Locomotoring

Tijara fort never quite had a queen. The son of the king started to build the fort and died before the fort was completed. His mother, the King’s partner/concubine, only got the status of queen after committing sati – she sat on her dead husband’s pyre and burnt herself alive.

My knees creaked going up the steep stairs of Tijara fort. But lets pretend that this hypothetical queen of Tijara fort had nimbler knees – from all the functional effort of going up and down these steep stairs everyday. The 650 million old Aravali range might have had a few more stubby hills around the fort, mined to nothingness since then. I imagine the sunrise would have looked different, the air quality index would have been 100 points lower. There would have been no haze blanketing the surrounding land. I am also going to imagine that the straw colored wheat fields would be interspersed with palm groves and orange blossomed palash trees. Even today, from the fort, you can see some small ancient temples on the surrounding land, they are black now and they would have shared the pinkish hue of the Aravali. We saw hundreds of birds flying around. Perhaps the queen would have fed them in the morning and they would have gathered around her. We saw a blaze of bougainvillea on the fort grounds, along with palash, madhumalati and parijat in bloom. Perhaps they were even more plentiful back then.

The morning at the fort, still jetlagged, we went up to the terrace of Hava (breeze) Mahal (palace) to watch the sunrise. There was no one else to be seen at 6 am which allowed us easy access to “authorized personnel” only spaces. Many of the Rajasthan palaces have a hava mahal, an area that is explicitly designed to be breezy. It was customary for these spaces to be designed for leisure and privacy, hence they would have beautifully carved latticework. The Tijara fort is a chic shabby reconstruction from its ruins, more shabby than chic, and you have to work extra hard to imagine any intricacy. Imagine also chunks of Aravali chipped away to build the fort, so pinkish hued stonework – enough pink to make anyone feel like a queen. I didn’t see any signs of water fountains that are common constructs in Hava Mahal, but while we are imagining, let’s throw a few of those in.

Now hold all these imaginations in your head as you see these images.