We went to see the Taj Mahal this morning.

It was very early, and it was quiet. I think that was my favourite part.

There weren’t many people yet. The paths were almost empty, and everything seemed to be waiting for the day to begin. The air was already warm because it was summer, but the morning still felt soft.

And then I saw it.

It was so white. Not just white like paper. It was shining.

I had seen pictures of the Taj Mahal before, but pictures don’t really explain how big it is.

At first, I thought it looked quite small and delicate from far away.

Then we got closer.

And closer.

And suddenly it wasn’t something I was looking at anymore. It was something I was underneath.

The entrance seemed enormous. The arches were so tall. The dome went up into the sky, and I had to tilt my head all the way back to see it properly.

I felt very small. I remember looking up and thinking that somebody had actually built this.

People had stood here hundreds of years ago and made all of these shapes and patterns and arches out of stone.

How did they know how to make it so perfect?

The walls had little flowers and patterns in them. The marble looked smooth and bright in the morning light. Everything seemed to line up exactly. I didn’t know words like symmetry or perspective properly then.

I just knew it was beautiful.

We took our shoes off.

The marble under my feet felt cool (slippery too!).

I remember that because the sun was already getting hotter, and the ground outside was warm, but the marble felt different.

I walked across it with bare feet. For some reason, that made the whole place feel more real.

Not like a picture. Not like something in a book. Something I was actually standing on.

And then we took photographs.

One of them was with my grandparents. I didn’t know then that one day I would look at that photograph and realise how much it meant.

We were all standing together in front of the Taj Mahal. The building was behind us, huge and white and almost too beautiful to understand.

And there we were.

My grandparents.

Me.

My family.

Everyone smiling at the camera. I think I understood that the Taj Mahal was about love. Someone explained that it had been built because an emperor loved his wife and wanted to remember her. I was ten, so I understood love in the way a ten-year-old understands it.

Love meant family. Love meant being together. Love meant people you wanted to keep forever.

I didn’t process that one day some of the people standing beside me in that photograph wouldn’t be there anymore.

I didn’t know that the photograph would become almost as important to me as the building behind us.

Years later, I look at it differently.

Now I understand something I couldn’t have understood then. The Taj Mahal isn’t only a building about love. It is a building about remembering.

Someone had loved someone so much that they made something enormous out of that feeling. They turned love into marble. They turned grief into arches and domes and gardens. They made something that could stay after the person was gone.

I think that is why the photograph feels different now. When I was ten, I was looking at the Taj Mahal. Now, when I look at that photograph, I see my grandparents.

And I see a little version of myself who didn’t know yet how quickly people can become memories.

There is something strange about that.

The Taj Mahal is enormous. But somehow, in the photograph, it is the people who feel enormous. I also remember thinking about how different everything was from home.

The language.

The clothes.

The food.

The architecture.

The history.

It belonged to a culture I hadn’t fully grown up in, and yet I understood the most important part of it.

Someone loved someone.

Someone was lost.

Someone wanted to remember.

I think that was one of the first times I understood that people can live completely different lives and still feel the same things. You can travel across the world and find something unfamiliar everywhere you look.

And then, sometimes, you find something that feels completely familiar.

Love.

Family.

Loss.

The need to remember.

I wonder what it would feel like to go back now – twenty years later. I think I would notice different things. I would probably spend longer looking at the architecture, how remarkable it truly is. I would understand the history more. I would notice the tiny details I was too young to see.

But I think I would also look for that photograph and almost step right back into the memory, preserved on that bench.

The one with my grandparents. The one where everyone was still there.

Maybe that is what travelling does. You visit somewhere when you are one person. And then you return years later as someone else.

The building hasn’t changed. The marble is still there. The dome is still reaching into the sky. The arches are still enormous.

But you have changed. You bring new memories with you.

New people. New losses. New ways of understanding love.

So perhaps I didn’t really see the Taj Mahal properly when I was ten. Perhaps I only saw what a ten-year-old could see.

White marble.

Huge arches.

A very big dome.

Warm summer air.

Cool stone underneath my feet.

My family standing beside me.

A camera clicking.

And a morning that seemed like it would last forever.

I didn’t know then that I was already looking at a memory.

I only knew that it was beautiful.

And that I was there.