Beads, Boys and Bangles (21 page)

Also, I have loaded up on new DS games and magazines and should have enough to keep me busy for the whole journey without once needing to resort to French grammar, which is good. Edie is insisting that we spend most of our time admiring the incredible scenery and ‘getting to know the heart of India’. But I’m totally planning to admire my new fashion show game and see how
many models I can send down the DS catwalk in record time.

The train is enormously long and just, well, enormous. There are lots of different classes and, with the help of the Patils, we’re in one of the best ones, which means air conditioning and a compartment with seats that turn into beds. When we get to the platform, I’m expecting hundreds of people to stream all over the carriages and tie themselves to the roof, like they do in movies. It’s quite disappointing when everybody behaves like they do in England, except dressed more colourfully, and gets on normally through the doors. Except they do it in such large, bustling numbers that I’m not sure how we’re all going to fit inside the train.

It takes ages to find our seats. Everyone we ask confidently tells us they’re somewhere they’re not, and I’m beginning to wonder if they really exist at all when finally, Edie shrieks and beckons to us and we all pile in after her, just as the train starts moving.

Cocooned in our compartment, Harry soon loses himself in a memoir by a photographer he likes who travelled in India a lot. Crow gets busy making a dress using some fuchsia pink sari material and a travel sewing kit she’s brought with her. Edie surrounds herself with revision books, guidebooks, water and bananas, which is pretty much all she dares consume in case Something Horrible happens to her tummy. She then has to pile the whole lot into her lap when an Indian
family comes in to join us and takes up all the other seats.

The train heads out of Mumbai. My plan to read and play DS games is quickly interrupted by the Indian family, who are desperate to chat. They want to know where we’ve come from, where we’re going, whether we’d like to try some of the delicious potato cakes and spicy things they’ve brought to keep them going on the journey, what my favourite sights in Mumbai are, and whether I’ve met the Queen. I’m tempted to say I’ve been compared to her a couple of times by my ex-not-boyfriend, but decide he’s not worth bringing into the conversation, and the family are very disappointed when I have to admit I’ve only ever seen her on TV.

Next thing I know, the daughter of the family, who’s about ten, is sitting beside me and ‘helping’ me with my DS game, while her mother ‘helps’ me with my magazines, by flipping through all of them and laughing loudly at several of the outfits. I don’t mind, because the food she keeps feeding me from the big bag at her feet is so incredibly delicious I’m probably eating more of it than her husband and children put together.

Long after darkness falls, they reach their station and pack up their belongings, leaving me with enough delicious food to last till morning. I’m very sorry to see them go, and amazed to see that four hours have gone by already and it’s time for bed. I’m starting to think twenty hours isn’t so crazy for a train journey after all. Not only
that, but even turning our seats into bunk beds is fun, and there’s something very soothing about being rocked to sleep by the sound of the wheels speeding along the tracks, carrying us further and further towards Agra.

I love sleeping on trains, as it turns out, and, unlike Edie, I’m not constantly in fear of being attacked by bandits. This is the advantage of not reading too much historical local literature.

The morning is a bit of a shock. Not the train itself, but the fact that every time I look out of the window, I seem to spot a naked bottom, squatting near the track. Are we travelling along some kind of thousand-mile loo? And, frankly, why don’t they teach you about this in geography? It would be so much more interesting than the population of Alaska, which is not a fact I plan on ever needing to know.

I could look out of the window all day. Not at the bottoms, but at the people and animals constantly at work in the fields, or building shacks dangerously close to the railway, or just standing, looking and not doing much at all. However, I don’t get much of a chance as a new wave of passengers arrives wanting to know all about us. So it’s not until after lunch that I can finally get stuck into the magazines I bought. I’m in the middle of an article on Mumbai Fashion Week when Edie starts.

‘The Taj Mahal,’ she says grandly, out of the blue, ‘was finished in 1653.’

We all look up, nod briefly and go back to what we’re doing.

‘It took twenty thousand labourers and a thousand elephants to build it and it is rumoured that Shah Jahan had all their hands cut off when it was finished so that nothing so beautiful could ever be built again.’

‘Elephants don’t have hands,’ I point out. ‘And by the way, ew.’

Edie looks at me crossly. ‘They say the architect was killed,’ she goes on, ‘but—’

‘Shhhhh,’ I say. ‘We’re busy. And as I said, ew.’

‘But you need to know this information. Otherwise you won’t—’

I cut her off. ‘I’m reading about Mumbai Fashion Week. I really don’t need to hear about hands being cut off, thank you.’

Crow giggles. Even Harry looks up and smiles.

From then on, about every half hour, Edie tries to tell us something important about where we’re going and we take it in turns to shh her. Even when she just tries to start a normal conversation, we shh her in case she tries to sneak in some useful information. The other people in the carriage think this is a hysterical English game and join in too.

Finally, she gives up. Harry, Crow and I get bored with what we’re doing and have a conversation about the markets we’ve seen, and the factory, and what else we want to do before we go back to England, but Edie
doesn’t join in. I notice she’s gone a bit white. I feel sorry for her, but it’s her own fault. We do not want to spend our holiday with a walking guidebook. She pulls out her extremely fat novel by Rudyard Kipling and buries herself in it.

