‘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.
It 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.
It 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.
From the hotel, we can see a big, orange-coloured building on the horizon. Edie points to it.
‘That’s Agra Fort,’ she says. ‘We should go there at sunset. That’s where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his son so he could see the Taj Mahal and constantly be reminded of his dead wife, but never visit her.’
What?
This is the story that we’ve been begging Edie not to tell us? No wonder she’s been tearful with frustration that we didn’t want to hear. So we let her get it out of her system and she tells us about Shah Jahan’s beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, dying while giving birth to their fourteenth child (so not just a teenage romance, then) and his plans for the most beautiful monument in history to house her (big success) and the feud with his son and imprisonment (not so good) and the reputation of the Taj Mahal as the world’s greatest monument to love. The few bits that
aren’t marble are amethyst and sapphire and jade and crystal and turquoise. Like it wasn’t wow enough already.
Edie feels much better after that. We all feel weird, though. There’s a lot to think about. It certainly puts sweaty kisses and windy benches in their place.
Early next morning, we set out again. We feel like regular visitors now. This is our second day, after all. We make our way through the gatehouse and watch the familiar outline of the Taj appear through the pale grey haze, like a mirage. Crow has her notebook with her and gets busy sketching at last. Harry and I pause with Edie while the sun rises and the marble turns from blush pink to creamy white.
We imagine Shah Jahan watching it from his prison in the Fort, still pining for Mumtaz Mahal. Then slowly we approach it, as he was forbidden to do until his son finally buried him there.
It seems different to me now that I know it’s a sort of love poem in marble. I make the mistake of trying to imagine some boy one day feeling about me this way. It’s so NEVER going to happen. Mumtaz Mahal gets a monument. I get frozen-faced, cold-fingered handshakes in Topshop. It’s a karma thing.
Harry has such a tinge of sadness to him today that I can almost hear the Russian folk songs in his head. Edie can’t be thinking about love – she’s never had a boyfriend for longer than four days – but there’s something about this place that appeals to her too. She’s probably working out the cubic capacity of the main onion dome. Or calculating the number of man-hours it took to build the place. Whatever.
Crow is in a world of her own. Several pages of her notebook are already covered in sketches. Yay! Something’s going on in that soul-singer head of hers, I can tell. She doesn’t talk to us but she isn’t ignoring us. She’s just thinking and she’s sort of forgotten we’re there.
By the time we get back to Mumbai, Crow has filled up both the notebooks she brought with her and is desperate for more paper. She’s even drawing in the margins of Edie’s Rudyard Kipling.
I’ve tried to get a look at what she’s doing, but for once she won’t show me. When I do eventually manage to get a brief glimpse, all I see is onion domes and filigree marble carving. Please please please may she not be thinking about architecture when I really need her to design a doable summer collection so I can keep my job. However, I don’t say anything. There’s no point rushing her. Her brain works at its own pace, in its own way. I just have to cross my fingers and hope.
We have two days left in Mumbai before our flight home. We’ve spent most of our money and couldn’t fit even another hair clip into our bulging suitcases, so serious shopping is out. Over breakfast, we agree that we’ll each think of a cheap thing to do to fill in the time. Harry makes a list and works out a schedule for the day. He’s a lot more organised than he looks in his frayed tee-shirt, torn jeans and hair that should have been cut a month ago.
Ever since we got here, Edie has been dying to visit the Gateway to India, so that’s top of the list. Outside the hotel, the streets are hot and dusty. I wrap one of my new cotton scarves round my neck, à la Jenny, and clutch my bag close to me. Without Mrs Patil beside us, the city feels big and a bit scary and we realise just how new to it we are.
Immediately, several boys and young men come up to us. Do we need to change dollars for rupees? Do we need a guide? Would we like to be extras in a Bollywood movie? As we move forward, they stay clustered round us, shouting out and waving their arms. I get a brief feeling of what it must be like to be Sigrid Santorini or Joe Yule, if they make the mistake of stepping out without a bodyguard.
Luckily, the Gateway to India isn’t far away. It’s a big, old monument shaped, not surprisingly, like a gateway, and I might be more impressed if I hadn’t just seen the TAJ MAHAL. As it is, we spend about ten minutes looking at it before Harry, thankfully, ticks it off our list.
Now it’s Crow’s turn.
‘It says “beads” on the list,’ says Harry, with a question mark in his voice.
Crow looks apologetic. ‘I know it should be statues and things, but Mrs Patil said there was a bazaar where they sell every kind of bead and crystal you can think of. I’ve been wondering about it for ages. What if they’ve got types that you can’t get in London or Paris?’
Edie gives us her ‘not more shopping’ horrified expression, but Crow sounds so worried at the thought of never seeing this place that we can’t say no. Harry finds a taxi driver who seems to understand where we’re talking about, and after another hair-raising, beep-filled journey, we find ourselves in a part of town that’s the total opposite of the modern shopping malls – ancient and crumbly, dirty and smelly, and completely fascinating.
