After a long and interesting drive from Delhi, complete with our first roadside cow sightings and constant, liberal and very necessary use of honking horns due to the frenetic Indy 500 pace of cars, auto rickshaws, vans, motorbikes, horse drawn carts, trucks and pedestrians along the way...plus oh, you know, a monkey jumping on top of our car to have a staredown with Karen through her passenger side window, we (thankfully) arrived safely in Agra late Tuesday afternoon to do a quick check-in at our hotel ITC Mughal, meet our Agra guide, and head for the "Baby Taj".
This is the nickname of the exquisite tomb of Mizra Ghiyas Beg, a Persian nobleman who was Mumtaz Mahal’s grandfather. (Mumtaz Mahal was the favorite wife of Emperor Shah Jahan--it was for her that the actual Taj Mahal was built.) Built between 1622 and 1628, the tomb is said to be the template on which the Taj Mahal is based. This was the first Mughal structure built completely from marble and the first tomb to be built on the banks of the Yamuna River, which until then had been a sequence of beautiful pleasure gardens....in which countless monkeys roam freely---but more about the monkeys later!
While it doesn’t have the same scale and majesty as the Taj, it was really beautiful. Karen and I fell in love with all the inlay work of semiprecious stones in the marble on both the walls and ceilings, as well as the various inlaid patterns on the floors modeled after designs of Persian rugs.
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