Back in Melbourne a day and I still don't know what hit me. In my head catchy Bollywood melodies jangle with memories of temples and towns and rickshaws and rivers
and deserts and children and holy men and animals and food and books and flowers and birds ... I feel so saturated with experiences I'm put in mind of the old method of packing as many stones as you can into a container: fill it with big ones first, shaking well; then add smaller ones, which will fill the spaces between the big ones, shaking well; then add smaller still, and so on, and so on. You'll end up close to solid rock.
Maybe I feel so thoroughly filled because, unlike any other place I've been, India has pushed, blurred and in general called in question my bodily boundaries. I'm not referring to getting "Delhi belly" -
though having to be constantly vigilant about what's been touched by water, not a friend but an enemy, is certainly part of it - but to things like people grabbing your hands, or coming up to you with red paste on their thumbs making a blessed billboard of your forehead (which seemed to me a terrible violation)...
In any case, here are some more pics. I briefly considered doing thematic postings - animals, temples, calligraphy, etc. - but that would require surveying and sorting the 1100+ photos all at once, which is more than I can imagine doing right now, and probably would make things
seem falsely coherent. Instead, I'll follow the route of my travels and try to include big things and small. Today's selection leads to and through Agra, our first stop after Delhi and home of the greatest monuments of Mughal India. The three clustered here are still from Delhi.
The first is a picture of an alley in the Old City of Delhi - relatively people-free since it's Sunday. Notice the happy man carrying his tiffin box. The next is of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, largest mosque in India, and the work of the same Moghul emperor responsible for the Taj Mahal. The third shows the platform from which our early morning train to Agra departed.
These two pictures show details from Agra Fort: sandstone carvings on the wall of the palace built for a Hindu princess,
on whose gorgeously carved wall (click the picture to see details!) intricate geometrical Muslim patterns try to contain the aesthetic traditions of India. While they are only pretend windows, the charms of the figural seem to be welling up from inside them anyway -
and ... overflowing! The floral's accepted as a compromise inside a pavilion for the queen, whose exquisite stonework makes that of the Taj seems crude by comparison (feel free to click this one too!). And then we come to the Taj Mahal, which really truly is not just in a category of its own but beyond category.
It seems simply perverse to try to discover a new angle on it. Here it is as seen from the Fort, across the Yamuna (or Jumna) river - the sacred river which meets the Ganges at Allahabad, site of India's biggest pilgrimage. During and after the monsoon I imagine the river would have filled up the whole scrubby riverbed you see here.
Now three pictures of the Taj Mahal from up close. The first is a view across the back side of the high marble platform on which the tomb itself sits,
with one of the four minarets and the side-dome of one of the two red and white mosques which flank the tomb. These two little sandstone and marble mosques (actually only one is a mosque and neither is little) are wonders in their own right. Each has a white marble dome like the central tomb's. You can see one of them in the foreground of the picture of the Taj from Agra Fort above. Below is the façade of the other one - the three friends in the doorway show just what grand edifices these are, too!
The picture below it is of the tomb itself - notice that the inlaywork flowers are similar to those on the mosque next door, and the Quranic verses which - besides the repeated dome shapes, concave and convex and outlined and the chevron patterns with sometimes inconsistent coloration -
form the only ornament of the building. The text, incidentally, is a whole sura describing the throne of God, which suggests to some that with this building the emperor was doing more than just memorializing the mother of his heir; its unprecedented placement off the center of the garden also suggests that his deeper intention was to suggest an analogy of imperial and divine power.
And now I simply must show you the Taj the way you've seen it a thousand times, but it's the way it means to be seen. (You can just make out the domes of the mosque and its twin behind the trees.) Even in the fading
light of dusk it draws in the sky above, the world below, and through the stunning symmetry gathers together everything on earth all around. Imperious indeed!
To close, let me explain the picture I started with. It's from the day after we left Agra's troubling mix of architectural purity and urban squalor - the exhilarating view across the vast lake created by the damming of the river Betwa in Madhya Pradesh. The almost ten-mile dam inundated eight-four villages. Look very closely and you'll see some black dots in the distance on the right. They are the tips of the towers of a fortress above one of these towns, visible only in winter. When the monsoon raises the water level back to the red/white line they disappear again.
There's not much old Hindu architecture left in north India - the Mughals destroyed most - 
so Khajuraho was the place for me to discover the surging fountain- or mountain-like shikara roofs, the art nouveau-like ornament, and the wonderful harmony of the carved figures which undulate around them like a dance. Nobody quite knows what these temples (10th-12th century) are about. (Actually the one at right above is 19th century, an ecumenical gesture with spires supposed to look Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim.) Khajuraho's temples are most famous for the fact that some of their many carvings are erotic, but pictures of these carvings out of context decisively lose their meaning, whatever it is. This is not eros masquerading as numen, or trampling on it, and as the balanced busyness of lines of dancers and elephants coiling around the the temples while gods, divine beings, couples and sacred dragons arch and twist in bands above them show, it's something more profound than the numen masquerading as eros.
as crowds were limited (this is a big tourist destination, and for more kinds of tourists than one may wish to ponder). Also it seems the sculptures are more beautiful in the rain - you can see them better with the stone darkened by moisture, the fugures not seared by sun and shadow.