This isn’t a market for tourists. It’s where local people come to shop and they bustle past us, laden with bags and boxes, pausing just briefly to stare at the tall boy, the white girls in their scarves and the black girl with the pinwheels in her hair.
We wander around for ages in the dust and heat. There are shops everywhere we look, packed with everything from flip-flops to little statues of gods and goddesses. No bead shops, though. And whenever we ask people about them, they just try and guide us into their shops, which sell anything you can imagine except beads. So we say no to them, and everyone seems shocked and devastated that we’re not interested. I’ve never felt so guilty for not shopping before.
On we go, further in to the maze of alleyways, trying not to admit to ourselves how lost we feel. Suddenly, we’re in a big sort-of courtyard with a concrete floor and a roof, and the most incredible smell my nose has ever encountered. Not in a good way. More of a thousand-mile loo sort of way, crossed with the kitchen bins at school. The place is full of animals, mostly in cages, not all of them alive. I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be pets or dinner. Or maybe both. Underneath our feet, the floor is wet. I keep trying not to look down, because I don’t think I want to know what I’m standing in. The animals are bleating and cheeping, barking and clucking. Edie, who can’t bear it if Jenny forgets to feed her cat, is looking distinctly queasy. Harry spots this and tries to get us out of here as quickly as possible.
And next thing we know, we’re in a quiet alley, feeling shocked and dizzy, and there’s a bead shop, right ahead of us, and another, and another. A whole lane of them. With another one leading off it. We’re in Bead Central. A man comes forward, beckoning us into his bead emporium. Finally, we can say yes and go inside. However, it’s been quite a journey to get here. For the first time in my life, I’m surrounded by trays of beautiful, colourful, irresistible beads and crystals and stones and I don’t want to buy the lot and make a thousand necklaces. I just want to sit down. So does Edie.
Crow is made of stronger stuff. She darts from tray to tray, choosing exactly what she wants and getting Harry to hold it all for her, piled high in baskets. Tiny red ones.
Huge gold ones. Multicoloured ones the size and shape of jelly beans. Sparkly blue-green ones the colour of peacock feathers.
Edie and I clutch each other for support, like the arches of the Taj Mahal. It’s the middle of the day and totally hot. We’re dusty, hungry and a bit overwhelmed. The owner notices how droopy we are and offers us tea. They don’t do that in Miss Teen. Edie’s about to say no, but I point out that the water is boiled, and she’s so tired and desperate that she finally gives in.
It’s the most delicious tea we’ve ever tasted. The owner magics us cushions to sit on from somewhere and we could probably stay there all day. Except that at this precise moment, Crow suddenly darts out of the shop without warning.
What happened?
Harry dumps the trays and chases after her. And we have to dump our cups in a hurry and follow them both before it’s too late.
We run fast down the alleyway, dodging cars, bikes, animals and people. We spot Harry going off to the right (lucky he’s so tall) and run fast after him. Edie’s much quicker than me. She hasn’t done five years of running club for nothing. I’m worried I’m never going to see any of them again. Then the stitch that started in my si
de about ten seconds after I set off finally feels like it’s cutting me in half and I have to stop.
I crouch down, panting and wondering what to do.
People step over and round me, as if I’m not there. I’m alone in the middle of a maze of shops, with no clue where to go or how to get there. I feel like I’m in one of my DS games, but without the option of quitting. Actually, I’d really like to quit just now. Instead, I have to stay where I am, telling myself it will all work out OK.
After a few minutes, Edie appears back round the corner. I’ve never been so glad to see her. She looks relieved too, and very dusty. She flops down beside me, panting, and offers me a drink of bottled water. For once, I’m grateful.
Then Harry and Crow return together, looking hot, tired and disappointed.
‘What was that about?’ I ask.
‘I saw something,’ Crow says. She grabs the water off us and takes a long drink.
‘What?’
‘The Svetlana dress.’
‘Seriously?’
Edie looks at us, bemused.
‘The Svetlana dress,’ I explain. ‘The gold embroidered dress Svetlana wore at the Miss Teen launch. It was the best piece of the collection. I mean, if you saw it at a party in New York you’d think, yeah, sure, she found it on eBay. But here? Who would wear it here?’
‘I saw it on a boy,’ Crow says, between sips of water. ‘He was in the bead shop, picking up a package. I only saw him for a moment. He was wearing the dress under an old shirt, but I recognised it straight away. I had to follow him.’
See? Crow has super-vision. The boy could probably have worn it under a spacesuit and she would have spotted it. But why was he wearing it at all? How did he get hold of it?
‘Did you find him?’
Crow shrugs and Harry shakes his head.
‘There are so many alleyways here,’ Harry says. ‘He just disappeared.’
We spend half an hour wandering through the lanes, getting vaguely lost again and looking out for a boy in a dress. No joy.
Beads, Boys and Bangles Page 15