The House of Kesarmer

The Trunk in the Tosha Khana

The key to the Tosha Khana is the size of my forearm. It hangs on a hook in Papa's office, black iron with a ring at the top worn smooth by a century of thumbs, and for most of my life it was simply part of the wall, like the faded map of the old state behind his desk. Nobody went into the Tosha Khana. It was the storeroom of a household that no longer needed a storeroom, a low vaulted chamber at the foot of the fort stairs where, in Raghuvir Singh's day, the state kept its ceremonial cloth, its account books and its spare saddlery. By my childhood it held broken chairs, rolled durries, a cracked brass bathtub and the general silence of things that had outlived their use.

I went in on a hot afternoon in April, three years ago, because Ananya wanted a particular carved screen for the hotel library and Papa thought there might be one down there. There was no screen. There was, behind a stack of rolled tent canvas, a steel trunk with leather straps gone stiff as bark, and painted on its lid in white letters, faded but still legible, the words "H.H. Kesarmer. Not to be opened by the Railway."

I laughed out loud, alone in the dark. Then I undid the straps.

* * *

Mira, you asked me once why I spend my evenings at the long table in the old billiard room with a magnifying glass and cotton gloves, muttering at photographs. This is why. That trunk held, as near as I can count, eleven hundred photographs, four hundred and some letters, nine ledgers, two diaries, a bundle of telegrams, a child's exercise book, a pressed lotus, and a polo ball signed in ink by eight men whose names I could not read.

Almost none of it was labeled.

I want you to feel that sentence the way I felt it. A glass plate of a man in a high-collared achkan standing beside a surveyor's theodolite, with a line of camels behind him and a canal half dug at his feet. Who was he? A studio portrait of a young woman in a pale sari, sitting very upright with a book open on her knee, looking not at the camera but just past it, as if someone had made her laugh a second before. Who made her laugh? A group of thirty schoolgirls on the steps of a building I did recognize, the girls' school, with a date scratched into the corner of the print, 1929, and not one name. An Englishman in a pith helmet and a dusty shirt, sleeves rolled, shaking hands with a man I am fairly sure was my great-great-grandfather, both of them grinning like boys who have just finished building a dam in a stream.

Everyone who could have told me who these people were had gone. My great-uncle Bhim Singh, who knew every horse and every groom and every story in this house, died in 2011. My grandmother, Dadisa, who could have read me those letters in an afternoon, died in 2015. Great-aunt Hemlata, the sharpest letter writer the family ever produced, died in 2019, and I had visited her in Gujarat only twice in her last ten years. I had been busy. Everyone is busy. That is the whole of the sad story, really, and it is the most common story there is.

So this book is partly an apology and partly a repair.

* * *

Let me introduce the family the way Dadosa used to introduce it to visiting guests on the terrace, with a glass of kesar milk in their hands and the lake turning orange below them. He would point up at the fort and walk them down the generations like a staircase.

At the top of the staircase stands Maharaja Raghuvir Singh, who was born in 1851 and ruled Kesarmer from 1874 until 1919. He is my great-great-grandfather, and he is the man in so many of the trunk's photographs standing beside something half built: a road, a canal, a railway embankment, a stepwell with scaffolding around it. He brought the railway spur to Kesarmer in 1896, and when the great famine came in 1899 he put tens of thousands of people to paid work building roads and tanks. His wife was Maharani Sajjan Kanwar, and her name is still on the stepwell below the fort and on the hospital in town. His great friend and great arguing partner was a British Political Agent named Colonel Arthur Fenwick, who I now believe is the grinning man in the pith helmet.

Below him stands his son, Maharaja Jaivardhan Singh, who ruled from 1919 until 1949 and whom everyone in the family, including people born long after his death, calls Bapji. Bapji went to Mayo College in Ajmer, played polo as if he had been born in the saddle, attended the Delhi Durbar of 1911 as heir, founded the scholarship that still carries his father's name, and opened the girls' school and the hospital. He also signed the Instrument of Accession in 1947, which is a story for later in this book. His wife was Maharani Gulab Kanwar, a woman from a hill state who I suspect ran a good deal more of Kesarmer than the official histories admit.

Then my grandfather, Maharaja Yashvardhan Singh, Dadosa, born in 1922, who studied at Mayo and then at Cambridge, became titular Maharaja in 1961 and had to reinvent what that meant when the privy purses were abolished ten years later. He founded the handicrafts cooperative and turned this palace into a hotel, and he taught every grandchild to tie a safa, badly at first. His wife, Rajmata Kishori Kumari, Dadisa, spent fifty years organizing the women of the district into self-help groups and cooperatives, and kept a diary in Hindi in a hand so small and quick that I am still learning to read it.

Then my father, Aditya Vardhan Singh, Papa, born in 1950, who runs the hotel and the family trust, brought polo back to the maidan and doubled the scholarships. My mother, Rani Meenakshi Kumari, is a pediatrician who trained and taught at the medical college that grew out of Bapji's hospital. If you are a child born in this district in the last forty years, there is a reasonable chance she has looked down your throat.

And then me, Devraj, born in 1979, and my wife Ananya, and our children, Mira, who is fourteen, and Arjun, who is ten and who has already asked whether he will be allowed to write the next chapter.

* * *

I should be honest about what this book is and is not. We were a princely family, and that meant comfort and privilege that most people in Kesarmer did not share. I have tried not to pretend otherwise. I have also tried not to write a book of grievances or a book of glories. What I found in the trunk, again and again, was work: ledgers of grain distributed, letters about where to dig a well, a doctor's report on vaccination in forty villages, a polo team list, a list of girls admitted to a school, a cooperative's first order book. That is what I want to record. Not the crowns, of which we never had many, but the building.

The other writers in my family, and there were several, wrote mostly letters. They did not imagine anyone would need help reading them. They knew who everyone was.

So for three years I have been doing what I can. Papa and I sat down with Mangla Ram's grandson, who still works in our stables, and recorded him talking about his grandfather for two hours. Bua Shailaja, who restored the fort walls, walked me along the ramparts and named every gate and every mason she remembered. My mother identified eleven doctors in a single photograph of the hospital staff in 1952. We have built a private family space online where the photographs are kept with their names and dates beside them, where each recording is saved with who was speaking and when, and where we can choose which memory is for the whole family and which is only for the children when they are older. It is slow work. It is the best work I have ever done.

On my desk as I write is the pressed lotus from the trunk. It was folded inside a letter from Bapji to Gulab Kanwar, written from Delhi in 1911, which ends: "The lake will be full when I return. Keep a flower for me." I do not know if he ever saw it. I only know that she kept it, and that a hundred and fifteen years later her great-grandson unfolded it in a storeroom, and for a moment the whole house seemed to be breathing.

That is where this begins.

The Fort on the Ridge

If you come to Kesarmer by road from Jodhpur, as most people do now, you see the fort long before you see the town. The land is flat and pale, dotted with khejri and ker bushes, goats moving between them like slow punctuation, and then the ridge rises out of it, a long spine of honey-colored sandstone, and on top of the ridge the walls of Kesargarh follow every fold of the rock as if they had grown there. At sunset the whole ridge turns the color of saffron. That, the family says, is where the name comes from: kesar, saffron, and mer, the hill. Not a drop of saffron has ever grown within five hundred miles of here. We have always been a family that preferred a good story to a strict botany lesson.

* * *

The founding is told briefly in our family, and I will tell it briefly too. In the second half of the fifteenth century, a younger son of our branch of the Rajput clans came west with a small band of followers, a few hundred cattle and, according to Kunwar Bhim Singh, one very opinionated mare. He was looking for land his elder brothers did not want, which in the Thar is not hard to find. What he was really looking for was water.

He found it below the ridge. In a good monsoon the rain that fell on the rock ran down a dozen gullies and gathered in a shallow basin at the foot of the hill, and the ground there stayed green weeks longer than the ground around it. He camped beside it. The story says that his mare refused to walk any further and lay down in the grass, and that he took it as a sign. Bhim Singh's version was that the mare was simply sensible and had found the only shade for twenty miles. Either way, the family goddess's first shrine was built on the top of the ridge that year, and a mud wall went up around a cluster of huts, and Kesarmer began.

Over the next three centuries the mud wall became stone, the huts became a fort, the fort became a town, and the shrine became the family goddess's temple, which still stands at the very top of Kesargarh. Every Maharaja's first act on succession was to climb the steps to it barefoot. Papa climbed them barefoot in 2004, as the custom asks of the new head of the family, and I walked behind him, and I counted three hundred and eleven steps, which I have never told him because he claims it is exactly three hundred.

* * *

Mira, Arjun, if you remember only one thing about Kesarmer, remember this: everything here is about water. The fort, the palace, the lake, the stepwells, the canal, the old quarrels and the new friendships, the festivals and even the jokes. In an average year this part of Marwar gets perhaps ten or twelve inches of rain, nearly all of it in eight or ten weeks of the monsoon, and in a bad year it gets almost none. A desert kingdom is not a kingdom of sand. It is a kingdom of carefully kept rain.

The founder's basin became, over many generations, Rani Sagar, the great tank that lies below the fort today. A queen of the seventeenth century, whose name the family has sadly lost, paid for the first stone embankment, which is why it carries a queen's name and not a king's. Later rulers deepened it, lined its edges with steps, and built small pavilions on its banks for the summer evenings. When it is full, after a generous monsoon, the whole fort stands upside down in it, and the town comes down to the ghats in the evening to walk and gossip and feed the fish. When it is low, the town watches it the way a farmer watches the sky.

