The Taj by moonlight
Three days late at the start, the family still reached Agra on the full-moon night and watched the marble glow silver-blue from six hundred metres away.
On the night
Part I · The Dream
A boy, some comics and a poem
Growing up in Irinjalakuda in the eighties, Bipin Cyriac lived in two worlds at once. One was red-tiled roofs, monsoon-soaked school uniforms and temple festivals. The other lived between the covers of Amar Chitra Katha, where Shiva sat on Kailash, Shivaji rode out of his hill forts and Chetak cleared the stream at Haldighati.
When he was thirteen, a family trip to Ajanta and Ellora ended at Ahmednagar, the day before, because his father fell ill with a fever. Two years later, in forty-five minutes, he wrote a prize-winning Malayalam poem about an imaginary pilgrimage across India. In its last verse, the young pilgrim completes only a quarter of the journey and turns back home on weary legs.
Thirty years, a career, a marriage, two children and a decade in Doha later, the rest of that journey was still waiting. Then, one evening in Kakkanad, his twelve-year-old daughter said something.
We have been to so many places outside India, but we haven't travelled much within India, right? I wish we could travel around India.Maria, aged twelve, late 2015
Six months later, on 5 May 2016, a white Mahindra XUV500 with the number plate KL 45 N 2445 rolled out of Mather Green Hills under a chequered flag. Inside were Bipin, his wife Reetha, Maria and six-year-old Cyril. The plan had only two fixed points: the Taj Mahal on the full-moon night of 21 May, and home at Irinjalakuda by 6 p.m. on 24 June, in time for Mummy's memorial.
