A city in decay makes for a fine muse. And Agra is not any city in decay, but the crumbling, most enduring memento of three centuries of Mughal rule in the Indian subcontinent. An ageing courtesan, who never quite recovered from the silence that follows the deafening applause of a fortuitous night. In The Shadow of the Taj , therefore, finds itself immersed in a subject as rich as it is vast. Enough to hold the attention of a reader through 267 pages, and yet, lacking the luminescence that such a subject deserves and demands.

Travelling in time and space, often with some of Agra’s most curious and engaging nostalgists and raconteurs, the author intends for us to see the city through its people. And for a while, that is a diverting ploy. The brother of the mahant of the Mankameshwar temple and his doctor wife, who wants to open a charitable hospital, or the sedan-owning footwear manufacturer from the Chamar-Dalit fold, for instance, come deliciously close to achieving the elusive ideal — making Agra’s present seem almost as interesting as its gem-encrusted past. But something is amiss, and one soon discovers, it’s humour.

A reader, who has travelled continents with Bruce Chatwin or found Bill Bryson’s dry wit addictive, expects levity to leaven the weight of history. To find laughter in the most unlikely of situations, bookending entire chapters even. Although the author, as authors are wont to be, is in love with her subject (and that alone is a reason to read this book), her inability to imbue the prose with lightness fails it.

One of the dilapidated riverside havelis still owned by the descendants of Nagar Seths — banias who often funded wars between kings — becomes a metaphor for the book. A decrepit house consumed by the possibility of what could have been. “A flight of steps, sweeping up to the main haveli, retains the faint traces of former grandeur, but… is now a leprous work of cement.” Apparently, the property was also rumoured to have buried treasure. But the family abandoned its search after it realised that they might “spend a fortune in the search and perhaps unearth nothing.”

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