Around the tank the old engineers built what Bua Shailaja calls the plumbing of the kingdom. Channels cut into the rock of the ridge to lead every drop of rain toward the tank. Small check dams in the gullies. Underground tankas, round covered cisterns, in every courtyard of the fort, so that a household could hold a year of drinking water if the rains failed. And the stepwells, the baoris, which went down into the earth in great stone staircases to reach the groundwater as it sank lower and lower through the dry season.

The most beautiful of these is Sajjan Baori, just below the fort walls on the town side. It is far older than its name. By the 1890s it had silted up and fallen into ruin, and Raghuvir Singh had it cleared and restored and named it for his wife, Sajjan Kanwar, who I gather had been nagging him about it for years. You go down nine flights of carved steps, the air growing cooler at every landing, past little niches where women once left lamps, until you reach the green water at the bottom. As children we were forbidden to go below the fourth landing, which naturally meant we spent most of our childhood trying to reach the fifth.

When Bua Shailaja came home from her architecture studies in the late 1970s, Sajjan Baori was silting up again. She spent the better part of three years on it with a team of local masons, lifting the fallen stones, cleaning the channels, and finding, at the bottom, a carved stone panel with a short inscription recording that Raghuvir Singh's masons had finished their work in 1894. She cried, she told me, not because of the inscription but because one of her own masons read it aloud and said, "My great-grandfather's name is here." It was.

* * *

The palace came last, and late. For nearly four hundred years the family lived up in the fort, which was cool in summer and cold in winter and very, very far from everything. In the 1890s Raghuvir Singh decided, as many princes of his generation did, that a ruler who meant to run railways and hospitals and schools ought to live where people could reach him. He built Sheesh Niwas on the lower slope, between the fort and the lake, with wide verandas, high ceilings and a Durbar Hall with mirror work in its ceiling that gave the house its name, the house of glass.

It was built of the same sandstone as the ridge, cut by masons from the town, and it was, characteristically, a building about water before it was a building about anything else. Under the courtyards lie four great cisterns that still fill from the roofs every monsoon. A clay pipe, laid in 1897, brought water up from the lake to the kitchen garden, and Ghulam Rasool's grandfather, the first of his family in our kitchen, is said to have been the only person who knew how to coax it into working in May.

The fort was never abandoned. The temple is still there, still tended, and the old halls are used for festivals and for the Dussehra procession, which begins in the fort courtyard and winds down the road to the palace. Along that road stand the birth trees, a khejri planted for every child born to the family, the oldest of them now a gnarled giant with a small stone at its foot carved with Bapji's name. Mine is about halfway down, rather lopsided. Mira's and Arjun's are near the top, still thin enough to circle with two hands.

Since 1972 most of Sheesh Niwas has been a hotel, which is its own chapter. We live in the east wing, and from my study window I can see the lake, the ghats, the stepwell's carved parapet, and the ridge with its long walls. On some evenings, when the monsoon has been kind and the tank is full, I stand at that window and think about the founder's sensible mare lying down in the grass. She chose well. Everything that came after, the stones and the channels and the steps going down into the cool dark, was only our family, and the town with us, trying to keep faith with her choice.

Water, Roads and the Iron Road

Raghuvir Singh came to the gaddi in 1874 at the age of twenty-three, and from the photographs in the trunk you would think he spent the next forty-five years outdoors. He is almost never seated. He stands beside things: a half-built culvert, a surveyor's chain stretched across the sand, a pile of railway sleepers, a new sluice gate with water just beginning to pour through it. In one print he is kneeling in a dry channel with a measuring stick, his achkan tucked up, while three men in safas look down at him with the expression of people who have been told to dig it six inches deeper. I am told that was a common expression in his reign.

Pandit Hariprasad, who came to the state office as a young clerk in the 1890s and later served as state secretary for more than thirty years, wrote in the margin of one of his ledgers that the Maharaja "measures everything twice and pays for it once." From Hariprasad, that was the highest compliment available.

* * *

The railway came first, because without it nothing else could. In the 1880s Kesarmer was a five-day journey by camel from the nearest railhead. Grain, cloth, salt, timber and every pane of glass in the new palace had to come across the sand on animals, and in a dry year the animals themselves needed fodder that did not exist. Raghuvir Singh's letters from that decade return again and again to one subject: the spur.

The main line already ran some distance to the east. What he wanted was a branch line, a little under forty miles of track, from that line to the edge of Kesarmer town. The state would pay for most of it. But nothing that crossed or joined a main line could happen without the agreement of the Government of India, and that meant the Political Agent, and that meant, from 1889, Colonel Arthur Fenwick.

I want to be fair to both men, because the letters are fair to both of them. Fenwick was not a romantic about India and not a bully about it either. He had trained as an engineer before he joined the Political Department, and he was more interested in gradients and drainage than in ceremony. He had his instructions, and the ultimate decision always sat with his superiors and not with him or with the Maharaja. Both men knew it. Within that limit, they argued like two craftsmen over a single piece of wood. Fenwick thought the line should follow the old caravan route. Raghuvir Singh wanted it to swing south past three villages that grew millet and had no road. Fenwick said the curve would add four miles and a great deal of money. Raghuvir Singh said the four miles would carry ten thousand maunds of grain a year. They rode the route together twice, once in April, which Fenwick described in a letter as "an experience I do not recommend to my enemies."

The southern route won. The line opened in March 1896, and the trunk holds a photograph of the first train arriving at Kesarmer station, decorated with marigolds, with what appears to be the entire town on the platform and a brass band clearly playing three different tunes. The steel trunk itself, I now realize, must date from those years. "Not to be opened by the Railway" was presumably a warning to an over-curious station master.

* * *

The roads followed the rails. Raghuvir Singh built metalled roads from the station into the town and out to the larger villages, and unmetalled tracks, carefully graded and marked with stone posts, out to the smaller ones. He was not interested in grand avenues. His instructions to his engineers, which Hariprasad copied into a ledger, were that a road must allow a loaded bullock cart to reach the station from any village in the state in two days. Some of those stone posts still stand by the highways, with their mileage carved in Devanagari, and Arjun and I once spent a whole winter Sunday finding nine of them.

Then the canal. Rani Sagar was the heart of Kesarmer, but its water mostly stayed where it fell. Fenwick, who had worked on irrigation in the Punjab, pointed out that the land east of the tank sloped gently away for miles and that a lined channel with a proper sluice could carry the overflow of a good monsoon out to fields that would otherwise get nothing. The two of them walked it with a dumpy level in the cold season of 1892. The Rani Sagar canal took four years, mostly built in the dry months by farmers who were paid in cash and grain, and it watered a strip of wheat and mustard that still shows green on the satellite maps when everything around it is brown. In Fenwick's letter of congratulation, which survived in the trunk, there is a line I love: "You have taught a desert to drink slowly. That is the whole art."

* * *

And then came the year nobody in Rajasthan forgets, even now, though almost no one alive remembers it. The monsoon of 1899 failed almost completely across western and central India. In the Hindu calendar it was Samvat 1956, and the famine is still called the Chhappania Akal, the famine of fifty-six. Wells dried. Fodder vanished. Cattle and camels, which were the wealth of every family in the Thar, could not be fed. It was, by every account, one of the worst famines of the century.

I will not dwell on the suffering, which was immense across the whole region. I want to record what was built.

Raghuvir Singh's first decision, in September 1899, was that no one in Kesarmer would be given charity if they could be given work, and no one who could not work would be turned away. The British famine codes of the time set out a similar principle, and Fenwick helped secure a loan from the Government of India to pay for it, but the scale of what the state attempted was its own. Relief works opened in every part of the state within walking distance of every village. Men and women dug and deepened tanks, built embankments, broke stone, laid road. They were paid every evening, partly in coin and partly in grain. Grain shops were opened in the town and in twelve villages, selling at fixed prices, with free rations for the old, the sick, and children. Kitchens fed those who could not walk to a work site. The Maharani, Sajjan Kanwar, organized the women of the zenana and the town to run two of those kitchens herself, which in 1899 was not a small thing for a queen to do.

The ledgers for those twelve months are the thickest in the trunk. Hariprasad recorded every work site, every tank deepened, every mile of road, every day's wage. On some pages the handwriting grows ragged with tiredness, and then the next morning it is perfect again. By the time the rains returned in 1900, Kesarmer had gained eleven new or deepened tanks, more than sixty miles of road, a rebuilt embankment on Rani Sagar, and the stone retaining walls along the fort road that still hold up the birth trees.

Many people still did not survive that year, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. But the old people of the district, when I was a boy, still pointed to certain tanks and said "Chhappania," the way you might name a friend.

* * *

Raghuvir Singh lived until 1919. Fenwick retired to Somerset in 1903, and the two men wrote to each other until Fenwick's death. His last letter is about the canal. He wants to know if the mustard came up that year. Underneath, in Raghuvir Singh's hand, is a note to Hariprasad: "Reply: yes, and send seed."

The Residency and the Palace

There is a cabinet in the hotel's front hall that guests photograph more than anything else in the building. It holds a dinner service with the Kesarmer crest, a silver inkstand, a pair of riding boots, and a framed sheet of paper on which two men, one in Hindi and one in English, have written out the same recipe for lime pickle. The English hand belongs to Colonel Fenwick's successor, Major Henry Lockwood. The Hindi hand belongs to Ghulam Rasool's grandfather. The note at the bottom, in Lockwood's writing, says: "Agreed after three months of negotiation. This is the only treaty of my career I am entirely proud of."

