Beyond Marrs

A year before leaving Alaska, Kate and I knew we would need to travel to India at least twice to renew our Nepal visa. We also knew that India is not always an easy place to move through, and we found ourselves wondering how the kids would take it all in. India tends to inspire intense reactions—people seem to either love it or recoil from it—and I think this is because it refuses to soften itself for visitors. Alongside its extraordinary, almost overwhelming beauty are realities that are raw, confronting, and completely unhidden.

Modern India is a relatively young nation built on ancient foundations. Nearly one in five people on Earth calls it home, shaped in part by a caste system that structured society for endless generations and was only formally abolished about seventy-five years ago. Explosive population growth has led to overcrowding, widespread unemployment, and pollution that permeates many cities. At the same time, India is layered with the elements that make it endlessly fascinating, and truly magnetic: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain architecture; evocative forts and palaces; hundreds of languages; millennia of history made visible in stone and wood; food that feels like constant discovery; and landscapes of remarkable diversity. Taken together, these contrasts led us into ongoing conversations with the kids about how beauty and ugliness often coexist, inseparable from one another.

After a series of family conversations about India, adventure, and our shared love of train travel, we settled on a loose plan: fly into Rajasthan, in far western India, and then work our way back to Delhi by train. The route would cover nearly 1,200 kilometers of track. We began in Delhi, where I had lived and worked in 2004, fresh out of college, and spent several days exploring a city that rarely gets enough credit for its depth of history and unexpected discoveries. One evening, after a particularly full day, I wrote down a few of the oddities—some familiar, some not—that stood out:

1. A man piloting a wheezing 125cc scooter, a fully cloaked old woman perched improbably on his feet, and an apartment-sized washing machine lashed to the back like an afterthought.
2. A young girl on Chandi Chowk, tightrope-walking along a braided rope, a trio copper pots stacked neatly on her head.
3. Two old men presiding over a makeshift barber stand at the edge of the road: a cracked leather dentist’s chair facing a brick wall tangled in tree roots, a broken mirror dangling beside an orderly chaos of scissors, clippers, and other mysterious implements.
4. A rat calmly eating a chapati at the feet of a man selling marigolds, both seemingly unbothered by the other’s presence.
5. A half-kilometer walk across a narrow pedestrian bridge, edging forward against a steady tide of oncoming motorcycles, each rider convinced there was still room for one more.

With our introduction to India—and to Delhi—behind us, we flew with IndiGo to Jaisalmer, a dusty city in the heart of the Thar Desert, about eighty miles from the Pakistan border. Situated along an old branch of the Silk Road, Jaisalmer was once a key desert crossroads for caravans moving silk, spices, gems, and textiles across South Asia. Its most iconic landmark, Jaisalmer Fort, dates to the twelfth century and remains both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the world’s largest living forts, home to thousands of residents within its golden sandstone walls. Known as the “Golden City,” Jaisalmer felt like it was suspended in time: narrow, winding alleys opening onto ornate havelis with intricately carved lattice balconies, overlooking quiet courtyards where children, cows, and motorbikes moved together in easy, honking and grunting harmony.

In addition to being quiet by Indian standards, we all took delight in the sheer number of cows that wandered the streets of Jaisalmer. Revered by most Hindus and rarely consumed, they moved through the city with an unhurried confidence. The kids were especially thrilled by how often we would round a narrow alley only to come face to face with a hulking Brahma bull, its horns painted yellow, entirely unfazed by our presence. It never got old. Throughout the city, many home exteriors were adorned with hand-painted images of Ganesh, offered as blessings for newlyweds and quiet hopes for lives with fewer obstacles ahead. At the foot of countless doorways sat small troughs, where daily scraps were left out for the meandering cows.

From the Golden City, we hopped on a train that snaked east through the desolation of the Thar Desert. Long stretches of scrub brush slipped past the windows, and in the distance, sandstorms filtered the low-hanging sun into a surreal yellow haze. Before long, we pulled into Jodhpur—known as the “Blue City”—and caught a four-seater tuktuk through narrow streets lined with blue-painted homes. The sights and sounds of Diwali, the five-day festival held in October or November, were beginning to take shape around us. The holiday commemorates Lord Rama’s return to Ayodhya after defeating Ravana in the Ramayana, and is marked by the lighting of diyas (oil lamps) and the near-constant crackle of fireworks in the streets.

The Blue City takes its name from the thousands of blue-painted homes and buildings that spill outward from its core. The tradition dates back to the 15th century, when high-caste Brahmins painted their houses blue to signify status—a practice that later spread more broadly among lower-caste Hindus as well. Jodhpur is also very much a fort town, with the massive Mehrangarh Fort towering above the city and visible from nearly every direction.

Beyond offering a cooling effect in the desert sun, we were told that surrounding the fort with Brahmin households served as a kind of cultural first line of defense: harming Brahmins was considered a grave sin in Hindu tradition, and their presence acted as a deterrent to would-be attackers. Alongside touring the remarkable fort itself, we spent several days engaged in one of our favorite family pastimes—aimless wandering through Jodhpur’s maze of narrow streets.

In the evenings, and especially after dark, the city erupted into a crackling, popping, booming, and sparkling melee of fireworks. We managed to buy some of our own, and the kids were overjoyed at the chance to run through the streets tossing patakha (firecrackers) and dodging those hurled at their feet. At the heart of Diwali is Lakshmi Puja, when oil lamps are lit in homes, on rooftops, and at doorways to guide Lakshmi home. Amid the relative madness of the fireworks, these flickering points of light spread across the city and along the fort walls—visible from our rooftop.

