hand over the other closed fist. ‘She is a very good wife and I am a very lucky man, and we have two children. My six-year-old son and a tiny baby who is one year old and quite loud in the night.’

  How odd, Annie thought, that Sanjay’s arranged marriage had headed in the opposite direction to her own love marriage, to many love marriages.

  Pinto had said pretty much the same thing. The Western world might just have it wrong when it came to love, she decided, flinching as another white 4WD came perilously close to clipping them.

  The charm of India’s explosion of lively colour was wearing decidedly thin by the time Deepak pulled up outside Annie’s hotel. It was five hours since they had picked her up at the airport in Delhi, and she was hot, sticky, tired and gasping for a cold drink and a shower.

  ‘What do you two do now?’ she asked as she got out of the car, her bags snatched instantly away by a tall handsome man in a turban.

  ‘Don’t think of us, most respected madam,’ Sanjay said. ‘We have a very nice guesthouse for the night and my tiny baby will not be waking me up, so I am very happy and so is Deepak.’

  They both did look happy actually. Annie smiled. ‘Thank you, Sanjay, and Deepak. It’s been very nice to meet you.’

  ‘See you very early tomorrow, ma’am. At five-thirty, OK? This way we see the Taj Mahal in all her glory and no crowds and also not too hot.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  By the time Annie was checked in, refreshed and showered, it was nearly nine o’clock.

  She had no desire to eat at any of the hotel’s restaurants, which were just as dull as the rest of the place, so she opened a half-bottle of Indian wine from the minibar, snapped open a packet of potato crisps and climbed into bed.

  Only then did she t
urn her phone on — her heart thumping — to see if there was anything from Hugh.

  There wasn’t.

  It was possible, she supposed, that if he was still running around the place trying to find his banana-picker he would not yet have received the letter.

  Possible, just not probable, given that she’d not been in touch with him all day.

  Would he not at least have called the hotel looking for her? She’d said goodbye to Mahendra, but hadn’t told him where she was going.

  Would Hugh splutter in disbelief and beg for details, or put the phone down and go about his day?

  What had she expected? Actually, she hadn’t thought at all about what sort of a response she wanted from him. Indeed, until now she hadn’t known she wanted any sort of response at all, but she did. One way or the other, she wanted him to bloody well give a damn!

  She gulped back the rest of her glass of wine and went to find the business centre, although part of her was already furious that Hugh might have responded to her by email.

  He hadn’t.

  There was a series of reminders from stores at home that they were having sales, one request from a Nigerian prince that she launder some money, and another that she make a donation to a programme trying to stop live involuntary organ donations in China.

  There was nothing from Ben or Daisy, of course, nothing even from Rhona (she would no doubt have her hands full) — and there was nothing from her husband of twenty-five years. A whole lot of nothing.

  She went back to her room and poured a second glass of wine. It wasn’t bad, actually. And who knew there was even such a thing as Indian wine?

  She checked her phone again. It was past ten now. There were no messages, no missed calls. She turned it off. It was too late now.

  The Bollywood movie playing on TV seemed to be telling the same story as the one she had watched in Mumbai, and it held her attention for a while, but as soon as she felt her eyes beginning to slide closed, she sank back into the pillows, stretched out across the crisp sheets of the big empty bed and escaped into a deep, uninterrupted sleep.

  When the alarm went off at quarter to five the next morning, she woke with a start, confused about where she was and why.

  Her husband’s name fluttered and died on her lips as the events of the previous day fully dawned on her.

  I’ve really done it, she thought as another ripple passed through her. I’ve really done it. Yet she felt less churned up than she had been the night before. She felt tired, with a tinge of anxiety: a common enough cocktail, and one she knew she could handle.

  Should it be this manageable? Leaving? Perhaps she was in shock. Or denial. Or so numbed by the events of the past months that nothing more could shake her.

  Perhaps there would be a day of reckoning down the track, wherever that was leading, or a week or a month or a year of reckoning.

  Right now it just felt … inevitable. And unalterable. She couldn’t have changed her mind even if she wanted to. She’d fled, and there was no fleeing back. That would be worse than continuing to do nothing, than living with the status quo.

  Be truthful, gentle and fearless. The words floated back into her consciousness as though on fluttering muslin in front of an open window.

  Gandhi probably had not been thinking of semi-neurotic twenty-first-century housewives when he conjured up his motto, but, nonetheless, as far as a guideline for living went, she felt it. She really felt it.

  And she had been truthful — probably more so than gentle — and she was trying to be fearless by leaping like this into the great beyond: beyond marriage, beyond motherhood, beyond whatever was making her so sad and lonely and dull.

  ‘I’m going to the Taj Mahal today,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m going to the TAJ MAHAL today.’

  She turned her phone on — still nothing.

  ‘I’M GOING TO THE TAJ MAHAL TODAY,’ she repeated, and kept repeating until it was time to leave the room.

  Sanjay and Deepak were waiting for her outside the hotel. It was still dark, with just a hint of sunrise in the distance.

  ‘Are you ready, respected madam?’ Sanjay asked. ‘Are you ready for the most famous monument in all of India?’

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said climbing into the back. ‘Come on, what are we waiting for?’

