The Taj Mahal, Christmas Day 2006

I catch my first glimpse of it through the gateway - half a dome, half a minaret, both framed against a cloudless, pale blue sky. It is 4.30pm. My heart skips a beat at the beauty of even this little glimpse.

Then you walk through the gate, and there it is.

It is surreal. The first thing that strikes me is how it looks so....two-dimensional. The way the sides of the building are angled, the building appears to be pasted onto the sky. Even its magnificent dome looks so, just exactly the way a full moon looks like a flat, round cut-out rather than the ball it actually is.

The second thing that strikes me is how this flat cut-out seems to be created out of lace in a wonderful shade of ivory, such is the impression created by the textures on its external walls. (I learn later that the years have given the once pristine-white marble a patina of ivory, but I know that no pristine-white could have surpassed its current patina for beauty, so I believe that the Taj Mahal never looked as beautiful at its first unveiling as it does now.)

The third thing that strikes me is the sense that all those sheer and magical tales of Arabia, all those dreams of domes and minarets, have indeed come alive.

The overall impression, in those first 15 seconds, is that I am looking at some exotic, gigantic cut-out of the Taj Mahal, so large and so subtly stage-lit that it is indescribably wondrous and overwhelming. No photo of the Taj Mahal you have ever seen, no matter how artfully photographed, will ever prepare you adequately for the jaw-dropping moment when you set eyes on it for the very first time in your life. Suddenly, all those over-worked adjectives you have ever known leap into your mind - 'unreal', 'surreal', 'awesome', 'magical', 'splendid' - but this time, those adjectives mean exactly what they mean. The Taj Mahal looks unreal and surreal and magical, just as I've described. And it is awesome. And, yes, what you have right there before your very eyes is splendour. Just splendour.

There are many buildings in the world that are architecturally beautiful, or amazing, or magnificent, but the Taj Mahal is more than beautiful or amazing or magnificent. Your jaw just falls open.

I turn to the guide to tell him this: that everyone who has seen it has told me that nothing will have prepared me for seeing it for real. I start my sentence well enough, but halfway through, tears suddenly well up and I choke on my words disgracefully. It was like that for two other friends of mine too. Tears came to them too. I was forewarned.

I look at it again and again, trying to fathom the reasons for this....impact. I seem to recall that someone once described the Taj Mahal as appearing to 'float in the sky'. This description puzzled me, but now I know what they mean. What they mean is that although the Taj Mahal is anchored to the ground at its base, the rest of it appears to rise very lightly into the sky - like a balloon that is tied to the floor still pulls airily towards the ceiling. The Taj Mahal does not sit fat and squat onto the ground below.

It is only when you stand at ground level, eyeball to eyeball with it, that you are able to see all this. For a photo to give you this understanding, its frame would have to be as wide as the horizon, and as high as the sky.

"You really like it, don't you?" said the 22 year old guide, a little casually.

"Yes. But you have seen it too often and you have forgotten what it was like your first time," I said.

It is now 5.30pm, and the pale blue sky has turned an astonishing smoky pink.

"No," he looked at me, raising an eyebrow firmly. "I haven't."