Ghost Town

This past weekend being my last in India, I braved the heat to make one more excursion.  Forty kilometers away from the Taj Mahal, the sprawling complex of Fatepur Sikri receives its fair share of visitors, but has very few full-time residents due to the heat and the lack of water.

Asia Gate, the entrance to Fetepur (the mosque bit)

It took twelve years to construct by Akbar (father of Humuyan and grandfather to the builder of the Taj) and was abandoned just as quickly.  The complex is magnificent, though, and the architecture liberally borrows from Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and even Buddhist traditions.

The Mughals weren't known for their subtlety, although I get the feeling the stories are occasionally exaggerated by even the most official government tour guides.  Still, it's a rare sight to see a tower with over 500 elephant tusks decorating the outside to commemorate the king's favorite killer elephant.  (He made the elephant sit on people he was angry with.)  It's also rumored that the king used to play Parcheesi in the courtyard using slave girls as gamepieces.

My favorite part, though, was the fact that Akbar's city combined the influences of his three very different wives - one a Hindu, one a Muslim, and one a Christian.  The intricate carvings each seemed to contain one layer of each, stacked together into one beautiful design. It was a great example of Indian art borrowing from the country's long and diverse history.

Christian patterns on top, the Islamic flowers in the middle, and the Hindu swastik on the bottom

The only downside of the day was the fact that we were the only tourists brave enough to withstand 110 degree temperatures.  This made us very attractive to the hoards of tour guides ubiquitous anywhere along northern India's "Golden Triangle".  At one point, we resorted to saying, "No English.  No English.  No English" to every tout who approached.  The only problem was, they all knew so many secondary languages that we still couldn't get away.  When one of them started ushering me into the mosque in flawless Russian, I knew I might as well resign myself to the harassment.

By contract, once we were actually inside the city walls, things quieted down.  Quieted down a lot.  For the first time since coming to India, I couldn't hear so much as a single car horn.  No smattering of voices.  Barely even any birdsong.  It was dead silent.  At that point, the real isolation of this ghost town sunk in, and it became clear what a rare ruin it was.