The Taj Conspiracy (14 page)

In 1992, Hindu faithful had succeeded in destroying the Babri Masjid, which had been erected by the barbarian Mughal conqueror on the site of Lord Ram’s birthplace. So consumed had the sainiks been in their passion for Lord Ram, that they had torn down the mosque with their bare hands!

Yet, the construction of a Ram temple had been stalemated by pseudo-secularists when they moved the Supreme Court. But now Kriplani had found another lever, one long enough to prod awake the apathetic masses throughout India. He replaced the glass on the table and licked his mouth. His mind went to the absentminded professor who had arrived unexpectedly offering his services—God fulfilled himself in many ways!

Thus far, all was going according to plan.

Agra

I
t was late night in Taj Ganj when a group of men filed into a nondescript room in the run-down market Katra Omar Khan. Inside the dimly-lit room, they took their position in front of the TV, cross-legged, attentive. Their hunger for education would be difficult to match even in the finest classrooms of India—privation and revenge were their spurs.

In his deep voice, the saffron-garbed guru on TV began. ‘You have grown up in the shadow of the Taj Mahal. Living in your pitiful homes, you have been dwarfed by the grand monument. Its marble shimmers and changes colours with the changing light through the day, while your quarters look drab in any season. The Taj has acres of green gardens flowing with water. You have not a tree to shade you in the blistering summer and get rationed water, when lucky. The grand Taj is a mausoleum, the tomb of a dead queen built by an emperor. Your hovels are living quarters for you, the living dead.’

He paused, his eyes piercing them.

‘For what else are you, but the living dead? Condemned in the twenty-first century to live like abject Hindu subjects of a seventeenth-century Mughal king! All your life you have looked at a lie, and understood nothing! Nothing. What if I told you the Taj is rightfully yours? It is yours for the taking!’

The men turned to exchange bewildered glances.

The guru had paused in anticipation. Realising the TV had gone silent, they turned to the screen again.

‘Yes. The Taj is yours. It belongs to you. To me. To all our Hindu brothers and sisters ... because like you and me, it is
Hindu
. Shah Jahan did not build the Taj Mahal. He converted Tejo Mahalya, a Shiva temple, and built his wife’s tomb on it.’ The guru’s face was thunderous. ‘The Mughals were invaders. Barbarians. They knew how to loot, not build. Wherever they went in India they destroyed our temples, beheaded our idols. Who can forget what Ghazni did in Somnath? He personally hammered the gilded lingam of Shiva, the temple deity of Somnath, to pieces, and carted the fragments to Ghazni where they were embedded in the new Jama Masjid’s steps.
Our
lingam, powdered into
their
steps. What can be more heinous?’

The guru’s eyes blazed at the gathering. Now he lowered his voice, sounding more ominous as he resumed. ‘Where they did not destroy the temple, they converted it into a mosque. Such was their treachery. The Taj Mahal is one such example. It is a Muslim tomb built on a Shiva temple. A Shiva temple that is no ordinary temple. It is called Tejolinga. Do you know why? Because it is the missing thirteenth jyotirlinga! Jyotirlinga. A place where Shiva first manifested himself. The twelve shrines of Shiva are well known, so well known that the Muslim invaders destroyed them, again and again and again. Kashi Vishwanath, holiest of all pilgrimage sites in India, destroyed by Aurangzeb. This legendary temple of Shiva was ransacked several times! And we rebuilt it, again and again. But—what if there was one Shiva temple, one Jyotirlinga that was so completely transformed that people forgot it was ever a Shiva shrine? So complete was its conversion that people even forgot it was a temple once, and not a dead queen’s tomb! So completely were the Hindu people brainwashed that they recalled only twelve jyotirlingas, and erased the rightful thirteen!’

The cross-legged audience of spindly young men sat in stiff concentration as the message of their impotence and misery was hammered into their comprehension.

‘Tejo Mahalya! Where
you
should be worshipping the great Lord Shiva. Instead you have got the Taj Mahal. Where you bow your head to a dead mortal, that too Muslim. Tch!’ The guru spat in fury.

