Having lived in the city of the Taj for almost a lifetime now, I cannot help admit
how I remain eternally charmed by the compelling presence of the monument of
love encased in alabaster. Whenever I visit the Taj Mahal—I do it quite often since I have the privilege of living in an apartment at a stone’s throw from the famed monument—I marvel at the soft elegance of immortal splendor etched with the sharpness of steel on the transient graph of time and tide. If I distinctly remember reading an essay by Edwin Arnold’s in school wherein he described the Taj as “not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passions of an emperor’s love wrought in living stones,” I happily recall, time and again, the following lines from Rabindranath Tagore’s testimony to the monument of love and beauty:
You allowed your kingly power to vanish, Shajahan,
but your wish was to make imperishable a teardrop of love.
Time has no pity for the human heart,
he laughs at its sad struggle to remember.
You allured him with beauty, made
him captive, and crowned the formless
death with fadeless form.
The secret whispered in the hush of
night to the ear of your love is wrought
in the perpetual silence of stone.
Though empires crumble to dust, and centuries
are lost in shadows, the marble still sighs to the stars,
“I remember”
If Tagore could compose such an exquisitely beautiful lyric to animate the “perpetual silence of stone,” one could well imagine his infinite capacity to render into eternal songs the more pulsating and vibrant voice of human life in all its manifestations. |
