A Study in Marble

Gazing at the Agra Fort, leaning against the railing of the mausoleum, I couldn’t help but think about the grandeur of the red sandstone structure that stood before me. Spanning as far and wide as the eyes can see are huge red blocks that make up the walls of the fort. Spread across those walls at certain intervals are minarets that stand like guard posts looking over the entire fort and the city which inevitably draw your attention to them. The occasional breeze that flows in the old Mughal capital carries whispers of tales of the sultanate; as varied as the hues of red that reflects off the walls of the fort during the length of the day. They sing songs of tales of lineages passed as the morning sun paints the fort in a salmon hue, to the scarlet red of power and violence during noon, finally settling into a crimson of love, longing and estrangement. The Agra Fort from that railing seems nothing less than the Taj Mahal that stands behind me. Its coarse stone a complete contrast from that of the smooth marble speaks of two worlds bound together by the waters that meanders past them. While the red sandstone structure somehow seems to melt into the city that sprawls around it, the Taj Mahal with its milky white marble stands out just like the drying river that encircles it.

While I stand and thinking about all this with tens of ideas going through my head, a harsh voice manages to pull me out of my reverie. Not quite far from where I was standing was a guide pointing towards a huge window somewhere on the edge of a tall minaret of the red sandstone fort. He explains to the group of tourists on my right about the imprisonment of Shah Jahan in the fort by his son Aurangzeb. Of how through that window (which I for one couldn’t find) Shah Jahan would look at the Taj Mahal, watching it transform like the various moods of Mumtaz, while he withered away in her memories. I listened to the guide speak of how the emperor would sit at the window during long nights writing poems for his beloved as he watched the pale luminescence of the Taj reflect on the waters of the Yamuna that meandered through the mausoleum. In the darkness of the night, it was the river alone that conveyed the emperor’s sorrow to Mumtaz resting in the Taj.

As the crowd around me awed the love of the Mughal emperor for his wife, I wondered if Yamuna on her countless sojourns to the Taj also began falling for the mausoleum? Could it have been possible that in receiving messages for the empress who rested in a vault within the four walls of Taj, a new love story might have started to bloom between the river and the mausoleum amidst the loss of Shah Jahan’s love? Did the weight of those poems, those songs weigh the river down causing it to sink below the surface? Perhaps the Taj turning crimson and Yamuna reflecting the same as soon as the morning sun fell over the two of them was their way of confessing love to each other. Yamuna as it became the mouthpiece of Shah Jahan’s love seemed to have reversed the traditional roles of courtship. Yearnings of the emperor became the voice of Yamuna, the one which Taj fell in love with, and whose loss is now causing the mausoleum to sink deeper into the surface on which it stands. The idea indeed seems far-fetched but going by the state of the river that was the chief reason behind Shah Jahan constructing the Taj Mahal on its bank, one begins to wonder if the improbability of the above claims were not the reason behind the decline of the river what is?

“Yamuna that flows through the Taj today is a trickle of its former self,” informs the guide to the group which by now happens to have an audience around; close enough to hear the guide for free but keeping in mind not to get too close that they might be called out. I remember these words also because it was something that ‘baba’ (my rickshaw wala) also echoed as he gave me a ride to Gandi Puliya, under which flows a decently sized drain that opens directly into the Yamuna, just a couple of hundred metres from the entrance to the Taj. I remember baba telling me of the time when the water in the Yamuna flowed so high up that people would jump into the river from the Taj Mahal to bathe and swim, of the time when it was both revered and feared for its size and might and how now the river is not even a shadow of its former self . Baba might have exaggerated a few of the imagery that he used for the Yamuna regarding how it was in the past, something which is not that uncommon and is frequently used by many of us when reminiscing about memories of the past, however, amidst all this it becomes increasingly hard to view the river and not feel a sense of sorrow grow within. As baba talks so fondly about the time when Yamuna used to gush past the Taj, I can only imagine how the river might have looked back then. The Yamuna that I see before me struggles to even cover the width of its bed let alone be anywhere close to the what Baba described it being as back in his day. While Baba revels in his memories as he pedals the rickshaw forward, I look back at the Taj once again against the fading light of the sun.