Eventually, it’s teatime and the train pulls into Agra station. I can’t believe the twenty hours went by so quickly. And that I’m going to miss my train seat, and the food and the conversation.

The taxi ride from the station in Agra to the hotel is death-defying and takes four times as long as it should, but that’s all part of the fun. Best of all, our new hotel has a pool and we eat supper beside it (Edie’s starving by now), and our rooms are inlaid with bits of marble, which gives us a taste of what’s to come.

We set our alarms for the early hours of the morning, because apparently ‘you have to see the Taj Mahal at sunrise’. They certainly make it hard work, visiting this place.

When I get back from the bathroom, Crow has laid the fuchsia pink silk shift dress she’s been making on my bed.

‘For me?’ I ask.

She looks up from her pillow and nods. ‘I hate those harem pants,’ she says sleepily.

I give her a hug and crawl into bed without trying the dress on. It will fit perfectly, I know. Crow’s things always do.

I
t turns out they’re right.

You
do
have to see the Taj Mahal at sunrise.

And it isn’t like London Fashion Week, or the V&A, or even Buckingham Palace, or anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s incredible. It’s glorious. It actually makes me want to cry, just to stand there and watch it, glowing pinkly in the early morning light.

It’s better than just an excuse to shut Mum up. It’s AMAZING.

We’re standing just inside the entrance gatehouse, listening to birdsong, trying to identify the distinctive smell (which Crow eventually pinpoints as ‘sweaty trainer’) and looking along the waterway leading up to the marble building with its famous onion dome and tall towers in the corners. It looks like an out-of-control Disney jewellery box, except it’s real.

‘Who did you say built it?’ I ask Edie.

She doesn’t answer. I look at her more closely and
realise that she’s holding back tears. This isn’t a total surprise, as it’s that sort of place, but I notice that her lip is wobbling too. I put my hand on her arm and ask if she’s OK but she just shakes me off like I’m one of the people asking if they can take our photo.

This is odd. I find Harry, who’s standing a few metres away from us, awe-struck, and tell him.

‘There’s something wrong with Edie, but she won’t tell me what. Can you talk to her?’

He looks concerned and nods. Then he puts his arm around her and leads her a few steps away, while Crow and I just stand and stare.

‘Is it a palace?’ Crow asks. ‘Or a mosque? It looks a bit like one, with those towers.’

I realise I don’t know. But Edie will. She’s been reading about it for days. She’ll explain.

Except she won’t.

Harry comes back while Edie, red-eyed, hangs back slightly. He explains that she was really hurt by the way we teased her yesterday. More than we thought. She can hardly talk now, she’s so upset.

Even when we apologise, it doesn’t make any difference. And we can’t face buying a guidebook, because that would be too rude after all the teasing, so we end up having to go round the place without really knowing anything about it.

When you’re used to having Edie explaining stuff to you the whole time, or Mum, or Granny, it’s weird not
knowing what you’re looking at. I’m pretty sure that’s Islamic writing engraved into the marble, which is also inlaid with precious stones. But then I’m stuck. So I just focus on how much I love the arched windows and doorways everywhere, and the delicate stonework, and how much Mum would approve of the minimalist approach: white, white and more white.

I expect Harry to be taking photographs the whole time, which is what he usually does when he isn’t listening to music, and often when he is, but he hasn’t even brought his camera this time.

‘I just want to look at it,’ he says. ‘And hear the sounds. People talking, the birds, the water. I just want to
be
here.’

This sounds very profound and Indian and I am impressed. Crow is so busy just
being
here that she doesn’t say a word. I can tell she’s drinking in the pure white surface of the marble.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ I say, going up to her.

Her shoulders stiffen slightly, in a way that means ‘Back off, I’m drinking in the pure white surface of the marble,’ so, without anything better to do, I have to just
be
here too. I start to see the detail through Crow’s eyes. I notice the delicacy of the inlaid carvings and the clever way you get to see beautiful bits through the gaps in other beautiful bits and before long I just want to take it home with me. It’s perfect. I could stand at wonder at it all day. I
wish
I knew what it actually was.

As we make our way back towards the gatehouse, I
give it one more try.

‘Edie, you were right, I love it.
Please
tell me who built it. And what it’s for.’

Edie still looks sad and tearful. But she takes a deep breath.

‘It was built by an emperor called Shah Jahan. For his wife, who died. It’s her tomb.’

Wow. This makes Romeo and Juliet look pretty small fry and uncommitted. I now have about fifteen other questions to ask, but I can see that Edie needs a quiet sitdown and a good cry in private before she can tell me anything.

We take her back to the hotel, where she ‘has to redo her makeup’, and promise ourselves we’ll come back tomorrow, when we know what we’re looking at.

I
t doesn’t take Edie long. By the time she comes to join us by the pool at the hotel, she’s almost back to her normal self, fussing about whether her water bottle has a tamper-proof seal and double-checking that the lunch we’ve saved for her doesn’t include salad.

We all say sorry again. Harry and I just say it, but Crow also draws it in her notebook – a full-page SORRY made out of wistful dancing girls in saris that would probably sell on eBay for thousands.

‘I’m sorry too,’ Edie says, in her Edie way. ‘I was just over-reacting. It’s just, you know . . . travelling.’

We nod. Whatever she wants to call it.