Inside the main room, the richly engraved cenotaphs (empty memorial sarcophagi) of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan are located behind an elaborate jali, or marble screen. A second set of cenotaphs is located in a lower chamber, inaccessible to ordinary visitors. It is believed the emperor and his beloved wife are buried even more deeply in the earth. The cenotaphs, the marble screen and marble walls are decorated with exquisite floral patterns of colored stone and inlaid inscriptions from the Koran.

While the Taj is a testament to love, it also embodied the power of Shah Jahan himself. As the emperor’s historian wrote: “They laid the plan for a magnificent building and a dome of high foundation which for its loftiness will until the Day of Resurrection remain a memorial to the sky-reaching ambition of His Majesty...and its strength will represent the firmness of the intentions of its builder.”

Presumably, the end of time is still a long way off, but the Taj is slowly deteriorating now. Seen up close, the marble has yellow-orange stains in many places; some slabs have small holes where the stone has been eaten away; in a few places, chunks have fallen from the facade; Brij Khandelwal, Editor, Agratoday.in and I even found a bit of recent graffiti on the white marble platform, where two visitors, Ramesh and Bittoo, had signed their names in red ink.

The sandstone of the terraces and walkways is particularly weathered. Where restoration work has been done, it sometimes appears sloppy. Workers have filled holes with a cement-like substance of a mismatched color. In at least one instance, it appears that someone stepped in the wet glop before it dried, leaving an indent the size and shape of a small shoe. The grouting in some of the gaps between marble slabs of the walls looks like the amateur work I’ve done in my bathroom.

For decades activists and lawyers have been waging a legal battle to save the Taj Mahal from what they believe is environmental degradation. M.C. Mehta, currently one of India’s best-known lawyers, has been at the forefront of that fight. I met him twice in New Delhi in a half-finished office with holes in the walls and wires dangling out.

“The monument gives glory to the city, and the city gives glory to the monument,” he tells me, exasperated that more has not been done to clean up Agra and the Yamuna River. “This has taken more than 25 years of my life. I say: ‘Don’t be so slow! If somebody is dying, you don’t wait.”

When he began his campaign in the 1980s, one of Mehta’s main targets was an oil refinery upwind of the Taj Mahal that spewed sulfur dioxide. Preservationists believed the plant emissions were causing acid rain, which was eating away at the stone of the monument—what Mehta calls “marble cancer.”

Mehta petitioned the Supreme Court and argued that the Taj was important both to India’s heritage and as a tourist attraction that contributed more to the economy than an oil refinery. He wanted all polluters, including iron foundries and other small industries in Agra, shut down, moved out or forced to install cleaner technology. In 1996, twelve years after he filed the motion, the court ruled in his favor, and the foundries around Agra were closed, relocated or—as was the case with the refinery—compelled to switch to natural gas.

But for all his successes, Mehta believes there’s much more to be done. Traffic has surged, with more than 800,000 registered vehicles in the city. Government data shows that particulate matter in the air—dust, vehicle exhaust and other suspended particles—is well above prescribed standards. And the Yamuna River arrives in Agra bearing raw sewage from cities upstream.

The river, once such an integral component of the Taj’s beauty, is a mess, to put it mildly. I visited one of the city’s storm drains where it empties at a spot between the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort, a vast sandstone-and-marble complex that was once home to Mughal rulers. In addition to the untreated human waste deposited there, the drain belches mounds of litter—heaps of plastic bags, plastic foam, snack wrappers, bottles and empty foil packets that once held herbal mouth freshener.

Environmental activists have argued that such garbage dumps produce methane gas that contributes to the yellowing of the Taj’s marble.

(Jeffrey Bartholet is a freelance writer and foreign correspondent)