Shah Jahan once wrote:

 â€œThe sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs;

 And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.”

Baba fondly recalled the times when one was allowed entry into the Taj Mahal even at night and you could revel in the bewitching glow of the marble masterpiece. There was an unmistakable twinkle in his eyes as he recalled a memory of him sitting somewhere on the edge of the structure and watched the mausoleum sparkle in the water below. Its white marble slabs diffused with the pale hue of the moon illuminating everything around it including the river below that seemed bejewelled. Teary eyed now Baba told me that the sight of the marble mausoleum under the moonlight was so beautiful that it felt like the entire world around you was moaning the loss of Mumtaz and the tears of every life form around you was the origin of the Yamuna that wanted to embrace the spirit of Mumtaz that glowed brightly in the moonlit sky. Today as the floodplains and riverbed of the Yamuna are increasingly being colonised by the hands of power, Taj- the age-old symbol of eternal love dressed in white, seems to be mourning the loss of its own beloved, whose very existence appears to be limited to the tears that flow down the Taj Mahal.

Tagore once wrote about the Taj calling it a “teardrop on the cheek of time”. The brilliance and beauty of this line sums up the entirety of the idea of Shah Jahan wanting to build the Taj Mahal. On the face of eternity, Taj Mahal will always hold the place of deep-seated sorrow, one that falls down from the eyes of time itself travelling on a stream of eternity that make for the cheeks to ultimately form the trickle of the river that now struggles to flow by the Taj. Dazzled in the bewitching sight of the monument one often forgets the intricacies and architectural brilliance that went behind the construction of the Taj Mahal. While many believe that the construction of the mausoleum on the banks of the meandering Yamuna was only for aesthetic purposes, only a few are aware about how the site also acted as an active measure to prevent scouring by erosion. The realisation that there was not just emotion involved but also a thought of constructing something that would survive the ravages to stand as the paradigm of love makes one marvel the monument and its site even more. The very foundation of the monument is a technological feat that required complex steps of digging deep wells and checking the water table followed by providing a wooden, box like structure for the monument to stand on. The fact that the Taj sits over a wooden foundation whose strength is directly proportional to that of the river’s health has led a lot of activists and environmentalists to think about the effects of a drying Yamuna on the Taj Mahal. The reasons behind this concern are quite obvious. The river serves as not only an aesthetical trope that magnifies the beauty of the monument but plays a key role in its survival. The fact that the monument stands upright and strong despite being centuries old is because the river made it possible. The strength of a wooden foundation prolongs for as long as agents like oxygen do not interact with it, thus preventing growth of any micro-organism that could promote decay. With the Yamuna now barely flowing through the city of Agra the moisture that the wooden foundation of the Taj Mahal required to retain its strength seems to be failing. Furthermore, with the excessive waste that the river is pumped with from around the city has made it much more corrosive towards the foundation of the Taj, thus furthering the possibility of it sinking into the bank on which it stands.

It is amusing to see that how we don’t want to see or are rather ignorant to signs. I find it extremely difficult to comprehend whether we are used to looking at things just at the face value that the complexities and elaborate relationships that they possess slip right past us. In our lust for power, dominance and a sense of control over anything and everything we might get a hold on we seem to have lost the sight to look beyond the surface. As one looks at the Taj Mahal from the long pond that leads up to the steps of the monument the hint of yellow seeping deeper into its stone becomes apparent. If one is lucky enough you can even spot a scaffolding over one of minaret of the mausoleum or even on the tomb itself making repairs on the structure. I often wonder how after all this time we are still so clueless about the relationship that the Taj and Yamuna have. Funds in millions are spent on repairs and maintenance of the Taj without realising that the river and the marble mausoleum are not two separate entities. They both share with each other a relationship that goes beyond the aestheticism of the monument. Our repairs like our sight just see the external faults that emerge on the structure whereas the more internal injuries that it is suffering is imperceptible to the eyes.

