Palace and Poverty

                My last day in Delhi was Taj Mahal day. The Taj Mahal, one of the Seven Wonders of the World is in a town called Agra, three hours away. The drivers came at 6 am and all of us sleepily piled into the cars. The entire drive there was three hours of more extreme poverty. I’m noticing that there is a huge gap between the few “wealthy” people I’ve seen and the massive amount of extremely impoverished that I’ve seen. The very small amount of middle class people live in a comparable manner to the people who are “in poverty” in the states. I just never realized that the homeless (no, I don’t count a propped up piece of wood as a home) could span so much territory. I’m starting to get used to seeing people peeing and bathing on the side of the streets, seeing neighborhoods of homes made of large sheets of plastic, seeing true desperation in the eyes of children and mothers, smelling sewage everywhere we go. No one should have to live like this…

                There was a particular traffic stop where I became a little irked. Men beat on the car windows trying to sell us things, which I’m used to but there were also men with monkeys on chains who were made to do tricks. That bothered me and no I don’t have any pictures because I didn’t want them to think I condoned the enslavement of another creature. After the monkey slave incident, I heard a knock on my car window and a little boy held up a cobra in a basket to my window. Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate snakes. In fact, I’m surprised I didn’t get a night terror… Everything is so different here… It’s fun for me to take little moments or customs or norms that I witness here and move them into an everyday America city. If a little boy held a snake up to someone’s car window at a stop light in Denver,  the snake would be taken from him and he’d be put into a foster home with food and water.

                So after traveling through hundreds of miles of the impoverished we parked to see one of the most extravagant monuments to love- a palace that was built to honor a ruler’s dead wife. A palace no one has ever lived in. Anyone else catch the irony in that? My group was not even a mile away from this fine example of excessiveness and beauty when I was approached by a little boy who had minimal use of his legs. His cloth green shorts and shirt had been worn to rags and he walked like a dog would walk as his legs didn’t work enough to support him. So, he had no choice but to walk with his hands on the ground as well. He begged for money, just a few rupees. It broke my heart.

                Though I site the irony in the situation, I did find the Taj Mahal breath taking. Made of the finest quality of white marble, it really is gorgeous. And to think that a man loved his deceased wife so much that he spent 22 years having a palace built that would be as beautiful as she was and be able to stand structurally sound forever, just like his love. The romantic in me found it beautiful and sweet. The cynic in me wondered if he used his dead wife as an excuse to show off his resources.

                The drive back to the hostel ended up turning into a 5 hour drive because of traffic. By hour three I had to pee so badly that I was in pain. By hour 3.5 I thought I would cry. I was left with no choice but to do something bold. The car had been stopped for a while and another girl, Jordan, offered to go with me to pee on the side of the road behind a sign. All I’m going to say is I really feel like I’m starting fit in and I feel kind of proud about that…