My return to the Taj Mahal starts with more excitement than I bargained for. Instead of being taken to the meeting point by Sagar, the man who has driven me pretty much everywhere & with whom I’d become very fond of, I'm told by The Office that I should take a cab to the tourism office & pay for it myself, so there. OK. I don’t want Sagar to have to leave his house at the crack of dawn to pick me up at 6 AM so I don’t protest at the last & I mean last minute change. The cab company was contacted, instructions given by Anil so I think I’m set. Ha. Ha. I get up at 5AM so I can take my time. Twelve minutes later, my cell rings [‘mobile’ outside the US, some places say ‘cellular’] & I hear an unintelligible voice on the other end. I assume it’s the cab company & reiterate my address but I’m puzzled as to why they’re calling since I know everything’s been taken care of. This repeats no less than 4 times, damn! How the hell am I gonna get ready at this rate? I peek out the window at 5:50, relieved the cab’s there but again, damn! has he been there since 5? I am NOT paying a ‘waiting’ fee [rampant here] & if he thinks that’s what he’s getting well I gotta another thing coming for him!
At 6:03AM, I was the one who had another thing coming. As soon as I got in the cab, the driver takes off a at cuh-RAWL! I wanted to get to the Delhi Tourism Center by 6:30 to get a good seat on the tour bus [you can’t choose your own seat, it gets ASSIGNED to you when you check in] & it should’ve only taken 10 minutes to get there but at this rate, I’d be sitting on the roof of the bus like I saw folks doing on my first tour to the Taj. Anywho, it becomes painfully clear the snail’s pace is because bro’man DIDN’T KNOW WHERE HE WAS GOIN’! He stopped no less than 6 times to ask for directions & once we reached C.P. or Connaught Place, he GETS OUT OF THE CAB WITH MY BROCHURE ON THE TOUR TO ASK FOR DIRECTIONS!! Says not a word to me or even gestures that he’s getting out, leaving me in the cab to say WHAT THE FAHK?!
He walks a bit of a distance to a group behind the car & when they don’t know where the place is, he walks ahead of the car to another group who of course has not a clue either. There are no street signs in Delhi except for major roads & from what I’ve seen, in the posh diplomat area. Meanwhile, while my cabbie is out in pursuit of the directions he should have been on top of instead of buggin’ me between the hour of 5-6:00AM, so I promptly jump on the phone with Anil, my go to guy who set up this ride to not-where-I-wanna-go-ville & needless to say, I’m hotter than a New Delhi summer. I hand the phone to Mr. I’m-a-taxi-driver-but-I-know-no-more-than-my-foreigner-passenger for his chew a new one yell out by Anil but no go. Bro’man still doesn’t know where’s he’s goin’ & I sure as hell don’t know because it ain’t like I can tell anyone the street address SINCE THERE ARE NO STREET SIGNS!
So after the impromptu pit stop, I begin to see sights I recognized startling both the driver & myself when I blurt out ‘THERE IT IS!’ Then I did something I’ve never done in my life, [& as I write this, I realize that I’m not proud about it but] though the meter read 130RS, I gave him 100, grabbed my phone that he had dumped on the seat next to him after being dressed up & down by Anil & with much self-righteous indignation, Sah-slammed the door & huffed across the multi-lane 2 way street, quickly remembering not to be so self-righteous as to get my butt flattened by an auto-rickshaw [I’d like to get rid of some of it but not that way!]. Plus I had to make sure my man didn’t come out of his cab after me because he sure was yelling like he was gonna make me into poori [poofy Indian bread]. In addition, people are setting up for a huge what looked like flower market, so I had to watch my step as I was followed by the sullen stares & ooh gee, my cell phone battery was DYING! Oh boy.
Got into the office with no more drama & after a short wait, I end up on a slightly larger bus than my last tour, with passengers all like me: foreign nationals. I’d say there were roughly 25 of us & boy was I happy to see that someone took my assigned seat so I ended up in a solo window seat. Yippee! & of course that changed to DAMMIT! when it was itchingly apparent that I am the cuisine of choice among mosquitoes WORLDWIDE. A bus full of people but I had killed no less than 5 mosquitoes within the first half hour & had to remain vigilant or I’d have ended up looking like poori anyway.
What I like about these tours is that you meet a cross section of folks from all walks of life, let alone from different countries. Alice & her family from Yonkers; Ruth the Environmentalist from England in her 10th year visiting India & Father Almeida from Southern India, the Tamil state to be exact, who has lived in Delhi for 30 years. Life is interesting, things always work out if you can take the time out to recognize that—I cried at the loss of my pictures which is the reason I chose to take another trip to the Taj. Of course that meant spending more money on a re-peat which I groaned about but had to let go for my own sanity. 3 hours in & I’m so glad I’m making the trek back. The breakfast was already better on this government sponsored tour than the chi-chi foo-foo private one I did while the people were rather stimulating. & the pictures I was able to capture by the end of this? WELL superior to the ones I lost. Wow! Like the title of that very tragic movie—Life IS Beautiful. I was beginning to realize that even here in India. The reality? I probably began to realize that BECAUSE of what I’d experienced in India. Though of course I’m not going off into the sunset singing Kumbaya just yet…
