“Hallo?” I said. There was no answer, although the back of my neck prickled, as if I were being watched. The room’s only light came from a shaft of sun through a high window; it shone onto more purdah screens—they seemed to be a feature of the Fort architecture, although this maharaja’s ladies lived in town. By the dim reflected light, I peered around me, trying to make out the room’s contents. That it contained a great deal was immediately clear, but it seemed more the clutter of a storage room than a used living space, and I looked in vain for an electric switch to throw light on the matter.

“Toy room,” the note had said. And hadn’t Nesbit’s brief biography of the family mentioned that the previous ruler, the current maharaja’s grandfather, was an enthusiastic collector of mechanical oddities? With that hint, my eyes began to adjust to the gloom and pick out its contents.

The first figure to come into focus appeared to explain the sensation of being watched: a full-sized suit of armour, parked at the other side of the door. So strong had the feeling been that, half embarrassed, I flipped up the visor to be certain, but there was no face behind it, only cobwebs.

The overall texture to my left proved to be an entire wall of open shelves, laden from floor to the ceiling fifteen feet above with metal wind-up toys of all makes, conditions, and vintages. White-painted Indian cows and German birds in nests, tigers and horse-drawn carriages, clowns and Victorian gentlemen. A lady in the dress of the nineties sat at an elaborately painted tea table, one hand frozen halfway between table and lip—although on closer examination the hand held, not a tea cup, but a cigarette: shocking. Next to this iconoclastic figure, a roughly clad and bearded man awaited a turn of the key to resume his chopping of firewood. And here was one that brought back my childhood with a thump—a tin boy on a pennyfarthing bicycle, identical (if in better condition) to my father’s childhood toy, given to me when I was five. Life in a myriad of forms, all with keys in their backs or on the shelves beside them, all frozen and awaiting the animation of tension on their mainsprings.

When I returned the pennyfarthing boy to his place, I was surprised to feel dust on my fingers, although the air smelt faintly of machine oil. The room was maintained, but not tidied.