Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal becomes the imagined destination of a reunion that Dexter Mayhew tries to make real through an elaborate plan for Emma Morley. He names a precise place and time, asks her to travel from London to India, and pictures himself finding her beneath the monument’s dome. The plan gives their closeness the form of a grand romantic encounter, but the letter carrying it is lost before Emma can read it.

A destination turned into a rendezvous

Dexter proposes that Emma leave her poorly paid restaurant job and windowless room, travel to Delhi on an open-return ticket, and reach Agra the night before the meeting. At noon on 1 August, he says, she should stand beneath the centre of the Taj Mahal’s dome with a red rose and a copy of Nicholas Nickleby. He would arrive carrying a white rose and his copy of Howards End. The detailed instructions turn a distant landmark into a stage set for a meeting between two particular people.

The date matters to the plan as well: 1 August is Dexter’s birthday. He offers to wire Emma the fare and pay for their expenses, describing the proposed three-month journey as affordable and imagining that they might travel onward to Kerala or Thailand. The Taj Mahal is therefore both the dramatic centrepiece of the invitation and the first stop in a larger future Dexter sketches for them.

The romance Dexter imagines

Dexter presents the meeting as a joke as well as a serious invitation. His plan includes the possibility that Emma might come to live with him as a flatmate, and he teases her about her supposed attraction to him; beneath the teasing, he says that he thinks about her often and wants her there. He also offers to tell her about his mother’s theory concerning the two of them if she comes. The proposed rendezvous gathers friendship, flirtation, and an unspoken possibility into one highly staged scene.

The objects assigned to each person make the imagined encounter almost ceremonial: Emma’s red rose and Nicholas Nickleby set against Dexter’s white rose and Howards End. Yet the plan is not evidence that the pair meet at the monument. It remains Dexter’s proposal, written while he is in India and sent without a usable address for either Emma or himself.

The letter’s unintended journey

The letter does not reach Emma. Heidi Schindler finds it tucked inside Howards End on a hostel sofa and reads it twice. Although her English is imperfect, she understands enough to picture Emma leaving her job and flat, travelling to the Taj Mahal, and meeting a handsome blond man. For Heidi, the scene resembles the kind of letter she would hope to receive herself; she decides Emma must get it.

With no address on the envelope, Heidi can only resolve to ask at the hostel reception across the road. The book and letter remain together instead: years later, Heidi, now Heidi Klauss, still has the paperback on a shelf in her spare bedroom, with Dexter’s letter inside. The precise rendezvous at the Taj Mahal thus survives as a vivid promise in a message Emma never receives, not as a meeting that takes place.