Fatehpur Sikri

On a day trip from Agra I dragged August out to see the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri, a ghost town built by the great Mughal emperor Akbar. I was especially excited having seen the 4-hour Bollywood period-epic, Jodhaa Akbar, at a theater in Delhi. Admittedly it was a bit hard to figure out the details of his life without subtitles, but I filled in that Akbar conquered most of Northern India in the 17th century, and generally promoted religious tolerance. He built Fatehpur Sikri as a utopian city for philosophers of different religions. Unfortunately he chose a location in the desert with no reliable water source, and the city was soon abandoned.

We decided to skip the expensive restored palaces, in favor of wandering the neglected ruins of the city that spread out over the valley behind. We had them entirely to ourselves, with the exception of some boys playing cricket and some men staying cool in a tower near the caravan serai.

When we went back to town to catch the last bus home, we found out it had been canceled. A mob of touts tried to hustle the ten or so stranded foreigners into taking a taxi, but August and I escaped the crowd, sticking like glue to some young Indian men August had been sitting next to on the bus out. While everyone else piled into the taxi, we went with our new friends to catch a train leaving in an hour for a 5th of the price.

As it turned out, we spent the next three and a half hours sitting in the station, attracting clouds of mosquitoes and staring men. The young men who had come to our aid told me they were also visitors to the area, training in Agra to become hoteliers (explaining their remarkable English). As we sat talking together on a ledge in the station, a crowd gathered around us, listening attentively in a semi-circle as though we were gurus dispensing wisdom. I think they were actually just fascinated by the sounds of the foreign language, but it was quite the illusion from my perspective.

When the train finally came we got to have our first experience with traveling on the Indian railways. It was a second class coach, which meant there were no reserved seats. Indians on the whole have much less of a sense of personal space than we do in the US, and are generally much less standoffish. What this means for train travel is that the carriages are packed beyond anything we would tolerate back home. Technically there are demarcated seats, but in second class carriage the boundaries are entirely ignored. What sense would it make for one person to lounge about in a whole seat and make another passenger stand or even miss the train, when they could both fit? On average, they can fit about 16 people into seating intended for 6, in addition to people standing back to front in the aisles. No one is truly comfortable, but at least the comfort is fairly distributed and everyone gets where they need to go.

Admittedly, the higher price of the touted taxi did sound a lot more reasonable when we finally collapsed in the hotel around midnight, without having had dinner. But what kind of a story would we have to tell then?