  AGRA WAS STILL FAR FROM BEAUTIFUL, but as the sun rose it glowed with a luminescence it had lacked the evening before. Also, the roads were empty. Even the cows and oxen were still asleep — they passed dozens of them, slumbering in between piles of litter and gangs of mangy dogs.

  As they drove through an outer gate into the Taj grounds and entered a massive, dusty car park, a ribby goat wandered across their path. The ground was pot-holed and sprouted sporadic desiccated tree stumps: it was not much of a calling card to the most famous monument in all of India.

  The ticket office was certainly ramshackle, and smelly. Sanjay bought her ticket and handed her a bottle of water, though she didn’t want to drink it. The guide saw this and Annie felt ashamed, but it was the man in the ticket office whose filthy hands she didn’t trust. He kept wiping his nose with one of them.

  She opened the bottle regardless and took a long, thirsty glug. If she died of diphtheria, it would at least be a polite death.

  ‘Come, we get the official battery bus now to the main entrance,’ Sanjay said.

  The official battery bus had no air-conditioning, and springs poked out of its plastic seats like jack-in-the-boxes. Luckily, it set off as soon as they got on it, so they didn’t have to wait in the heat. Luckily for them anyway: as it pulled away Annie saw an elderly man being berated by a flock of women in saris for not telling them to get on in time.

  They drove out of the car park and down an avenue with souvenir shops on each side, a couple of barely awake cows mooching in front of them, rickshaw cyclists snoozing on their empty rigs.

  ‘No petrol or diesel near the Taj,’ Sanjay said. ‘Only battery bus. And since UNESCO say, no factories in Agra either. One time there have been more than twenty business chimneys, but the smoke is making the Taj black so then the businesses are told to go away.’

  That certainly explained the seen-better-times impression the city outside the Taj managed to present. Even the avenue they were on, leading directly to the favoured monument, needed a jolly good tidy-up, Annie thought.

  The bus stopped and its occupants piled out at a plain red-brick entrance, the outer shell of the Taj Mahal fort.

  ‘One queue for womens,’ Sanjay said, pointing her in the right direction. ‘One queue for mans. I will meet you on the other side.’

  The gate opened as Annie joined the back of the women’s queue and she was quickly deposited on the other side once her bag was searched.

  ‘The Taj is open from sunrise to sunset,’ Sanjay said, as they walked down a long path between two emerald-green lawns, ‘but early morning is best time to come because the light is changing with every minute.’

  They turned right to face the northern outer gate that led into the Taj proper.

  This gate itself was stunning: it looked almost like a one-dimensional church, with large domed towers on either side at the top, eleven small domes in between.

  The red brick was inlaid in places with the most intricate patterns of red and green on white marble tiles. It looked like a Moorish fairy-tale castle.

  In the centre was a small opening through which Annie could only just make out, in the early sunrise, a blur of silvery white.

  She felt excitement flaring in her belly.

  Sanjay, with dramatic aplomb, was not about to let her just barrel in, however. He stopped her, a very serious look on his face.

  ‘Most respected madam,’ he said. ‘I have told you the story of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz, so you know this great love between these two peoples is why we now four hundred years later still have this monument, this reminder of all that is the most wonderful between two peoples, a man and a woman.’

  ‘Yes, Sanjay, you have told
me that.’

  ‘And do you believe in love, madam?’

  Annie gulped. What a question. What a time to be asked that question.

  ‘I am sorry, respected madam, this is perhaps not my place to ask you this. I am very sorry. Please, let me ask you something else, because even though I tell you that the Taj Mahal is the Palace of Love, it is actually something else, it is something more, something that is in the air that you cannot see or touch, like love.’

  You can’t see or touch love either, she wanted to say, but he so desperately wanted to please her, she could not stand in his way.

  ‘Taj Mahal, more than anything else, respected madam, is the Palace of Symmetry. Because Shah Jahan believed in symmetry.’

  She nodded. Maths, she could do.

  ‘You will notice here, even at the gate,’ Sanjay said, ‘that this is perfectly symmetrical, and you will notice when you get inside that everything in there is also perfectly symmetrical. Ah, almost everything. I will see if you can find the one thing that is not. But the buildings, the gardens, the mausoleum itself — everything is exactly similar on one side as the other.’

  ‘So what is the meaning of all this symmetry?’

  ‘Well, you see, respected madam, Shah Jahan felt great love for Mumtaz, this we know, and love, it is a wonderful thing. Love, it is all you need, it is making the world go round, is that not so?’

  Annie bit her lip and nodded.

  ‘But love is not marriage. We are talking about this before, madam. Sometimes love comes first and marriage second, and sometimes it is the other way around, and sometimes the two never meet at all. Either way, this is a balancing act, respected madam, and Shah Jahan knew this. He knew that love, that life, is about balance and that it is getting the balance right that counts, more than anything else. Sometimes from one angle love looks very good, sometimes from another angle, very terrible. This is natural; this is what happens in life. We are only human. But when it came to building this beautiful monument to his wife, Shah Jahan made sure that at least this was the same from every angle, so that it was in perfect symmetry, always, to forever honour the balance of love and life. For me this is the most profound beauty of the Taj Mahal.’