It’s hard to like Agra: the air is so polluted that some days you can’t see the Taj Mahal from just across the river, the children – unlike the shy, smiling kids you see elsewhere in India – have seen enough backpackers for foreigner-pinching to be game, and the tourists at the Taj, having paid their 750 rupees, seem to feel immune to the usual rules of etiquette.

In parts, however, it’s magical – in a tragic fairytale sort of way.

Take the Taj itself. There is very little to say about it that hasn’t been said, and the very nature of the place lends itself to hyperbole and cliché, but from across the sandbars and slow channels of the Yamuna the white marble spires and domes are indeed breathtaking.

And then there’s the Itmad-ud-Daulah, the red sandstone and white marble tomb built by Nur Jahan for her parents, and completed over a decade before the Taj was dreamt of. Perhaps because it lacks the crowds, the Itmad-ud-Daulah is the most peaceful of the sights of Agra. You can stand above the old water gate looking down on wallowing buffalo and laundry drying out on the sandbars for hours, thinking of immortal monuments and the centuries which pass them by.

Before the inevitable shopping trip that follows any rickshaw tour, you’ll be taken to the Agra Fort, the now ruined walled city which once lay at the heart of the Mughal Empire. Despite the beauty and scale of the red sandstone complex, and a history that rivals that of any ex-capital, the most famous story surrounding the Agra Fort is, perhaps fittingly for a city known for its tombs, one of love and death. It is said that Shah Jahan, imprisoned in the fort at the end of his life, died gazing at the distant Taj, dreaming of his beloved wife Mumtaz for whom he had built the memorial – a sad fairytale to the end.