The Bureau of Nonsense and Humbuggery is pleased to report that Yanni's copious hair, bright lights and mushy orchestrations did not knock down the Taj Mahal. No great gaping holes have been punched in the dome, nor have the faux minarets been broken like so many twigs by the underwhelming whoosh of saccharine synthesisers. Now that we've got that one out of the way...

I can tell you all about the Taj. Any tourist can, and will. Further, I am the Professional Tourist, currently without a fixed address -- just the requisite onward tickets though I came close to breaking the Tourist Code of Conduct by skipping the world's most exclusive graveyard. I was tempted by the perverse joy I would undoubtedly derive from my friends' exasperation when they learned that I had visited India but could not make time for the Taj.

But I flinched. I was convinced that if I remained truant from the Taj Mahal, I would be stopped at the airport by a couple of burly and mustachioed security types and an unctuous little bureaucrat intoning: "I'm sorry, sir, but our records indicate that you did not visit the Taj Mahal during your stay. I'm afraid we will have to detain you in India until you have rectified this deficiency. We will now accompany you to Tihar Jail." So I went.

Icons like the Taj, the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings and China's Great Wall have been reproduced on countless T-shirts and coffee mugs, have loaned their grandeur to many films and have been the subject of many paeans, jokes and sermons. For those of us privileged enough to affect being jaded, there is no sense of discovery upon seeing these monuments, only the oddly tactile sensation when the memory of a picture blooms into the memory of an experience. This is the same feeling I experienced when I first saw Matisse's Icarus Falling and when I first visited the Empire State building. I'd seen them all before, in reflections, in light captured on film and transferred to paper or shaped into ephemeral images encoded in bursts of electrons. But in all three cases I have had the luck to be caught by surprise. The Empire State Building suddenly appeared framed in my portal as my aeroplane took a long turn over Manhattan. Matisse's most famous piece was hanging, entirely unapologetically, in my university library. I had at first thought that it was a reproduction. But there it was, the real deal, just hanging on the wall of an otherwise pedestrian library like a calendar or a peppy poster.

The Taj Mahal does not disappoint. It sneaks up on the traveller, aided by a conspiracy between Agra's winding ridges and irregular clumps of trees. One approaches the Taj a bit like the doctor in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, who sees his future wife one piece at a time over several years, during medical examinations conducted through a small hole in a white sheet intended to spare the conservative girl's modesty. The dome and the towers are first visible over the trees, then one gets a shorn view through the preliminary grandness of the gates. Finally, stepping into the green around the famous reflecting pools, the traveller gets the whole celebrated view -- and learns that the Taj Mahal, like a beautiful woman, is best appreciated from a distance. The rest is slapstick. Shoes off, scampering, burning feet on the great marble griddle that the Taj becomes in the summer, the tourist takes his pictures, listens to the guides and says knowing things, having become an expert on the history and politics of Mughal successions on the train that morning. He spends a little "much-needed foreign exchange" -- as the speechwriters are wont to put it -- and returns home to report what he saw in India: the Taj Mahal, autorickshaw-wallahs and tandoori and everything.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.