From Jodhpur, we continued our train journey, stopping in a trio of places I had last visited twenty-two years earlier: Pushkar, Jaipur, and Agra. Pushkar is an oasis town centered on one of the five holiest lakes in India, ringed by fifty-two ghats—lakeside steps used for religious ceremonies, pilgrimage bathing, and cremations. These sites hold deep significance for Hindus and are layered with centuries of history and spiritual belief. Some of Gandhi’s ashes were released into Pushkar Lake, and it remains an important pilgrimage destination for Hindus from around the world.

Pushkar is also famous for its annual Camel Fair, which was set to begin the week after our visit. Before departing, we were dropped off on the outskirts of town, where camel herders and traders had already begun to gather, camping with their caravans in the surrounding dunes. The kids wandered through the camps wide-eyed, weaving among hundreds of camels and laughing at their awkward gait, guttural grunts, and odd temperaments. One owner was chasing a particularly ornery camel—surely a teenager—across the sand, the animal entirely uninterested in following orders. There were tan and black camels, baby camels, camels adorned with makeup and necklaces, and others that looked as though they were already preparing for the competitions and pageantry of the fair yet to come.

After leaving Pushkar, we skirted the edge of the desert and made our way toward Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan and the state’s largest city. Having already passed through the Golden City and the Blue City, we now arrived in the Pink City—named for the distinctive rose-colored buildings of its old town, painted to welcome Prince Albert in 1876. Jaipur feels like a quintessential Indian city: relatively few high-rises, yet a vast, sprawling urban jungle of unchecked development, clothing and gem shops, fruit stands, honking motorbikes and tuk-tuks, and impromptu entrepreneurs at every turn. We visited Amber Fort just outside of town, hiring “Mr. Smiley” to chauffeur us around in his tuktuk for the day after meeting him on the street the afternoon before. Every other tuktuk driver and shop owner tends to have stories about celebrities they have escorted around town or sold bracelets to. In the case of Mr. Smiley, perhaps it was Mick Jagger or Angelina Jolie, but I can’t remember. We tend to cover a lot of ground on foot everywhere we go, and Jaipur was no exception. We walked through the busy streets, past the gem shops and hole-in-the-wall stores that all seem to sell the same thing, and gravitated towards some green space in the center of town.

After a short stay in the Pink City, our last leg of the journey brought us to Agra, which rests on the Yamuna River and is certainly known best as being the home of the Taj Mahal. Leaving Jaipur, we left Rajasthan behind and crossed into Uttar Pradesh, a train journey of about 4 hours. Train travel in India became one of the most grounding parts of the trip. Stations were busy and loud, with vendors moving up and down the platforms selling chai and snacks, porters calling out destinations, and families waiting alongside piles of luggage. Once on board, the pace shifted. Hours passed watching the landscape roll by through open doors and barred windows—fields, villages, livestock, and the occasional temple or water tower. Compartments filled and emptied, food was shared, conversations sparked and faded, and long stretches of silence settled in. The trains weren’t particularly fast, but they were dependable, carrying us steadily across long distances and tying the journey together.

In Agra, we found a hostel within walking distance of the Taj Mahal and settled into a simple room that met our needs. We rose early the next morning, joining a steady flow of people hoping for the same experience. In the morning light, the white marble took on a soft, rosy hue as we wandered the complex, talking about Mughal architecture, Shah Jahan, and the ongoing conservation work on the dome. Scaffolding encircled the Taj’s main dome as part of a rare effort to address water leaks caused by recent monsoon damage—work that has only been undertaken a handful of times in the monument’s nearly four-hundred-year history. I may have been the only architecture nerd in attendance genuinely delighted to see how this kind of work is carried out. While Agra itself is chaotic, it also holds quieter rewards, including a particularly pleasant red fort and the tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulah—often called the “Baby Taj”—a contemporary of the Taj Mahal and, in some ways, even more impressive in design, if not in scale.

We met one final tuktuk boss who, much to Ada and Kate’s discomfort, let Willem climb into the driver’s seat and take the wheel. The driver’s cheerful reassurances that Willem was, indeed, a good driver did little to calm their nerves, but Willem was fully soaking it in and still reminds us regularly of his tuktuk driving credentials.

On our final night, we got stuck in traffic on the way back to the hostel—a familiar reminder of why we love trains so much, and of how India so often seems to separate visitors into distinct camps. After sitting motionless for forty-five minutes, all we could do was settle back and watch the world pass by: a man pushing a flatbed cart stacked with engine parts, a groom riding through the gridlock on a white horse on his wedding day, four men on a scooter watching a Bollywood movie on a smartphone as they waited for the dam of vehicles to break, a dog asleep atop a parked car, a tea seller slipping between lanes, a cow moving calmly through the horns and exhaust, and Willem grinning in the driver’s seat, honking along with the hopeful urban chorus of Agra commuters. It felt like a fitting bookend to the trip. By the time we boarded our flight and turned our sights back toward Kathmandu, India had done what it so often does—overwhelm, delight, confuse, and charm us all at once. The kids left with new stories, a few inflated driving credentials, and a much higher tolerance for chaos.