I begin with the pickle because I want to describe the relationship between our family and the British officers who were posted to us honestly, and honesty here means two things at once. The first is that real power sat with them. Kesarmer was a princely state, not a colony, and its Maharajas ran its courts, its revenue, its schools and its roads. But the state could not make treaties, raise an army beyond a ceremonial guard, or build anything that touched the wider country without the consent of the Government of India, and the Political Agent, later the Resident, was the man through whom that consent came or did not. The second is that, within that arrangement, the people involved were often simply people, and many of them became friends.

* * *

Bapji, Jaivardhan Singh, grew up inside this arrangement and understood it from the beginning. He was born in 1889, the year Fenwick arrived, and among the earliest photographs of him is one of a solemn small boy in a velvet cap sitting on the Colonel's knee and holding his pith helmet upside down like a bowl. At Mayo College in Ajmer, which had been founded in 1875 to educate the sons of the princely families, he learned English, mathematics, history and cricket, and he learned, he wrote later, "how to disagree with an Englishman so politely that he thanks you for it."

In December 1911, at twenty-two, he went to Delhi as heir to attend the Coronation Durbar of King George V. The trunk holds his letters from the camp, which spread for miles across the plain north of the old city. They are the letters of a young man who is impressed and amused in roughly equal measure. He describes the pageantry, the elephants, the endless tents, and the moment the King-Emperor announced that the capital of India would move from Calcutta to Delhi, which he says caused "a sound from a hundred thousand people like a wave going out." He also describes, at much greater length, a conversation with an engineer from the Public Works Department about drainage, and a polo match he played and lost. The letter with the pressed lotus belongs to this bundle. He was homesick by the second week.

* * *

Raghuvir Singh died in 1919 and Bapji came to the gaddi at thirty. By then the Political Agent was Major Lockwood's successor, and over the next three decades Bapji dealt with seven different British officers in that post. His files on each of them, kept by Pandit Hariprasad, are a small masterpiece of diplomacy. They note the man's interests, his family, his health, his views on irrigation, and what he likes for breakfast. One reads simply: "Keen on cricket. Bad on a horse. Very honest. Give him the accounts first."

Much of the work was ordinary negotiation. A new road that would cross into British territory. A request to extend the railway platform. An argument about salt, which in British India was taxed and whose movement was closely controlled. A long and eventually successful campaign to get a Government of India grant toward a hospital. Bapji's method, as far as I can reconstruct it, was to arrive at every meeting knowing more about the subject than anyone else in the room, and to leave every meeting having given the other side something to be pleased about.

In 1921 the British created the Chamber of Princes, a consultative body in Delhi where the rulers of the princely states could meet and discuss common questions with the Viceroy's government. It had no real legislative power, and the princes knew it. Bapji attended for most of its existence, and his letters from its sessions are frank about its limits. But he valued it as a place where the rulers of states large and small could compare notes on schools, hospitals, famine codes and railways, and where a ruler from the edge of the Thar could sit across a table from one from the Deccan and discover they had the same problem with their wells. He came home from one session with plans for a dispensary copied from a state in central India and the name of a doctor willing to come west.

* * *

The British officer who mattered most to the women of Kesarmer was not an officer at all. In the mid-1920s, the Resident for the western Rajputana states was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ashby, a quiet Scot, and his wife, Margaret Ashby, had been a schoolteacher in Edinburgh before her marriage. She spent several weeks each cold season at the guest house in Kesarmer, and she and Maharani Gulab Kanwar became close friends, the kind of friends who correspond for twenty years.

Gulab Kanwar had already decided that Kesarmer needed a school for girls. What she did not yet have was a plan, a curriculum, or a husband entirely convinced that the town would send its daughters. Margaret Ashby supplied the first two and helped with the third. The letters between the two women from 1925 and 1926, half in English and half in a careful Hindi that Margaret was clearly learning, are full of practical detail: how many rooms, how many teachers, whether to teach in Hindi or English first (Hindi, both agreed), how to arrange purdah screens so that families would feel safe sending their girls, where to find a headmistress. Margaret wrote to a training college in Lahore. Gulab Kanwar wrote to every family of standing in the town. Bapji found the money.

The Kesarmer Girls' School opened in 1927 with thirty-one pupils. Margaret Ashby was in the second row at the opening, beside the Maharani's curtained carriage. The girls' school is another chapter, and Dadisa would want it told properly, so I will stop there. But I think often of that pair of women writing to each other across a gulf of language, religion and empire, about desks.

* * *

It would be easy to sentimentalize all this, and I am trying not to. The arrangement was unequal. Bapji knew that a British officer could, in the end, overrule him, and there were years when that knowledge sat heavily. Some officers were unhelpful, and a few were pompous, and the files make that plain too. But the trunk mostly holds the other stories, because those were the ones the family chose to keep: the pickle recipe, the hospital grant, the lotus, the schoolteacher from Edinburgh.

When Charles and Margaret Ashby retired in 1934, Bapji gave them a small silver model of the Sajjan Baori. Forty years later their grandson, on a visit to India, brought it back to the hotel to show Dadosa, and asked if the stepwell was real. Dadosa walked him down to it himself. They went past the fourth landing.

The Horses of Kesarmer

The first thing you notice about a Marwari horse is the ears. They curve inward at the tips until they nearly touch, like two hands about to meet in a namaste, and when the horse is alert they quiver and turn as if they are tuning in to a distant radio station. Kunwar Bhim Singh used to say that you could read a Marwari's whole opinion of you from its ears, and that most of the time the opinion was not flattering.

There have been horses at Kesarmer for as long as there has been a Kesarmer. The founder came with his opinionated mare, and every generation since has kept a stable. The Marwari is a desert breed, bred over centuries in this part of Rajasthan for exactly the conditions the family lived in: tough, small-hoofed, able to go a long way on little water, and astonishingly loyal to the people who look after it. They were cavalry horses once. In my lifetime they have been polo ponies, ceremonial mounts, trail horses for hotel guests, and, for a few years, the reluctant companions of every Kesarmer child learning to ride.

* * *

Bapji was the horseman of the family, and he was, by every account including the British ones, one of the finest polo players of his generation in Rajputana. He learned at Mayo College, where polo was practically part of the curriculum, and he never stopped. There are more photographs of Bapji on horseback in the trunk than of Bapji on his own feet. In most of them he is a blur. In the rest he is laughing.

In the 1920s and 1930s Kesarmer fielded a polo team that played across Rajputana and as far as Delhi and the cantonments of the Punjab. The team was usually Bapji, one or two of his cousins, an officer from the state's small ceremonial guard, and whichever visiting Englishman could be persuaded to make up the numbers. The signed polo ball in the trunk, I eventually worked out with Papa's help, is from a tournament in Jaipur in 1933, when Kesarmer reached the final and lost by half a goal. Bapji kept that ball, not the trophy from the tournament they won the year after. He said a loss taught you more and was cheaper to dust.

What strikes me most in his letters about polo is how much they are about the horses and how little about winning. He writes about a mare called Chandni who would not turn left until she had been spoken to kindly, a gelding who disliked the sound of the brass band, the right amount of jaggery to give after a hard chukker. He insisted that every pony in the state stable be retired to grass at the end of its playing life, not sold, which in that era was not universal practice. There is a long list in Pandit Hariprasad's ledger headed "Pensioners," with each retired horse's name, age and the village where it grazed.

The other great game of the stables was tent pegging, which is older than polo in India and very much a cavalry skill: a rider at full gallop lowers a lance and lifts a small wooden peg out of the ground. At Dussehra, after the shastra puja and the procession, the young men of the family and the guard would compete on the maidan below the fort, and the whole town came to watch. Bhim Singh claimed to have lifted his first peg at the age of eleven. Dadosa, his elder brother, claimed Bhim Singh had lifted the peg's shadow and the peg had fallen over in sympathy. They were still arguing about it in their seventies.

* * *

Kunwar Bhim Singh was born in 1925, three years after Dadosa, and from the time he could walk he lived in the stables. He never married. "I have forty-two horses," he said once, when a hopeful aunt raised the subject, "and every one of them listens to me more than a wife would." He became stable master in the late 1940s and held the post, officially and then unofficially, for more than fifty years.

He was the best storyteller this family ever had, and the stables were his theater. When I was a boy I spent most of my winter holidays sitting on an upturned bucket in the tack room, oiling a bridle I was supposed to be cleaning, listening to him. He told me about the founder's mare, about Bapji's polo, about the night in 1939 a foal was born in a dust storm and he and Mangla Ram held a blanket over the mare for four hours, about the horse who learned to open the feed store with its teeth. I have checked a few of these stories against the ledgers, and roughly half are entirely true. The other half are true in the way that matters.

His right hand for most of those years was Mangla Ram, the head syce, a lean, quiet man from a village south of the canal whose family had worked with horses for generations. Mangla Ram knew every animal in the stable by its breathing. He could tell from the sound of a hoof on the stable floor whether a horse was going lame two days before it limped. He taught me to ride, which mostly meant teaching me to fall off correctly, and he taught Papa before me. The one thing he never taught anyone was how he knew. "The horse tells you," he would say, shrugging, as if that settled it.

After 1947, and especially after the privy purses were abolished in 1971, polo became very hard to sustain. Horses are expensive, and a family that has just converted its home into a hotel to pay the bills does not usually keep a polo string. Across Rajasthan, the Marwari breed itself declined sharply in those decades; many fine bloodlines were lost. Bhim Singh and Mangla Ram kept a small stable going, a dozen horses at its lowest, through sheer stubbornness and a good deal of Bhim Singh's own money. They kept the bloodlines written down in a cloth-bound book, every mare and stallion and foal, so that when better times came there would be something to build on.