The more I fancy about Yamuna and Taj as being lovers, the more I see their narrative overshadowed by the love Shah Jahan had for Mumtaz. In being vessels that mirrored the love of Shah Jahan for Mumtaz, Taj and Yamuna seem exhausted to even profess their love for each other. Yamuna who at one point of time could feed the waters of the ponds in the Taj carrying Shah Jahan’s sorrows; now finds it hard to even reciprocate Taj’s love in the form of reflections. As the barrages in Delhi and Mathura, hold Yamuna back preventing it from flowing freely, they strangulate not only the love between the Taj and the Yamuna but also the life within and around the river.

Like the present-day politics and the hands of power have worked brilliantly in punctuating boundaries in the name of religion, culture and ethnicity. Each passing day it becomes harder to overlook the tightly defined lines of segregation that are being propagated and furthered through the well-defined binaries similar to the borders of the nation. As I still try and imagine the improbable tale of affection between the Taj Mahal and the Yamuna I wonder if if the love between the two masqueraded in the crimson of dawn and the pale shimmer of night somehow get exposed to the extremities of religions? Is this why the Yamuna has been attempted to be controlled, in hopes of stopping her from becoming impure and corrupted as she flows through the Taj. As if resting in his lap under the lilac tone of the night sky while she whispers the angst of Shah Jahan in a voice reflecting her longing for the Taj would be the beginning of something that would challenge the people in power. While the river yearns for its freedom, Taj seems to wilt and turn yellow in his longing for Yamuna. Like the moods of Mumtaz that Shah Jahan would see reflected in the Yamuna through the white marble of the Taj, Taj today finds himself all alone as there is no Yamuna to reflect back his emotions. All that flows by the Taj Mahal today is the dark purple residue from the dyeing factories and drains. Yamuna seems to have long left the Taj and the city of Agra. The bright soul of the river that once reflected the myriad colours Taj Mahal seemed to be painted in during the sunset, now appears to be lost in eternity. Standing there before the Taj staring at the river below, these thoughts strike hard at the chords of melancholy. Will the Taj and Yamuna ever reunite like their former selves, or will her disappearance leave a scar on the mausoleum, like the yellow sulphur lines on the marble roof of the tomb that would be constantly repaired without addressing the actual cause?

The hard brake of Baba’s rickshaw makes me realize how far I had come from the Taj, its well-maintained gardens and the river. Baba had stopped the rickshaw on the right side of the road that curved around the Agra Fort before bifurcating into one that led back to the Taj and the other continuing to weave its path around the Fort. We now stood right above the place from under which flowed one of the many drains that help maintain an illusion that a Yamuna still flows within the city above its d(r)ying riverbed. Baba and I both looked down at the drain that carried the black waters of the old city flowing freely through its web like streets, to finally open into the Yamuna, choked by the very waters that feed it.

It’s not quite long before Baba is joined by a middle-aged man, who too owns a rickshaw and smiles at me as he says, “This is the Yamuna of Agra”.

A lean man in his late fifties, Baba seemed to enjoy informing me about the river. Everyone wants to be heard, everyone has a story to tell, maybe it is the same for the river that flows below me. Maybe Yamuna too wants to tell its story. A story of an ageless river, of eternal love, hope and despair. She might even want to cry out for help or scream to draw attention towards itself. But how would someone say anything if he or she is choked to death. There needs to be life in a body to produce a sound, and in case of the river below me, life has long seized to exist. Baba however seemed to have found a story to tell and so he does as I pull out my phone to take photos of the drain. He stands next to me and tells me about the places where this water of the ‘Yamuna’ is used.

“Because the water is dirty, it acts as manure for the plants and they grow really fast when it is used to irrigate the soil,” he says, his eyes shining as if celebrating the fact that he taught the city boy something about agriculture, a domain believed to be alien to a world that lies beyond the Yamuna of the old city, the place Baba and his friend refer to as ‘shaher’.

