Day 41. The bus company stood us up. There were four Europeans. It seems only seven people book the two are, so they claimed the driver didn't show up. It is the unexpected that makes the day. We four hired a private car for hardly more money and had a great time. Delhi Tourism Development Corporation (DTDC) is the culprit. Ticket CC 14111.
[Author's note: what happened is not enough people signed up for the tour so the bus office made the excuse that the driver hadn't showed up. They claimed he was a Sikh and in fear of his life but I explained that hadn't stopped him from selling us our tickets. Plus they made us sit there for three hours in the waiting room before saying anything.]
Taj Mahal is nice to see, however I view such monuments to the dead as one of the more excessive abuses of inherited wealth. There is upper replica, to decoy looters and the lower room, rancid and suffocating, with the real sarcophagi. It is not a temple or castle or even museum, and it's really just the most menace of many similar buildings. It is huge considering is designed purpose.
I traveled with a couple from Canada and a chap from Australia. It was a full day trip, seven to eight hours in the car. The roadways are used by everyone and India takes you back to the bicycle and oxcart age. People everywhere, wondering cows, miles from the nearest town. Plan on half your speed for getting around them and the sorely overloaded trucks which can flip over on the straight and level. We saw 4 [wrecks] in the 440 km.
[Author's note: these huge trucks are piled often twice the safe height limit with cargo, so the center of gravity is well about the driver. These trucks regularly flip over on the highways. Your road speed is reduced to half because you have to slow down and drive around them, usually with vultures already picking at the carcasses.]
Every foot of the Taj is inlaid with marble, or stones, or carvings. Then they continue the theme by ton upon ton. The theory seems if something is nice, more of the same must be nicer. Not so.
The city sleeps in. Few in the streets till 9 a.m. then chaos begins. And you should see the newspaper column called Matrimonials.
[Author’s note: these handwritten notes are necessarily incomplete. The Taj Mahal is really one of millions of these tombs that dot the countryside. This is not an exaggeration. The only difference is the Taj Mahal, which is quite small as far as the big tombs go, the only one made of white marble. The rest are made of the local red clay brick. Repetition seems to substitute for grandeur. They build something looks nice 10 feet long and then duplicated several thousand times making a wall a few miles long.
Matrimonials is a section of the want ads, not the column which was a bad choice of words on my part. I cannot find any modern-day evidence but I will tell you what I saw in 1984. You'd find ads from families by the thousands offering considerable sums of money if you would marry their daughters and take them out of India. You'd see a picture of a 14-year-old girl and a big description of how many princes and rajahs she's related to, six prominent doctors declaring she's a virgin, and a long history of the family wealth. Some offered as much as $55,000 for an initial contact and the balance to be paid when she achieved American or European citizenship.
I was once offered $2,000 for my passport in Delhi.]
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