The Immortality of Shah Jahan
Exiting the enshrined tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, I am blinded by light. Echoing voices, a fog of stale tourist exhalations lifts like a spring-action curtain, a surreal world stabbing like dozens of pins into my reticent retinas. Even the dull marble reflections are too much. I close my eyes, revealing a warm bed of reds and oranges the afterimage. White air rushes into my lungs. A monument built for love? Such a monument would never last forever. Inevitably, it is or has transformed to become a commemoration of death. The Taj Mahal is as majestic as it is devoid of life, empty.
Far from the temples of Khajuraho depicting all the forms of life in every joyful occupation, the delicate pietra dura exhibits vines, leaves, and flowers only, shapely translucently fragile blossoms opened four centuries ago. If one took this art as representative of the physical world, one could believe the living world was filled with nothing but flowers, that perhaps humans sprang from floral seeds. But the pigeons wallowing quietly around the elevated latticed windows refute this theory. It is just a dream of simplicity, a vision of exquisite, geometric minimalism. It could not have been that the idea of including a little dog in the corner, or a sparrow hidden among the vegetarian designs was beyond the imaginations of the artisans.
This whole structure is a tribute to poles of opposition. It plays with light and shadow, dances between substance and space; in treading barefoot on the solar-heated surfaces of squares I find the interface between life and lifeless. The crowds shifting over these surfaces become the flower petals and fruit, peach, lime, orange, violet, grape, lemon meringue, black cherry, beet red, green tomato, each never resting in the breeze.