The Perfect Day
Abel Hadden, Client
An alarm call at 5 o'clock in the morning is not what you want to hear at any time, let alone just 30 hours after you first touched down in Delhi. However this turned out to be the penultimate stage in a journey that will stay with me always.
At exactly 6.15, having survived the madness and chaos of Delhi's main railway station (I shudder to think what might have happened if we hadn't had a guide), we were sitting comfortably in first class as the train pulled out of the station en route to Agra, two hours away.
Inside the train, the smartly dressed TTE (Train Ticket Examiner) went about his work while breakfast was served (tea, cornflakes with hot milk, boiled eggs, toast, butter, marmalade, marmite, more tea). Outside the train, the darkness soon lifted to reveal the dusty, smoky, hazy mists of dawn breaking and India waking. In the sun's first soft red glow, the poorest of the poor stretched, prayed and warmed themselves against open fires in their shanty dwellings alongside the rail tracks. The mass of so many people, their animals, the brightening sunlight, the rubbish all blurred together as the train gained speed. In my ears my ipod shuffle delivered Lou Reed's Perfect Day – sublime.
The day's start and the journey were soon to be surpassed by the sheer scale and beauty of the twenty year creation of 20,000 workers in 1630, that is the Taj Mahal.
