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.