* * *

Better times came in the 1990s, and they came through Papa. He had ridden since childhood but had never really played polo seriously until he was nearly forty. Then, almost as a dare from an old Mayo friend, he put together a scratch team for a local tournament, lost every match, and came home transformed. Over the next few years he rebuilt the polo ground on the old maidan, brought in young players from the town and from the families of the stable staff, and worked with breeders across Marwar who were by then trying to revive the Marwari breed and win it proper recognition.

Bhim Singh's cloth-bound book turned out to be priceless. Three of our mares traced back without a break to Bapji's polo ponies of the 1930s. Today the Kesarmer stables hold about forty horses again, a good many of them Marwaris bred here, and every winter there is a polo week on the maidan that draws teams from across Rajasthan. Mangla Ram's grandson is now our head syce. He has his grandfather's hands and, I am sorry to report, his grandfather's habit of saying "the horse tells you" whenever I ask him a question.

Bhim Singh lived to see it. In his last years he would sit in a cane chair at the edge of the polo ground, wrapped in a shawl, and shout advice at the players that was forty years out of date and entirely correct. When he died in 2011 we retired his favorite mare to grass in the village south of the canal, and Papa had her name added to Hariprasad's old list of pensioners, in the same ledger, on the next empty line.

Arjun has started riding this year. On his first day his pony put its ears together, looked at him for a long moment, and decided to allow it.

Mayo and Beyond

Mira, you asked me once why I keep a faded school photograph on my desk, the one with forty boys in white standing in front of a pink sandstone building, squinting into the sun. You could not find me in it. That is because I am not in it. The boy third from the left in the second row is your great-great-grandfather, Bapji, aged about twelve, and the building is Mayo College in Ajmer, nearly ninety years before I walked through the same gate with a tin trunk and a lump in my throat.

The British founded Mayo College in 1875 to educate the sons of the princely houses of Rajputana. The idea, as one of the old prospectuses in the trunk puts it with Victorian confidence, was to give the young princes "the training of English gentlemen without loss of their own customs." Like most things of that age, it was a mixture of the generous and the self-serving. The British wanted rulers who would understand their ways and cooperate with them. Our families wanted sons who could hold their own in a changing world. Both sides got something of what they wanted, and the boys got cricket, mathematics, Persian, Sanskrit, and a lifetime of friends.

Bapji went in about 1899, the year the great famine began. I have found a letter from his father, Maharaja Raghuvir Singh, written that autumn. It is short, because the old Maharaja was spending his days on the relief works, but it contains one line I have read many times: "While you are learning your sums, remember that every sum here is a man's wage and a family's grain. Learn them well." I think that line explains a great deal about the kind of ruler Bapji became.

* * *

Bapji's own letters home are a delight. He wrote every Sunday, as all the boys were made to, in careful English with an occasional Hindi word when English failed him. He reported on his marks, which were respectable but never brilliant, and on his riding, which was brilliant and which he described at length. He asked for sweets from the palace kitchen, and there is a note in Pandit Hariprasad's ledger for 1901 recording "two tins of ghewar dispatched to Ajmer for the Yuvraj and his friends, the friends being numerous."

He complained about the cold mornings, the cold baths, and a Latin master he called "Mr. Ablative." He praised a mathematics teacher from Bengal who, he said, "explains things so that even a polo player can follow them." Years later, when Bapji founded the Raghuvir Scholarship, he wrote in its first notice that a good teacher can change a whole district. I suspect he was thinking of that patient man from Bengal.

What I notice most, reading these letters now, is how Mayo taught him to live with boys from other states who had been raised, like him, to think of themselves as the center of a small universe. At Mayo nobody was the center of anything. You made your own bed, waited your turn, and lost at cricket to a boy whose state was half the size of yours. Bapji came home, his mother wrote to her sister, "with better manners and worse handwriting."

* * *

Dadosa followed him in 1932, at ten years old. By then Mayo had softened a little. There were more Indian masters, more Indian history, and a growing sense among the older boys that the world they would rule was not going to stay the same. Dadosa was a reader rather than a rider, which caused some quiet worry at home. Kunwar Bhim Singh, who followed him three years later and was the opposite, used to say that the two brothers between them made one complete Mayo boy.

Dadosa's letters are longer than his father's and full of books. He read everything in the library and then wrote to his mother asking for more. His mother, Maharani Gulab Kanwar, who had not been allowed much schooling herself, sent him books and asked him to send her his opinion of each one. There is a whole correspondence between them, mother and son, about novels and poetry and history, and I believe it was the beginning of her own education as much as a continuation of his.

In 1940 Dadosa went on to Cambridge to read history. It was wartime, the crossing was not easy, and the family argued about whether he should go at all. Bapji settled it in his usual way. "The world is being rearranged," he said. "Someone from Kesarmer should understand how." Dadosa sailed with a trunk of warm clothes that turned out to be nowhere near warm enough.

His Cambridge letters are my favorite things in the whole trunk. He describes the rationing with great good humor, and the blackout, and cycling everywhere in the rain. He describes evenings with students from every corner of the empire, Indians, Africans, Australians, and young Englishmen who argued, sometimes with him and sometimes on his side, about what should come after the war. He wrote to his father: "Many of them assume India will be free within ten years. Some of them are glad of it. I find I am glad of it too, and I am trying to think what that means for us."

That sentence, written by a twenty-year-old in a cold room in England, tells me that Dadosa was already preparing for the world he would actually live in. When the changes came, he was not surprised by them. He had been thinking about them since he was a student.

He also learned to cook. He wrote home to Ghulam Rasool's father in the palace kitchen asking for instructions on making dal on a single gas ring, and the reply, dictated to Pandit Hariprasad, survives. It is a recipe of great precision and a certain anxiety, ending with: "If the Kunwar-sa burns it, he should not tell anyone in Cambridge that it is a Kesarmer dal."

* * *

My own turn came in 1989. I was ten, the same age Dadosa had been, and I was certain my life was over. Dadosa took me to Ajmer himself. On the drive he told me about his first day, when he had cried behind the chemistry laboratory and been found by an older boy from a neighboring state who gave him a handkerchief and a toffee. "That boy," Dadosa said, "remained my friend for sixty years. You will find yours."

He was right, as he generally was. By the end of my first term I had three friends I still speak to every month. Mayo in my time was still recognizably Bapji's school, with the same sandstone and the same cold mornings, but it was full of boys whose families had nothing to do with old kingdoms: the sons of doctors, engineers, army officers, businessmen. Nobody cared in the least whose grandfather had been a Maharaja. I learned more from that than from any lesson.

After Mayo I went to university in England, as Dadosa had. It was a very different England from his, warm rooms, plenty of food, no blackout, but I found myself, like him, spending evenings with students from everywhere, arguing about what the world should become. I wrote letters home too, though by then they were mostly telephone calls, and I regret that now. Dadosa's letters fill a box. Mine filled the air and disappeared.

* * *

Mira, you are fourteen now, at a school in the hills that takes girls and boys from all over India and a good many from abroad. You telephone us on Sunday evenings, which is a kind of family tradition you did not know you were keeping. You tell us about debates and science projects and a teacher who, you say, "explains things so that even I can follow them." I laughed when you said that, and you did not know why. Now you do.

Five generations of us, then, have been sent away to school, and five generations have come home a little changed. Each time the family worried, and each time the school gave back someone more useful than the child who left. When your turn comes to choose where Arjun goes, or your own children, I hope you will read these letters first. They are not about schools, really. They are about learning to stand among equals, which is the most important lesson any of us ever learned.

I have started keeping the school letters properly now, the old ones and the new ones together, with a note on each of who wrote it, when, and to whom. When you are older I will give you the whole bundle. Write back to us more often than I did. Paper outlasts the telephone.

The Scholarship Ledger

Of all the books in the trunk, the one I handle most carefully is a tall ledger bound in green cloth, its corners worn round by a hundred years of thumbs. On the first page, in Pandit Hariprasad's beautiful hand, first in Devanagari and then in English, are the words: "Raghuvir Scholarship. Register of Scholars. Commenced Vasant Panchami, 1924."

Bapji founded the scholarship in his father's name five years after the old Maharaja died. The idea was simple. Every year a number of children from the villages of Kesarmer, chosen by examination and not by birth, would have their school fees, books, and lodging paid by the state, and the best of them would go on to college in Jodhpur, Ajmer, or further. Bapji wrote in the first notice that his father had built roads so that grain could reach the people, and that the scholarship was a road of another kind, "so that the people's children may reach the world."

He had help from the British, I should say honestly. The Political Agent of the day was keen on education and smoothed the way for Kesarmer boys to enter the government college in Ajmer. Ultimate approval for anything of that scale still sat with the Residency, and Bapji knew it, but in this case the two sides wanted the same thing, and the letters between them are brisk and friendly.

* * *

Pandit Hariprasad kept the register as he kept everything, with a precision that borders on devotion. For each scholar he recorded the name, the father's name and occupation, the village, the date of the examination, the marks, the school, the cost of every term down to the last anna, and a column headed "Remarks" in which, over the years, he allowed himself small comments. These remarks are the treasure of the book.

"Clever but talks too much." "Walks eleven miles to the examination and arrives first." "Mother came to thank His Highness. Brought a basket of ber fruit. His Highness ate three." "Has asked for a second pencil. Granted."

