Excerpts from
Humayun's Tomb

© 1998 by Edessa Ramos

The sky over Humayun’s Tomb darkened with a fury of gleaming orange-red as the sun lowered itself further into the horizon's belly. A woman stood on the wide terrace contemplating the way the distant minarets daintily punctured the sky with their silhouettes.

The magnificent edifice rose behind her with its domed roof which in another time must have been covered entirely with marble. The walls were cut into an intricate lace-work of orifices. The whole structure was laid out in a complex set of octagonal floor plans that only an ancient genius could have designed. There were latticed floor-to-ceiling windows narrower than an elbow’s length. Minaret-shaped doorways faced the four directions of the wind while, inside, bathed in an endless-mobile dance of sunlight stabbing the gloom, its mood moving with every change in the time of day, the tomb of India’s last Persian emperor lay in absolute stillness. It was flanked on both sides by two smaller tombs, those of his sons who were executed along with him by the conquering British forces during the last century.

Far below, rows of bare hedges zigzagged endlessly in the gardens where once had walked the emperor’s wife. Now they lay forlorn and abandoned, eternally waiting for the delicate hands that would bring the blooms back to life.

She often came to this very spot in the heart of old Delhi. It was her one refuge from the overwhelming presence of a man who had been inhabiting her heart and mind; who, in the manner of true conquerors, had stamped his way into her life and tantalized her with the age-old game of fire and ice. But where she now stood, here on the brink of twilight, holding her breath for the ritual death of another day, amidst the tomb's conflicting ambiance of baffling serenity and unbridled rage, of mighty conquests and defenseless deaths, of day battling night and night resisting day, while waiting for this very sunset, somehow she cleansed herself of the pain of knowing him.