Three girls were sightseeing at Bibi Ka Maqbara just like me

As I wandered through the streets of Aurangabad, I eventually arrived at Bibi Ka Maqbara, one of the city’s best-known landmarks. Its resemblance to a scaled-down Taj Mahal has earned it the unflattering nickname “the poor man’s Taj,” yet for a provincial Indian city it remains a remarkably grand monument.

Standing before the mausoleum, my gaze was suddenly drawn to a group of girls adorned with dazzling accessories. Large earrings dangled from their ears, gaudy necklaces glittered around their necks, and their arms clinked with layers of silver bangles. Even their noses sparkled with tiny studs. One might have assumed they were daughters of wealthy families, yet the worn plastic water bottles they carried told another story. That odd imbalance lingered in my memory—perhaps because it seemed so quintessentially Indian. Here, luxury and the everyday coexist side by side, not as contradictions but as part of the same landscape.

Bibi Ka Maqbara, incidentally, is the tomb of Dilras Banu Begum, wife of the Mughal Empire’s sixth emperor, Aurangzeb. Its name translates simply as “Tomb of the Lady,” an almost disappointingly plain designation. Unfair though it may be, comparisons to the Taj Mahal are inevitable. But after all, this mausoleum was never built to be weighed against other monuments, nor to impress the judgment of tourists. If anything, it seemed to me that the laughter of those girls, glittering with ornaments before its walls, fulfilled the mausoleum’s role more happily than any architectural appraisal ever could.

For a traveler like me, however, the most striking detail was the girls’ expressions: eyes filled with a mix of anticipation and shyness at being photographed. That blend of vanity and hesitation was more vivid than the stonework itself. In India’s tourist sites, human dramas accumulate in layers just as densely as the monuments of stone.

Bibi Ka Maqbara on Google Map

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