Agra and New Delhi are far cleaner cities (by Indian standards) than the other large cities, such as Calcutta and Bombay. In northern India the people are taller, lighter skinned, and more sturdily built than are those of the hot coastal areas. Occasionally I encountered a native Indian who could easily pass for a southern European — or perhaps a Louisiana Creole.¹

Anticipation welled up in me and tingled like a cool breeze across my sweaty body as we neared the Taj Mahal. My father had described the structure to me a number of times, and for years I had been eager to see it. As we passed through the shaded arches of the outlying buildings, the whitish-blue sky became bright with glare. Then the great temple itself came into view, gleaming, white and magnificent in the sun. I had stepped out of the filth, rot, and decay of modern India into an earlier era of beauty, order, and high art.

Rodney and I sat on the edge of the reflecting pool to cool off and rest. We rested quietly, our eyes drawn to the water. We looked at the reflection of the great structure, overwhelmed by its beauty, and then at the building itself. Although Rodney and I were both usually quite glib, we sat motionless and mute. When Rodney finally spoke, the words came out in whispers of reverence for the splendor of the Taj Mahal. And then reality slowly began to crowd in on me. I knew that most of the modern-day Indian visitors I saw around me were poor reflections of the men and women who had walked these grounds centuries before. The temple — actually a memorial built by a man for his dead wife — had been constructed as a Muslim temple long after the great flowering of the Aryan civilization but contains many of the architectural and artistic qualities of the earlier era. I thought, as I approached the temple, how it might be taken as a metaphor, a funerary monument to the memory of a people who had given the world such great beauty. As I viewed the structure in the sharp sunlight of afternoon, it occurred to me that the rounded dome, with its features like sun-bleached bone, resembled a great skull. The temple might represent the spiritual cranium of the Aryan people, I thought — one that had once held talented and disciplined minds but which now served only as a magnificent gravestone of a deceased culture and genetic treasure now degraded beyond redemption.

On the long road back to New Delhi, Rodney slept, while I rested my head on the window frame and peered into the dusty countryside, taking in the sights and sounds as nonchalantly as if I had traveled the road a thousand times before. Half asleep, I dropped Rodney off after we had exchanged addresses, but somehow in my travels it became lost, and I never saw or heard from him again after that day. When I got back to the YMCA, I took off my shoes, curled up on my musty cot, and fell asleep with my camera still around my neck.