‘And Shiva? His worship has been consigned to a hole in the wall of the Taj Mahal!’

Was he referring to Ghat Mandir? the audience wondered.

As if the guru could read their thoughts, he wagged a knowing head. ‘Yes, that apology of a Shiva temple that now goes under the name of Ghat Mandir. A temple to Mahadeva, the great lord of the trinity, Lord Shiva—and where is it located? Atop the pipe that brings water from the Yamuna into the Taj! Shame! Shame! Such utter shame!’

Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shivaya.

I surrender to God.

The chants rumbled forth from the screen as an agitated guru attempted to calm himself.

The seated men fidgeted, unsure what was expected of them, and looked about. A whispering started. Was this true? What was the proof? Who would believe them?

The voice from the TV surged again. ‘You will get answers to all your questions. Every single one. The myth of the Taj Mahal was not built in one day. The Mughals ruled over us for three centuries. Three hundred years in which they enslaved us, gagging and blindfolding us to our true heritage. But why continue to be slaves?

‘The time has come to seek the truth. Because only the truth will set you free.’

Delhi

T
he neurosurgeon at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences delivered a diagnosis that devastated Mehrunisa: Professor Kaul was suffering from Korsakov’s syndrome. It was a case of a deep and, perhaps, permanent devastation of memory.

The professor’s history of severe migraines could have caused the impairment, the doctor said. Or, it could have resulted from the alcoholic destruction of mammillary bodies in the brain—the professor, though by no counts a heavy drinker, was fond of his daily Scotch. Whatever the cause, amnesia seemed to have overtaken him. The illness had advanced to the extent that the patient seemed to have forgotten a large chunk of his life. He recognised his book on the Taj Mahal, but for the most part everything else seemed to have been erased from memory, except, occasionally, when his mind surfaced from the fog.

He had exhibited a history of ‘little strokes’ in the lead-up to the final collapse. Mehrunisa had witnessed some of those, but perhaps he had experienced others while she had been away.

The notion that her uncle, the renowned scholar, the man who could tell such fascinating, layered tales, was lost to her was like a physical shock. That such a man could lose a chunk of his rich life was horrifying. For Mehrunisa, it was a double whammy. Kaul uncle, the genial, loving godfather was the last link in a chain that connected her to her lost father. And she had lost her only ally—Professor Kaul was her guide and confidant in the attempt to unravel the incidents at the Taj. Whom would she turn to now?

Agra

S
SP Raghav was unhappy. The one-day match between India and Pakistan had gone in favour of Pakistan, the enemy having snatched victory on the last ball by hitting a giant six.

Saala! The match was rigged all right. All these cricketers making money on the side. Who could blame them for indulging in what was, after all, a national pastime: the quest for illicit income? But surely these men could rein in their greed at least when playing The Enemy? Was there no patriotism left nowadays?

Disgusted, he strode to the narrow portico that ran along the colonnaded front of the police station and spat. The station was quiet, with just two constables and him on duty. He didn’t have a family to go home to—his wife and children were in Salem because the boys, in secondary, needed a stable school environment. Besides, he had followed the cricket match and he felt compelled to compensate for the lost hours of work. If only, he shook his head once again, if only Team India had won.

This wasn’t helping. He marched to his room, grabbed his cap, felt for his motorcycle keys in his front right pocket and strode out.

At the gate he turned to the right and sped down the empty road to the Taj Ganj area with nothing specific in mind. The Taj issue had not stopped troubling him. There was more than one thread to the story, of that he was now convinced. The ASI director-general Raj Bhushan had supervised the examination of the change in the epitaph and Quran verse and proclaimed it ‘minor vandalism’. Mehrunisa, though, had been unconvinced. To which the director had quipped, ‘You believe there is a conspiracy afoot! The Taj Conspiracy, shall we label it?’

He had been a policeman too long to be a conspiracy theorist, but something was awry. Where did the second murder, of Nisar the artisan, fit into the equation? What linked Nisar to the supervisor was the Taj Mahal. Were the masked man and Aurangzeb two different men or one?

