Nandan and I took a taxi in Agra and the driver wanted me to visit some shop. I asked Nandan what he thought and he said let’s check customer service in a tourist capitol. In the front of this shop there were marble workers toiling on the floor with all kinds of complicated equipment. I was trying to follow what each one was doing, but found that I could not differentiate between meaningful labor and just playing with rocks to give the appearance of looking busy. I doubt that any serious craftsman could do precision work with a string of tourists continually approaching an open workspace to gawk and maybe interfere, and certainly fake labor would be cheaper than real labor, so I cannot say what I was seeing. The salesman assured me that all of the “craftsmen” in front of me were descended from centuries of family lines who do semi-precious stone inlay on marble.
I went inside with this guy to an overfull gallery of marble stuff. Store inventory was in many cases not visible because it was behind piles of marble plates. Most space consuming and easy to see were large marble tables in the room. The designs almost all had the same pattern theme, which I might describe as an multicolor floral motif with some simple geometric shapes. To me the designs were all unattractive and besides that I do not think it suits the tastes of many Western people to purchase furniture displaying the entire rainbow of colors. I asked the salesman if the designs were copied from historical sources and he told me that they were as old as India, but when I asked him if he had any pictures or information about the monuments or art sources from which they were taken he did not understand why I should care. I always ask this to people selling ancient designs here because I have an idea that most or all of the designs are entirely modern, despite the fact that the monuments here all have beautiful traditional carved patterns. The salesman pulled out some smaller pieces and told me that one could be used as a cutting board, but I personally do not like the idea of dulling my sharp knives on stone. Another one he told me could be a cheese plate, and I suppose it could have been that but typically I would expect a cheese plate to have a cover, and this one neither had a cover nor a groove into which a cover might fit. We were sitting at one of the tables and he flipped some switches to turn off the lights around us. Then he turned on the lights in the enormous dining table at which we were sitting. The white stone was translucent and lights blinking underneath made it flash red, green, yellow, and blue. I suppose a person could train himself to salivate when this happens. There is a certain fabulous clientele who might be interested in this, have the money to buy it, and be able to make it look good in a room, but at this point I had seen enough.
After I left I explained the concept of white trash to Nandan, and he asked me if this subculture also liked plastic flowers. Obviously he understood.