He also recorded what became of them, as far as he could learn it, and he went on learning it for decades. A scholar who became a schoolmaster in a distant village would find, years later, a postcard from Pandit Hariprasad asking how many pupils he had. The answers were entered faithfully in the register, sometimes thirty years after the first entry, so that a single line can run from a barefoot boy's examination marks to the headmastership of a district school.

The first year there were eleven scholars. By 1930 there were forty. Bapji read the examination results himself every spring, sitting in the Durbar Hall with Pandit Hariprasad on one side and the headmaster of the state school on the other, and the old servants used to say that it was the only day of the year when the Maharaja was nervous.

* * *

The scholar whose story every child in our family knows is Gopal Lal, the son of a well-digger from a village on the edge of the dunes. Pandit Hariprasad's entry for him in 1926 reads: "Father digs wells. Boy reads by the light of the cooking fire. Marks in arithmetic highest in the state. Has never worn shoes." In the remarks column, a week later: "Shoes provided. Boy carried them to school in his hand for the first month to keep them good."

Gopal Lal went to the state school, then to college in Ajmer, then to study law. Every year the ledger records his marks, and every year Pandit Hariprasad's remarks grow a little prouder. In 1938: "Has passed his law examination with distinction. Has written to His Highness. Letter attached." The letter is still there, folded inside the page, thanking Bapji "for the road you built for me."

He practiced law in Jodhpur, and after Independence he rose, step by step, until he sat as a judge of the High Court. Dadosa told me that when Gopal Lal was appointed, he came to Kesarmer in a hired car and asked to see the ledger. Pandit Hariprasad was very old by then but still came to the palace every morning. The two men sat together in the record room, the judge and the clerk, and turned the pages back to 1926. Dadosa said that neither of them spoke for a long time. Then the judge asked for a pen and, in the remarks column beside his own childhood entry, wrote in small letters: "Still have the shoes."

I have seen that line. I have run my finger over it. It is the best sentence in the whole trunk.

* * *

The first girl scholar was admitted in 1929, two years after the Girls' School opened. Her name was Kamla, the daughter of a schoolmaster from a village to the north, and the ledger shows that her marks were better than any boy's that year. There was, I am told, a short and polite argument among the examiners about whether a girl could hold a scholarship meant, in the old notice, "for the sons of Kesarmer." Maharani Gulab Kanwar heard about the argument. She sent a note to the Durbar Hall which Pandit Hariprasad pasted into the ledger: "The notice says the children of Kesarmer in the Hindi. The English must be corrected." It was corrected.

Kamla went on to train as a teacher and became, in time, the headmistress of the Girls' School. She taught at least two generations of the women of Kesarmer, my grandmother's helpers among them, and when she retired the school named its library after her. After 1929 the ledger records girls every year, first one or two, then more, until by the 1950s nearly half the scholars were girls.

* * *

When the old state merged into Rajasthan in 1949, the scholarship did not stop. Bapji moved its funds into a family trust, and Dadosa kept it going through years when money was far tighter than anyone outside the family imagined. There were seasons in the 1970s when the scholarship had fewer scholars than in 1924, but it never had none. Dadosa said that was the one promise he would not break.

Papa took over the trust in the 1980s and did what he does best, which is to turn a good idea into a well-run one. He brought in friends from business and former scholars who had done well, and he widened the scholarship beyond school to nursing, engineering, agriculture, and the crafts. He started a mentoring scheme so that every scholar has an older former scholar to write to. Today there are more than three hundred Raghuvir scholars studying at any one time, and the alumni dinner in Jaipur every winter fills a hall. Papa still reads the results himself every spring, and he still gets nervous.

The ledger stopped being written by hand in 1972, when Pandit Hariprasad's successor retired and the trust bought a typewriter. The later records are clearer and duller. I have begun putting the old pages together with the new records, so that each scholar's story sits in one place, with the remarks, the letters, and, wherever we have them, a photograph labeled with a name. Some of the old scholars' grandchildren have written to us asking for copies of their grandparents' entries. A retired engineer in Pune wept on the telephone when I read him the remark beside his father's name: "Asks too many questions. Encourage him."

Arjun, you asked me last month what a family is for, and I gave you a poor answer. Here is a better one. A family is for keeping promises longer than any one person can. The scholarship was Bapji's promise, and Dadosa kept it, and Papa keeps it, and one day it will be yours and Mira's. When you open the green ledger, start with Gopal Lal's shoes.

The Zenana Opens Its Doors

The zenana of Kesargarh is a set of rooms at the back of the old fort, built around a small courtyard with a single neem tree. The windows are carved stone screens, jharokhas so finely cut that from inside you can see the whole town spread below, and from outside you can see nothing at all. For three hundred years the women of our family lived behind those screens. They ran the household, managed lands, arranged marriages, kept accounts, and influenced a great deal more than the official records admit, but they did it unseen.

When I was a boy, Dadisa took me up there once and had me stand behind the screen and look out. "Your great-grandmother stood here as a bride," she said. "She looked at that town and decided she was going to walk through it one day with her face uncovered. It took her twenty-seven years."

* * *

Maharani Gulab Kanwar came to Kesarmer in 1911 from a small princely family in the hills, where purdah had been kept less strictly. She was sixteen, she had been taught to read by an aunt, and she was, everyone agrees, determined. The family word for her, used with great affection, is "ziddi," which means stubborn.

She began by teaching the maids in the zenana to read. Then the maids' daughters. Then, because the maids talked, women from the town began to send their girls up to the fort in the afternoons. By the early 1920s there was a small school in the zenana courtyard under the neem tree, with a slate for each girl and a teacher brought from Ajmer.

The wife of the British Resident of that time visited the zenana, as such ladies did, and was taken to see the class. The letters in the trunk show that she became a real ally. She sent books, she wrote to a training college about teachers, and she suggested to Bapji at a dinner, in the hearing of several officials, that a proper school building would be "a credit to the state." Bapji, who had been persuaded already by his wife and was looking for a public reason to act, agreed at once.

Kesarmer Girls' School opened in 1927 in a new building at the foot of the ridge, with thirty-one pupils. The Maharani did not attend the opening. Purdah still held, and she watched from a curtained carriage at the edge of the grounds. But she chose the teachers, approved the timetable, and visited every week through a screened gallery built along one side of the hall so that she could watch lessons without being seen. The girls called the gallery "Maharani-sa's window." Several of them told their granddaughters that they always worked harder when they thought she was behind it.

* * *

By 1938 the school had three hundred pupils, girls had begun to win the Raghuvir Scholarship, and the first of them had come back as teachers. The world outside was changing too. Women were speaking at public meetings across India, and in several princely states the old customs were being quietly set aside.

The prize day that year was held in the school courtyard. The whole town came. The British Political Agent and his wife sat in the front row, the officers of the state behind them, and the girls in their white and saffron uniforms in rows on the steps. Bapji gave a short speech and then, according to the account in Pandit Hariprasad's register, "stepped back and indicated the door of the hall."

Maharani Gulab Kanwar walked out into the sunlight with her face uncovered. She was forty-three. She crossed the courtyard, sat at the table, and handed out every prize herself, speaking to each girl by name. Then she stood and spoke, briefly, in Marwari, so that the mothers would understand. The register records her words: "I have watched you from behind a screen for eleven years. Today I wanted you to see that I was proud of you."

Kunwar Bhim Singh, who was thirteen and present, used to say that there was a silence long enough to hear the pigeons on the roof, and then the mothers began to clap and did not stop. Several of the older women of the town came out of purdah within the year. Within ten, very few in Kesarmer kept it.

There is a photograph of that day in the trunk. It was among the unlabeled ones, and I did not know what it was until Kamla's niece, now in her eighties, saw it and told me. A woman in a pale sari, seated at a table full of books, handing a prize to a small girl who is staring up at her with her mouth open. The small girl was Kamla's niece herself.

* * *

Dadisa, Rajmata Kishori Kumari, married Dadosa in 1947 and came into a household where the women's door had already been opened. She went through it at a run.

Her Hindi diary, which fills nineteen notebooks, records sixty years of work with the women of Kesarmer. She began in the 1950s by visiting villages with a nurse from Sajjan Hospital, sitting with the women, and asking what they needed. The answers, she wrote, were always the same: water nearby, money of their own, and schooling for their daughters.

She started small savings groups, ten or fifteen women each, who put aside a few rupees a month and lent to one another for a goat, a sewing machine, or a daughter's school fees. She tied this work closely to the handicraft cooperative Dadosa founded in 1964, and for many years the women's section of the cooperative, the block printers and the leheriya dyers in particular, was her special care. Women who had never held money in their own hands opened bank accounts. Dadisa went with them to the bank in town the first time, every time, and sat beside them while they signed.

Her hardest work was against child marriage. It was illegal, and it was also common, and Dadisa understood that a law alone would not change it. She went from village to village speaking to mothers, to grandmothers, to the elders, never scolding, always asking: what would you want for your granddaughter if she could finish school first? She persuaded families to wait, and she made sure the girls who waited had a school to go to and, often, a scholarship. Her diary for one year lists forty-one weddings postponed until the girls were of age. Next to each name is a small tick when the girl finished school.

* * *

In 1993, after the reforms that reserved seats for women in village councils, Dadisa set to work again. She was sixty-seven. She ran workshops in the palace courtyard for women elected to the panchayats, teaching them how a budget worked, how to read a government order, and how to speak in a meeting full of men who did not expect them to speak. Some of those women went on to lead their councils for years. One of them, a weaver's widow, brought a hand pump to every lane in her village and still sends a box of sweets to the palace every Diwali.