No wonder he needed the crisp night air to clear his head.

Raghav was cruising down the lane that led to Sirhi Darwaza, the south gate of the Taj complex. It was narrow and lined with shophouses on both sides, their façades painted red in harmony with the Taj forecourt’s red sandstone. That was about all that was harmonious between the utilitarian bazaar and the elegant Taj Mahal. Beyond these lay a jumble of tenements that made up Taj Ganj. He cast a disdainful look at the shops he was passing: Gyan Bookbinders, Aditya Sweets, Arun & Bros. Chemists, Al Guest House, Taj View Motel, Mumtaz Ladies Tailor, Rocky Music. Built by Shah Jahan as a bazaar where a variety of merchandise brought from all over the world could be sold, it was now a miserable market. As was characteristic of small-town India, where man and animal co-existed, there was a large buffalo stable in the lane and an abundant monkey population residing on rooftops. A smattering of cheap hotels and restaurants catered to backpacking tourists. The budget lodges showcased Indian ingenuity: multiple floors piggybacked on narrow plots of land until they could provide a view of the Taj Mahal! Raghav snorted as he veered his motorcycle around a series of festering cow dung cakes.

The Taj Ganj area, raucous with human and animal traffic through the day, sat quiet. Raghav passed a bonfire whose embers glowed dully. A stray dog raised his head to glance at him and a string of lights pulsed intermittently atop a signboard as people slept in the warmth of their homes. He was nearing the arched wooden gate at the lane’s end when he spotted shadows crouching on the right. Their hesitant shuffling aroused his curiosity. Bringing his motorcycle to a stop, he pointed the vehicle’s light in their direction.

‘Who’s there?’ he called out.

A scramble ensued. A hushed, yet frantic,
Police!
sounded. The shadows were racing now, away from him, toward the crowded shophouses. He hastily put his motorcycle on its stand and gave them chase. His physical ability belied his forty years—it had been a factor in his selection for the ATS, aided by the patriotism he wore on his sleeve. At annual functions, when booze flowed and beer bellies jiggled in carnival bonhomie, it was common to toast, ‘Fit as a fiddle, Raghav has no middle!’ The ‘middle’ alluded to both his trim waist and the fact that in a culture of ‘anything goes’, he was a fastidious man.

Now Raghav drew closer. The lane was ill-lit but he could make out two men, probably youngsters, but their frantic dash was no match for the SSP’s trained sprint. He was closing in when one of them cast a quick backward glance, yelped, dropped what he was carrying and doubled his speed. Raghav neared the bundle that had fallen to the ground with a dull thump, a stack of loose sheets. As he glanced up, he saw the boys were scaling a low wall. Beyond it would lie the narrow courtyard of a house. Doubtless the miscreants would scale more walls in their getaway—the area beyond was a maze of dwellings. He glanced in their direction—they must be local, the swift manner in which they had vaulted across and vanished. Raghav knew it would be futile looking for them in the dense labyrinth of houses. Besides, they had left their booty behind, which he now bent to retrieve.

A4 size paper, printed sheets—it was too dark to read. Screwing up his eyes, he walked to the nearest lamppost that was ten metres away. The light was dull, moths trapped within the glass case reducing the effectiveness. He stood beneath the flyblown lamp and strained his eyes to read what looked like a pamphlet: white background, bright orange lettering and a headline in bold.

As he read it, SSP Raghav knew his instinct had been right. The ‘Taj conspiracy’ was not a hypothesis—it was a work-in-progress! And, if the headline was to be taken at face value, the evil behind the conspiracy was Hindu, not Muslim. His eyes bulged with shock as they scoured the text again:

The Taj Mahal is a Hindu Temple

Brothers and sisters of Agra! You have been fooled for too long. The most famous monument of our city, the world-famous Taj Mahal, is not a Muslim monument built by a Mughal emperor! No! Its actual name is Tejo Mahalya—a Hindu temple that, as per the tradition of conquerors, was converted into a Muslim monument.

Do not take our word for it, we beg you. Read the proof that follows and form your own opinion.