The great building inside which we stood followed the outline of the hill, forming a skewed circle but for the flat eastern side, which contained the gates and faced the Old Fort across the road; late-afternoon sunlight glittered off fresh gilding around the east wing’s deep-set windows. Before us to the north, a wide terrace spilled flowers from pots the size of a man, and the arcade behind it gleamed with mosaics of lapis-blue and gold. To my left, the western wing was more or less obscured by trees, and a glance behind me at the south walls gave the only indication that the conversion of The Forts was not yet complete, for flaking paint and stained stone peeped from between branches of bamboo as thick as my forearm.

There was no sign of the maharaja, although his motorcar stood open-doored on the gravel drive. In his place, we were met by a man as grand as the uniform he wore, its snug trousers spotless white, the heavy silk brocade of his tunic dropping past his knees, the ends of his greying moustaches trained flawlessly upwards. To one side stood two men with leashed cheetahs, the cats’ collars flashing with rubies; both animals eyed the delicate gazelles with feline interest, the very ends of their tails twitching, twitching. Up on the terrace, half a dozen musicians had begun to play the moment we came through the gates. Behind these ceremonial figures, a platoon of lesser chuprassis stood waiting to retrieve us and our bags, to show us to our rooms, to draw us scented baths and tea trays and finally to take up positions outside of our doors, awaiting our least wishes. I was given a suite of two rooms with its own small bath-room, the bath’s square-footage more than compensated for by the ornateness of its walls: It had enough mirror and gilt to send Bindra into a thousand ecstasies. I, on the other hand, was overjoyed to find that it had running water, both hot and cold. Someone in Khanpur’s past had been remarkably progressive when it came to the comfort of guests; I couldn’t imagine what it must have cost to install nineteenth-century plumbing in a sixteenth-century building.

When I had been shown the glories of the water closet and had illustrated for me the geyser controls over my bath and the resultant spouts of furiously hot water, the two men who had accompanied me to my rooms left me in peace, one of them pausing only to adjust, with ostentatious ceremony, the ornately worked album resting on the writing table beneath the window. When they had left, I went to see what the album’s significance might be, and found it to contain a magnificently calligraphed document with the day’s date at the top.

5 February 1924

Welcome, friend, to Khanpur.