When Dadisa died in 2015, the women of the cooperative came to the fort and sat in the zenana courtyard under the neem tree, which had grown huge, and sang. My mother says there were more than five hundred of them, and they would not let anyone hire a single musician.

Mira, the zenana is a museum room now. Visitors come and look through the stone screens and take photographs. When you go up there, stand behind the screen the way Dadisa made me stand, and look down at the town. Then go down the stairs and walk through it.

From Sajjan Hospital to the Medical College

My mother keeps a brass bell on her desk. It is small and dented and does not ring very well, and if you ask her about it she will tell you that it hung over the door of the first ward of Sajjan Hospital in 1931 and was rung every morning at six to wake the patients for their tea. When the old building was taken down in the 1980s to make room for the new teaching wing, a ward attendant saved the bell and gave it to her. She has kept it on every desk she has had since.

The hospital is, I think, the thing in our family's story of which we are proudest, and also the thing for which we deserve the least personal credit. It was built by Bapji, staffed by doctors and nurses whose names are mostly forgotten, grown by Dadosa with the help of the state government, and made into what it is today by hundreds of people, my mother among them. Our family's job, generation after generation, was mostly to keep asking for more.

* * *

Before 1931 Kesarmer had a small state dispensary in the town, run by a single doctor trained in Lahore, with a compounder and a room of medicines. For anything serious, people traveled to Jodhpur, if they could afford it. Most could not.

Bapji's mother, Maharani Sajjan Kanwar, had nursed the sick herself during the famine of 1899 and 1900, organizing the women of the palace to cook for the relief camps and sitting with fevered children in the shelters. She died in 1925, and Bapji decided that her memorial would not be a marble cenotaph but a hospital. He announced it at her first death anniversary and spent the next five years building it.

He needed the British for this, and he said so frankly. The Indian Medical Service controlled the supply of trained doctors, and a hospital of any size required approval through the Residency. The Political Agent was sympathetic and arranged for a surgeon of the service to advise on the plans. The letters between them are full of drains, ventilation, and the correct width of a ward door, and one of them ends, rather touchingly, with the Agent's offer to lend his own wife's cook to teach the hospital kitchen how to make invalid food. The offer was accepted, and Ghulam Rasool's grandfather learned to make invalid broths and then politely substituted a lentil broth that the patients actually liked.

Sajjan Hospital opened in November 1931 with forty beds, an operating theater, a maternity ward, and a small laboratory. Its first medical superintendent was a doctor from Madras who had trained in Edinburgh, and its first matron was a nursing sister from Kerala who stayed for twenty-six years and learned to speak Marwari better than some of the palace staff. Maharani Gulab Kanwar insisted on the maternity ward and on a women's doctor, and when it proved hard to find one, she paid for two local girls from the Girls' School to train as nurses in Lahore. They came back in 1936 and ran the maternity ward for a generation.

* * *

The work I find most moving, in the old reports, is the vaccination.

Smallpox was a terror in the desert, as everywhere. In the 1930s and 1940s Sajjan Hospital sent teams out to the villages by camel and bullock cart, a vaccinator, a nurse, a clerk, and sometimes a schoolmaster to explain. People were afraid of the needle, and a great deal of patient talking was needed. Bapji sometimes went himself, and Dadosa remembered being vaccinated publicly as a boy, in front of a crowd in a village square, so that the parents would see the Yuvraj bare his arm first. "I was told to smile," he said. "I did my best."

The hospital reports in the trunk record village after village, year after year: number of persons vaccinated, number of refusals, and in a later column, number of refusals who returned. Pandit Hariprasad copied these figures into his own ledgers with the same care he gave to the scholarship accounts. Long after Independence, when the great national campaigns came to finish off smallpox in the 1970s, the old Kesarmer vaccinators, white-haired men by then, were brought back to help, because the villages still trusted them.

* * *

After 1949 the hospital became part of the health service of the new state of Rajasthan. Dadosa did not resent this; he welcomed it, because the state could fund the hospital far better than the family ever had. But he did not step away. He sat on its board, he raised money for new wards, and through the 1960s he campaigned, patiently and persistently, for Kesarmer to have a medical college of its own.

His argument was simple. Doctors trained in the great cities rarely wanted to come to the desert. Doctors trained in the desert would stay. He spent years writing letters, sitting in offices in Jaipur, and inviting officials to see the hospital for themselves. The family gave land below the ridge for the college buildings. In 1968 Kesarmer Medical College opened, with Sajjan Hospital as its teaching hospital and its first class of sixty students, fourteen of them women.

Dadosa used to walk through the college every Sunday morning in his white kurta and safa, talking to students. He did not pretend to know medicine. He asked them where they were from and what they wanted to do, and he remembered the answers. Some of those students are now the senior professors of the college, and more than one has told me that they stayed in Kesarmer because an old man in a turban once asked them to.

* * *

My mother, Rani Meenakshi Kumari, came to the college as a student in 1972, in only its fifth class. She was a doctor's daughter from Jaipur, and she met Papa, she likes to say, because he kept turning up at college functions he had no reason to attend. They married in 1975. When she qualified, she was offered a place to train in pediatrics in the city, which most of her classmates would have taken at once. She stayed in Kesarmer and trained in its own children's ward instead, partly for Papa, and partly, she says, because she had seen that ward as a student and could not stop thinking about it.

The children's ward in those days had twenty beds, one pediatrician, and a great deal of malnutrition. My mother spent the next thirty-five years changing that, first as a trainee and then as a teacher of the college. She built a newborn unit, then an intensive care unit for infants, then a network of village health workers who could spot a sick child early and bring her in. She taught generations of students and was famous, I am told, for her rounds, which were long, thorough, and full of questions she would not answer for you. She also insisted that every mother who brought in a child should be given a cup of tea and a chair before anyone asked her a single question. "A frightened mother forgets half of what she knows," she says. "A mother with tea remembers everything."

I grew up partly in that hospital. I did my homework in her office, under the brass bell, while she finished her rounds. I learned there something I did not learn at school: that the most important work in the world is often very slow and very undramatic, a vaccination, a cup of tea, a child weighed every week and gaining a few grams.

Arjun, when you broke your arm falling off the garden wall last year, it was set in the emergency department of Kesarmer Medical College by a doctor whose mother was a Raghuvir scholar and whose grandmother was born in the maternity ward of Sajjan Hospital in 1934. You did not know that, and neither did I until I asked her. That is what a hospital is, in the end. It is a long chain of hands.

Midnight, 1947

On the night of 14 August 1947, Bapji sat on the terrace of Sheesh Niwas with a wireless set on the table in front of him and listened to the voices from Delhi. Kunwar Bhim Singh, who was twenty-two and sitting with him, told me that his father said nothing for a long time after the broadcast ended. Then he stood, looked up at the fort, where the family goddess's temple was lit with a single lamp, and said: "Well. Now we must be useful in a new way."

That sentence became a kind of motto in our family. Dadosa used it. Papa uses it. I find myself using it to my children, usually about homework.

* * *

The months before that night had been full of letters, and the trunk holds a thick bundle of them. As the British prepared to leave, the princely states had to decide whether to join India, join Pakistan, or try to remain independent. For Kesarmer, deep in Rajputana and bound to its neighbors by roads, the railway spur, trade, and family ties, there was never any serious question of where its future lay. The question was how to go, and on what terms.

Bapji had sat in the Chamber of Princes since the 1920s and knew most of the other rulers well. Many of them were anxious, some were angry, and a few hoped to hold on to what they had. Bapji, his letters show, was mostly practical. He wrote to Dadosa, who had come home from Cambridge the year before: "Your grandfather built a railway so that Kesarmer would not be cut off from the world. It would be a strange way to honor him to cut ourselves off now."

He signed the Instrument of Accession in August 1947, before Independence Day, with a pen that Dadosa kept in his desk drawer for the rest of his life. It is in the trunk now, wrapped in a handkerchief. It is a perfectly ordinary fountain pen and it no longer works.

Those were terrible months in other parts of the subcontinent, and the family never forgot it; in Kesarmer they were remembered as anxious but peaceful, and the state took in and found work for a number of families who had lost everything elsewhere.

* * *

Accession was only the first step. Over the next two years the princely states of Rajputana were brought together, stage by stage, into a single new state. On 30 March 1949 Kesarmer became part of Greater Rajasthan, and the rule of our family, which had lasted for centuries, came to an end.

I have tried to imagine what that felt like for Bapji. He was nearly sixty. He had ruled for thirty years. He had built a school, a hospital, and a scholarship, and he was being asked to hand all of it, along with the treasury, the police, the courts, and the revenue, to a new government he had no part in choosing. The family stories all agree that he did it with grace. He called the officers of the state to the Durbar Hall, thanked each of them by name, and told them that their duty now was to serve the new government as faithfully as they had served him. Pandit Hariprasad, who was among them, wrote in his diary that night: "His Highness said that a good servant serves the people, and the people are still here."

In return, under the agreements of the time, the family kept its private properties, its titles, and an annual allowance, the privy purse, paid by the government of India. The allowance was not large by the standards of the great states, and it shrank in value every year, but it allowed the family to keep up the palace, pay the people who had always worked there, and continue the scholarship and other charities through the trust Bapji set up.