As I continued to speak with Baba and his friend under the scorching heat of Agra sun, I could feel my mouth run dry and beads of sweat trickle down the back of my neck. Baba was holding on one hand a corner of his old brown cloth that was wrapped around his neck marked with white patches of dried sweat. As he wiped the perspiration dripping off of his nose onto the black tarmac road below, I couldn’t help but wonder what the Yamuna meant to him. Did the raven waters foaming beneath us, marked by occasional bobs of a “Bisleri” water bottle remind him of the river struggling for a breath? In the swelling summer heat Baba bought a twenty-rupee bottle of water for himself to drink, as water purifiers are a luxury he cannot afford. As I watched him gulp down the cold water from the bottle, I was left thinking of the thousands of people like Baba, who spend scores of rupees buying these plastic bottles to quench their thirst, more often than not, multiple times a day. How many of these bottles end up in the steel dustbins marked by red and green paint I wonder? As I paid Baba his fare of sixty rupees, bidding him goodbye, I couldn’t stop thinking where would that bottle from which he drank end up. Will it too become a jewel to the blackened Yamuna like almost every other of its cousins after fulfilling its purpose of being Baba’s momentary life support? In this city through which passes a Yamuna as frail and wide as the lines marking its course on the map of the country, it becomes almost impossible to ignore the economics behind these plastic bottles. They lap around the river, racing over its stream until someone scoops them out to put them into use again.

Walking along the edge of the road I could see a multitude of thelas selling coconut water, fruits and items made out of clay, each however resting against the red brick wall that separated the bank of the river behind to the bustle of the city. A couple of hundred metres from the Gandi Puliya the wall opened up to a huge parking space that was being constructed right on the bank of the river or what was left of it. I remembered Baba recalling how the river was both a figure of reverence and one that instilled fear when its waters gushed through the city during the monsoon rains. Watching the construction of the parking lot right on the floodplains of the river brought me back to the reality of today. The floodplains of the long-lost Yamuna are nothing more than spaces that become sources for generating capital. The figure of Yamuna has begun to fade away from the memories of the people. Its fierceness has subsided with age or probably been tamed until it finally seems to be done with everything.

Beyond the parking lot on the left, was an overhead bridge for trains to reach the new city of Agra and beyond. It is said that many years ago the Yamuna used to flow under it. Her visits to the bridge however, are now limited only during the monsoons. For years on the smooth, silky locks of Yamuna punctuated the Agra of Shah Jahan to the present-day Agra City, but she has aged now. Those smooth locks of Yamuna have given way to a rough, patchy golden-brown riverbed over which flow the traces of a river that is merely a shadow of its former glory. Her waters that used to stretch as far as the eyes could see and as wide the space where the parking lot was being built now seem content flowing in nothing more than a trickle. Walking though that barren land poking out of which was a skull of some animal long dead, I wondered if Shah Jahan’s nightmares involved such an image of the Yamuna. In his violent dreams did a still as a blood clot Yamuna remind him of Mumtaz moments after she whispered her last words into Shah Jahan’s ears? The dried up river bed however is not entirely a sad story. In the huge expanse of the nothingness but mud and uneven ground, the mausoleum now is a witness to kids flying kites high up in the sky. For them the dried up river is not a sorry sight. In the clustered space of the old city and the high rise of the new one, an almost dried up Yamuna marks for the one place where they can enjoy without any restriction of space. In their struggle to unite as one, Taj and Yamuna find solace looking at the kites.

Tracing my steps back to the road I turned to look at the Yamuna once again. In that drying riverbed the few depressions that held water of the river made me think of the ties Yamuna lost to Taj with Shah Jahan’s death. Perhaps his death was too much of a sorrow that she chose to lock herself under the gates of ground. Or maybe it was us who took each and every step as calculatedly as we could to ensure that we kill an entire river because who could stop us? As I boarded the bus that would take me back to Delhi, I wondered if Shah Jahan could have ever imagined how similar Delhi and Agra would turn out to be in the future. Both of them- sites of Mughal brilliance and power, are stitched together with the thread of the river, weaving in turn a narrative that mirrors the Yamuna of both the cities in its destruction.