Agra

Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631, giving birth to her fourteenth child on a military campaign far from home. Her husband, Shah Jahan, spent the next two decades and a serious share of an empire's wealth building her a tomb. Grief, it turns out, is very good at architecture.

The ending is less famous. Aurangzeb deposed his father and held him inside Agra Fort, where Shah Jahan died in 1666 with the Taj visible a mile downriver. Stand at that window and the marble stops being a monument and becomes a rather sad private view.

Parchin kari — flowers cut from carnelian, jasper and lapis and set flush into marble — is still worked in Agra workshops by families who trace the skill back to the emperor's masons. Watch it done before you visit the tomb. The inlay reads differently once you know how slow it is.

Away from the monuments Agra is a plain working city of leather units and petha shops, selling translucent ash-gourd sweet by the kilo near the old gates. The Mughals are long gone. The sugar and the marble dust remain.

Sunrise entry is worth the alarm — the marble goes grey, then pink, then white in about forty minutes, and the crowds land at nine. Cross the river to Mehtab Bagh for sunset rather than queueing twice. Itmad-ud-Daulah, the small tomb people call the Baby Taj, is older, emptier and finer in its detail. And the Taj closes to visitors on Fridays: plan around it, not into it.

Agra's touts work on commission, and the 'government emporium' usually isn't. Buy inlay straight from a workshop where you can watch someone cutting stone. Leave plastic and food outside the security gates. And remember the building is a grave — the photographs are fine, the shouting inside the chamber is not.

If Agra left you wanting Mughal scale without the Mughal crowds, take the train to Jhansi and drive twenty minutes to Orchha — riverside cenotaphs, empty palaces, no queue at all. Jaipur, four hours west, is the other natural continuation.