* * *

Bapji lived on at Sheesh Niwas for twelve more years, a private citizen with a famous name. He took a great interest in the new democracy. He voted in every election and made the whole household vote too, driving the elderly servants to the polling station himself in the old Daimler. He was invited to stand for Parliament and declined, saying that he had governed long enough and should now be governed. He spent his mornings with his horses and his afternoons at the hospital and the Girls' School, and he was, everyone says, happier than he had been for years. He died in 1961, and the whole town walked behind him to the cremation ground below the ridge.

Dadosa became the titular Maharaja, the head of the family, at thirty-nine. It was a title with a history and no power, and he understood that better than anyone. His Cambridge letters had prepared him for it. He worked with the state government on the hospital and later the medical college, founded the handicraft cooperative in 1964, and spent his energy, as he put it, "on things that would still be useful if the titles went away."

The titles did go away. In 1971 Parliament passed the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which ended the recognition of the former rulers and abolished the privy purses. There was a long public debate, and many of the princely families felt that a promise had been broken. Dadosa felt it too, I think, but his diary for that December is calm. "The country has decided," he wrote. "The country is entitled to decide. Now we must find a way to pay forty-seven salaries."

* * *

The answer was the palace itself.

Sheesh Niwas had been built in the 1890s for a court that no longer existed. It had more than a hundred rooms, a Durbar Hall, a ballroom no one had danced in since the war, and gardens that took thirty men to keep. Dadosa and Dadisa walked through every room of it in the winter of 1971, with Pandit Hariprasad's successor taking notes, and decided that it would become a hotel.

Some of their friends thought this undignified. Dadosa disagreed. "A palace with no one in it is a museum," he said. "A palace full of guests is still a home." The family moved into the east wing, and the rest of the building was repaired, rewired, and furnished with whatever could be found in the storerooms. Ghulam Rasool's father ran the kitchen. Kunwar Bhim Singh offered guests rides on the Marwari horses. Dadisa chose the fabrics, nearly all of them from the women of the cooperative, so that every room in the hotel was also a showroom for Kesarmer crafts. Every guest was greeted at the gate with a cup of kesar milk, as every visitor to the family had been for generations.

Sheesh Niwas opened as a heritage hotel in 1972 with twelve rooms. The first guests were a retired schoolteacher and his wife from Ohio, who stayed for three weeks and wrote to Dadosa every Christmas for the rest of their lives. Within a few years the hotel was full most of the winter, and every one of the forty-seven people who had worked for the family was still employed, along with many more.

Papa runs it now, and I help. We still live in the east wing. Guests sometimes wander into our corridor by mistake and apologize, and Mira, at six, used to take them by the hand and show them back to the lobby, explaining that this part was "where the family keeps its shoes."

Arjun, people sometimes ask you whether you are a prince. You usually say no and change the subject, which is exactly right. The honest answer is that your great-great-grandfather signed away a kingdom so that Kesarmer could belong to a larger country, and your great-grandfather turned a palace into a place of work so that the people who depended on us would not be left behind. Neither of them was a prince in the old sense by the end. Both of them were useful in a new way.

Hands of Kesarmer

Among the photographs in the trunk there is one I can date almost to the hour. It shows a long, low shed with a tin roof, a dozen men and women sitting cross-legged on the floor, and in front of them a row of wooden blocks laid out like chess pieces. My grandfather stands at the back in a white kurta, his hands folded behind him, looking less like a Maharaja than like a nervous father at a school play. On the back, in Dadisa's hand, is a single line in Hindi: "First morning. Nobody knew if it would work."

That was 1964, the year Dadosa founded the Kesarmer Handicrafts Cooperative. The privy purse still came every year in those days, but he had been reading the newspapers and listening to the debates in Delhi, and he had a feeling, which turned out to be right, that the old arrangements would not last. More than that, he had watched the craft families of the town grow poorer every year. The block printers in the lanes behind the bazaar were selling their work to middlemen for almost nothing. Young dyers were leaving for factory jobs in Ahmedabad. The durrie weavers in the villages along the canal had looms but no buyers. "We have the most beautiful hands in Marwar," he told his mother, "and we are letting them go idle." Gulab Kanwar, who was by then an old woman and not easily impressed, apparently said only, "Then give them something to do." It was the closest thing to a blessing Dadosa ever got from her, and he took it.

* * *

The idea was simple, and like most simple ideas it took years to get right. The cooperative would buy raw cloth, dyes, leather and lac in bulk, so the artisans did not have to borrow at ruinous rates. It would pay a fair price on delivery, every Friday, in cash. It would find buyers in Jaipur, Delhi and Bombay, and later abroad. And the artisans themselves would sit on the board and vote on the prices. Dadosa insisted on that last point. Pandit Hariprasad's son, who kept the cooperative's first accounts, told me that Dadosa lost almost every vote in the first year and seemed delighted each time.

The block printers came first. Their quarter in the old town still smells of indigo and wet earth, and if you walk through it in the morning you hear the soft, steady thump of carved teak meeting cotton, a sound I think of as the heartbeat of Kesarmer. The master printer in those days was a man named Ustad Rahim Bux, who could print a six-color border so true that you could not find the joins with a magnifying glass. Dadosa used to sit with him for hours. In one photograph they are bent over a single block, their heads almost touching, and Rahim Bux is clearly explaining something while my grandfather listens with the expression of a schoolboy. Rahim Bux's grandson now runs the printing unit and teaches design students who come from as far as Bangalore.

Then the leheriya dyers, who tie and resist-dye cloth in diagonal waves that look like wind moving over water. Leheriya is the pattern of the monsoon in Rajasthan, worn at Teej, and every leheriya safa I have ever tied on my head came from those vats. The dyers were mostly women, working in family courtyards, and Dadisa took them under her wing almost at once. She arranged for the cooperative to pay them directly, in their own names, which in 1965 was a small revolution. One of those women, Dhapu Bai, later became the first woman to chair the cooperative's board. In her speech she said, "The Rajmata gave us our own money, and our own money gave us our own voice." Dadisa copied that sentence into her diary and underlined it twice.

* * *

The durrie weavers lived in three villages along the Rani Sagar canal, which pleased Dadosa enormously, because it meant the water his grandfather had brought to the land was now feeding a craft as well as crops. Durries are flat-woven cotton rugs, heavy and cool, the kind every Rajasthani house keeps rolled in a corner for guests. The weavers' looms were pit looms set into the floors of their houses. Dadosa did not try to change the looms. He changed the colors. He brought a young designer from the textile institute in Ahmedabad, who sat with the weavers for a whole winter and worked out a palette from the desert itself: the gray-gold of the dunes, the red of the fort stone, the green of the khejri after rain. Those durries were the first Kesarmer goods to sell abroad, and a few of them still lie on floors in the palace hotel today, worn soft by fifty years of guests' bare feet.

The mojari makers were the oldest craft family in the town. Their camel-leather slippers, stitched with colored thread and sometimes embroidered with silver, had been made for the court since my great-great-grandfather's time, and for ordinary people long before that. The head of the family, Bhanwar Lal, measured my feet when I was six for my first pair. I remember him tracing my foot on a sheet of brown paper with a stub of pencil, and then tickling my sole so that I laughed and spoiled the outline, and he had to start again. Those slippers squeaked when I walked, which Bhanwar Lal said was the sign of honest leather. My son Arjun has a pair made by Bhanwar Lal's great-grandson, and they squeak too.

Finally, the lacquer bangle makers, who heat lac over small charcoal fires and roll it into glowing rings of red, green and gold. Their workshop was always the favorite stop for visitors, because you could watch a bangle being born in under a minute. Mira, when you were four, you sat on the bangle maker's mat for an entire afternoon and came home with eleven bangles on one arm. You refused to take them off for a week, even to sleep.

* * *

The cooperative struggled, of course. In the early years there were floods one season and a drought the next, a warehouse roof that collapsed under a monsoon cloudburst, and a whole shipment of durries that sat in Bombay for three months because the buyer had changed his mind. Dadosa kept every letter from those years, and they make humbling reading. He was not a businessman by training. He learned by asking people who knew more than he did, and by never pretending otherwise.

When the privy purses were abolished in 1971, the cooperative was already standing on its own feet, and in a sense it helped the family stand on ours. It gave us a reason to remain part of the life of the town that had nothing to do with titles. The people who walked into the cooperative shed every Friday did not care whether my grandfather was still called Maharaja. They cared whether the price was fair and the cash was on time. It always was.

The next chapter of the story belongs to my uncle, Kaka-sa, Kunwar Narendra Singh. He was the restless one in Papa's generation, the boy who took apart radios and asked the visiting buyers questions they could not answer. In the 1980s he moved to Jaipur and set up the cooperative's export arm, and he is still running it today, now with an office full of young people half his age who think he is wonderful and slightly mad. Kaka-sa was the first to send Kesarmer block prints to a trade fair in Europe, the first to put the artisans' own names and photographs on the labels, and the first to insist that buyers visit the villages before placing large orders. "If they meet the weaver, they never haggle," he says, and he is usually right.

I visited his warehouse in Jaipur last spring. Bales of leheriya stood in rows like a field of rainbows, and a young woman from the dyers' families, who is now the export arm's head of quality, was inspecting each length against the light. She told me her grandmother had dyed the safa I wore at my wedding. I had not known. It is exactly the sort of thing that nobody writes down, and that everyone should.

The cooperative now has more than two thousand members across forty villages. It has a school for artisans' children and a small pension fund for the old masters. Each year, on the anniversary of that first nervous morning, the members gather in the courtyard of the original shed, now freshly whitewashed, and someone reads out the names of every founding member. My grandfather's name is read too, somewhere in the middle, in no special place. I think he would have liked that best of all.

