When we booked our India tour, our man in the UK was emailing the tour company in India to book everything, who then got back to him, who forwarded on to us… you get the picture. The subject line of the email originally sent by him was: “India tour for 2 white people”. Honest, that’s what it said. In 2016.

Yet its actually the way things are done here. Tourists are treated differently. A little deferentially, certainly more expensively. You get to a palace or a fort and it says: ‘locals 30Rp, foreigners 500Rp’. And you think ‘those little bastards!!!’ Racism, pure and simple. Here comes the ‘white man’ (not even ‘white person’ which would at least be just racist but not sexist) let’s fleece the fat pig!!

And I don’t even mind. Our money is worth much more than theirs. And they pay for these sights already with their taxes. Assuming they pay tax, or don’t use the forged banknotes when they do.

But at the Taj Mahal yesterday I appreciated the full value of my white person ticket. It was Christmas Day (in case you missed that), so India was on holiday. And it went, en masse, the entire fucking population of 1 billion, to the Taj Mahal because they heard we’d be there. And there was line to get into the building itself, the tomb. The queue was about 200 metres long. And in fact was 2 queues, one for men and one for women. And I thought, as always when faced with a queue for anything, I actually don’t need to go in, outside is fine. Then our guide pulled us inside the two long lines, to an empty couple of extra lines, separated by metal fencing, and we walked all the way to the front, not one other soul in either the white men’s or white women’s line, trying not to appear in too satisfied. And I thought, I wish I could pay an extra 470 Rupees in England every time there was a queue.

There’s something absolutely magical about the Taj Mahal. I can see what all the fuss is about. Even though I’ve seen a million pictures of it and eaten in 1,756 restaurants in Wembley named after it. It is simply beautiful. Achingly symmetrical in a way that you just want to keep looking at it. And it appears really ‘soft’ in a way that marble normally isn’t.

Ironically, the king who built this magnificent tomb for his wife, planned an identical one for himself to be built as his own memorial. Directly opposite the Taj, same design, but in black. Alas, his own son (a true little bastard) locked his father up in his own prison for 7 years til his death, so it was never even started.

Happy Boxing Day

A xxxx