Rosebud and Other Stories

Taj Mahal

 7DM0DKDO The play Taj Mahal started out as an experiment, an exercise: to try writing from a white man’s point of view. The time I chose was the 1930s, the time of America’s Great Depression, when many men from the lowest economic rung, jobless and homeless, were riding the rails looking to change their lives. I felt I knew a little about being broke and searching for a change. My narrator was a fifty-year-old white transient who had spent most of his youth in aimless wandering. Now he was old, his best years squandered, and he faced a future of strangling loneliness. Theplaywasashortmonologuedeliveredtoanalmostunseenyouth. The old man speaks about his past, running away from an abusive alcoholic father and working from one end of the country to the other, east to west and back again, driving cattle to Chicago stockyards, doing odd jobs, always on the move, searching for utopia and freedom and never finding either. He speaks of a love affair that he relives again and again, a story he hopes to sell one day. He tells the tale to the inattentive boy (wrapped up in his own problems ), who he sees as the ghost of himself as a young man. He tries to make connection with the youth through his own experiences, particularly that of the one romantic encounter that he remembers as a young man. The love affair is a seduction by his boss’s daughter, who lures him into the main ranch house to see pictures through a stereoscope. Among the landscapes is the Taj Mahal, a monument to love that a shah had built for one of his wives. Lost on the old man is why a prince with access to so many women found only one to capture his heart. Doesn’t that prove something right there? But I digress.