24.202374 N 85.377887 E


The boy looks to his left through the window of a bus and finds a long, though broken, boundary wall running parallel to the road.

This wall is not like those that people in the town surround their homes with: it’s sculpted, carved and carries little domes on its pillars. In all fairness, it looks heartbreakingly ancient, and the boy wonders if respectable grandeur is always a property of the past.

Someone says the king lives here and someone says the king lived here, but they all agree that it is a place where tenses are easy to confuse, and therefore townsmen stay away from it. They don’t necessarily want to remember its existence because memorising takes an effort.

The principal archway which the boy sees to his left through the window of a bus going to Patna is whitewashed, perhaps to indicate that the erstwhile estate now houses a police academy, the aesthetics of the commonplace converting royalty to apprenticeship.

If the eyes could permit, the road which goes beyond the archway could reveal a palace of winds, its huge windows inspired by the craft of Kashmir. If the eyes could permit further, this palace of winds could give way to the palace of ruins where humanity and weather have left upon its surface marks of neglect over a period of two hundred years.​

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