India is like a jungle: raw, wild, and dangerous, particularly if you are a woman. My friend Shrubhra, who grew up in Delhi, said that her hometown had the highest rate of crimes against women in the country and that India had the highest number of offenses against females in world. Yet, there were unexpected bursts of sweetness, like papaya and mango, seeds of love and longing.
Enter the Taj Mahal, signature of India, and memorial of love by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his much mourned third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died after the birth of their fourteenth child. An exquisite wonder of white marble, it combines Persian, Turkish, and Indian architectural elements into a mausoleum of undeniable of Muslim origin.
I watched the face of the tomb soften with the dawning of the day; blue undertones predominated in the early rising, and the beckoning warmth of red and yellow highlights as the sun climbed higher in the sky. Marble is mobile, fluid, and expressive. The Taj unfolded its own symphony of light. Despite her death, Mumtaz Mahal left her legacy.
Beside me stood my mother, and another couple from our tour, watching, fascinated by this fantastic structure even though the guide talked endlessly without releasing us to much desired free time. Renegade that I was, my wanderlust kicked in and I stalked off, exploring the angles of the mausoleum in the allotted hour. The others followed and the couple was close behind me. The woman was Filipina, smooth as wood and luminous as water. The man was tall and pale, a handsome German with a hardy stride who only had eyes for his wife.
On the ride back to the hotel, the wife introduced herself as Andrea and proceeded to tell me their story (upon my shameless prompting, of course). She was actually nine years older than he, she said a bit cautiously, and they had met nearly two decades ago in the Philippines when she was going to school and he was backpacking. They rode on the same bus, and he never noticed her. Fast forward fifteen years later, and they met again at a wedding in Canada and retraced their adventures to the first time they crossed paths. They became friends and at first she could not believe that he would be romantically interested in her due to the age difference. But he was. So much so that he moved from Munich, Germany to the other side of the world to join her.
So it was love, she admitted, and she had not thought such love was possible for her. Her eyes mirrored her husband’s with the same sentiment that drove Shah Jahan to create an epitaph for his beloved.
It had been a long time since I thought of love. Sometimes I don’t allow myself to imagine it, because not all love stories end happily. But when it does, it is like finding heaven in another person, and you follow it until you are lip-locked with the divine.
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