The People in the Photographs

When I first spread the photographs from the trunk across the floor of the Tosha Khana, I could name perhaps a third of the faces. The rest were people I should have known, standing beside people I loved, in places I recognized, smiling at a joke nobody had thought to write on the back. So this chapter is my attempt to do for my own family what I wish someone had done for those strangers. I want to put names to faces, and a story or two beside each name, while I still can.

* * *

I will start with Dadosa, because his photograph hangs above my desk. Maharaja Yashvardhan Singh, my grandfather, was a tall, thin man with large ears, which he claimed were the reason he was such a good listener. He woke at five every morning, walked the length of the Rani Sagar embankment with his walking stick, and came back to read three newspapers in two languages before breakfast. He had studied at Cambridge and kept a fondness for English marmalade all his life, which the palace kitchen made for him from the bitter oranges of the garden.

His great gift to me was the safa. Every boy in the family learned to tie his own turban from Dadosa, on the veranda outside his study, in front of a long mirror spotted with age. Nine meters of cloth, he would say, and not one of them wasted. He made me tie it again and again until the pleats fell evenly over my left ear. "A man who cannot tie his own safa," he told me, "will always be waiting for someone else to finish him." I was eight and did not understand. I do now. When I tied Arjun's first safa last Dussehra, I heard myself say the same sentence, and Arjun gave me exactly the look I must have given Dadosa.

Dadisa, Rajmata Kishori Kumari, was small and quick and missed nothing. She wore cotton saris in pale colors and reading glasses on a chain, and she carried a cloth bag everywhere that contained, at various times, her diary, a fountain pen, cardamom, safety pins, and petitions from village women she had promised to take up with the District Collector. Her diary is the closest thing we have to a record of those decades. She wrote in Hindi every night before sleep, a page or two, never more. Most entries are ordinary: what was cooked, who came, what the weather did. But scattered through them are sentences like this one, from 1982: "Meenakshi delivered twins at the hospital tonight, the mother is from Bhadrasar village, both girls, both healthy. The father cried. I told him he is the richest man in Kesarmer." Meenakshi is my mother. I had never heard that story until I found it in the diary.

* * *

My great-uncle Kunwar Bhim Singh, Dadosa's younger brother, deserves a book of his own. He never married. "The stables are my family," he used to say. He lived in a set of rooms above the stable yard that smelled permanently of saddle soap and cardamom tea, and children were drawn to him the way bees are drawn to the jasmine by the zenana wall.

Bhim Dada was the family's storyteller. On winter nights the cousins would crowd into his rooms, and he would tell us about the horses of his youth, each one with a name and a temperament: Badal, who was afraid of camels; Toofan, who could find his way home from Jodhpur in the dark; and a mare called Chanda who, he swore, understood three languages and pretended not to understand any of them. He did the voices of every person in his stories and many of the horses. When he laughed, his whole body shook, and his mustache, which was magnificent, trembled at the ends. I recorded none of those stories. That is the first great regret of this book.

Baisa Hemlata Kumari, Dadosa's sister, married into a princely house in Gujarat and lived most of her life near the sea, but she remained a Kesarmer woman to her fingertips. She wrote letters every week, long ones on blue paper, to her brothers, to Dadisa, and later to Papa, Bua and Kaka-sa, and even later to me at boarding school. Her letters were famous for their postscripts, which were often longer than the letter and much funnier. One of hers to me at Mayo ended: "P.S. Your grandfather tells me you came fourth in mathematics. Fourth is a perfectly respectable number. There are four directions, four Vedas, and four legs on a horse. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. P.P.S. But third would be nicer." Forty of her letters are in the trunk. I have read every one of them twice.

* * *

Papa, Maharaj Aditya Vardhan Singh, is seventy-six now and still rides most mornings. He is a quieter man than Dadosa, steady and patient, with a habit of answering difficult questions with a long pause and then a short, kind answer. He took on the hotel when it was losing money and the family trust when it had more good intentions than funds, and he made both of them work through decades of careful, unglamorous effort. He also revived the polo ground, and on match days he still stands at the edge of the field in a battered hat, calling advice to riders who cannot possibly hear him.

My mother, Rani Meenakshi Kumari, is a pediatrician, and I think she has held more babies than anyone else in western Rajasthan. She trained at the medical college Dadosa helped build, and she taught there for thirty years. When I was a boy, I knew she was important because strangers in the bazaar would stop her, touch her feet, and show her a grown son or daughter. "This is the one you saved in 1983, Doctor-sa," they would say, and my mother would look carefully at the young man's face and say, "Yes, you had a terrible cough, and you bit me." She remembered every one of them, or at least she always let them think so.

* * *

Papa's sister, my Bua, Rajkumari Shailaja, is an architect, and the reason the Sajjan Baori still holds water and the fort walls still stand. She spent years on scaffolding with a notebook and a team of old stonemasons, learning the lime mortar recipes their grandfathers had used, and I remember her coming to dinner with stone dust in her hair and her hands rough as a mason's. She is precise, funny, and impatient with anything badly built, including arguments. Her son, my cousin Ishaan, is a year younger than I am, and we were inseparable as boys. We once spent a whole summer mapping the secret passages of the fort, only to discover that Bua had already drawn every one of them, to scale, years before.

Kaka-sa, Kunwar Narendra Singh, runs the cooperative's export arm from Jaipur, and is the loudest and warmest of Papa's generation. He arrives at every gathering with too many presents and an entirely new plan for the business. His wife, Kaki-sa Reena, is the family's peacemaker and its best cook outside the palace kitchen; her dal baati at Diwali is the subject of serious negotiation among the cousins. Their children, Kabir and Tara, are younger than I am, and I remember them first as small, sticky children chasing peacocks across the lawn. Kabir now works with his father, and Tara is a veterinarian who has quietly taken over the care of Papa's horses, which makes Papa both proud and slightly nervous.

* * *

No portrait of my family would be honest without the families who lived and worked beside us for generations. Ghulam Rasool's grandfather was the khansama, the head cook, when the palace was new, and his son and then his grandson followed him into the palace kitchen. Three generations of one family have fed four generations of mine. The present Ghulam Rasool makes a laal maas, a lamb curry with chilies, whose recipe exists in no book at all. When Mira was nine, he let her stand on a stool and stir the pot, and he told her the secret was patience and not too much talking. Mira, you have never been good at either, and he loves you anyway.

Mangla Ram was the head syce, the keeper of horses, and Bhim Dada's right hand for forty years. He could judge a horse's mood from the angle of its ears across the length of the stable yard. In a photograph from the 1960s he is holding the bridle of a white Marwari with curved ears, and Bhim Dada is laughing at something just outside the frame. Neither of them is alive to tell me what it was.

And Pandit Hariprasad, the state secretary, who kept the ledgers in his beautiful double hand, Devanagari on the left page and English on the right. His grandson came to see me last year with a folder of his grandfather's notes, and we sat in the Tosha Khana for an afternoon putting names to the people in the photographs. He named eleven faces I could not. That afternoon taught me more than any archive could, and it is why I have started asking everyone who comes through the door the same question: "Who is this? And what were they laughing at?"

Lamps on the Walls

Every family keeps time in its own way. Ours keeps it by festivals. When I try to remember a particular year of my childhood, I do not think of dates; I think of which Diwali it was, whose wedding, which Teej the swing rope broke. The year in Kesarmer turns like a wheel of lamps and colors, and every one of us has a place on it.

* * *

It begins, for me, with Gangaur, in early spring, just after Holi. For eighteen days the women of the town worship Gauri, praying for good husbands or for the long life of the husbands they already have, and on the final day the procession comes up from the old town to the palace gate. In Bapji's time the zenana watched from behind carved stone screens. After Gulab Kanwar came out of purdah in 1938, she walked in the procession herself, and every Rajmata since has done the same.

Dadisa loved Gangaur more than any other festival. She would sit on the steps of the Rani Sagar ghat with the women of the town, singing the old songs, her pale sari among the bright ones, and she knew the words of every verse. One year, when I was perhaps ten, a group of girls from the Kesarmer Girls' School asked her if they could carry the image of Gauri themselves, which by custom had always been done by married women. Dadisa thought about it for exactly as long as it took to finish her verse and then said, "Gauri was a girl once too." The girls carried the image, and they have done so ever since.

* * *

Teej comes with the monsoon, in the month of Shravan, when the desert turns green almost overnight. The palace garden has a great neem tree with a swing hung from its lowest branch, and at Teej the women of the family, and the women of the household families, take turns on it in leheriya saris while the rest of us push and sing and argue about whose turn it is. The men wear leheriya safas, and Dadosa's veranda becomes a turban-tying workshop from early morning. I remember a dozen of us, cousins and uncles, lined up in front of his mirror, and Dadosa walking down the row adjusting a pleat here and a fold there like a general inspecting troops.

The year I was twelve, Kaka-sa decided the swing should go higher, and he and an eleven-year-old Ishaan spent an afternoon re-hanging it from a branch that was, it turned out, not quite strong enough. When Kaki-sa Reena sat on it, the branch bent gracefully and lowered her, very slowly, onto the grass. She sat there in her leheriya sari laughing until she cried, and Bua said that if the tree had wanted to make a statement about engineering, it could not have made it more politely. We tell that story every Teej. Nobody photographed it. Somebody should have.

* * *

Dussehra in Kesarmer is the great public day. In the morning comes the shastra puja, the worship of weapons, which in our family has long since become a worship of tools as much as swords. Alongside the old ceremonial blades in the Durbar Hall, we lay out the things that have built the state: Bua's surveying instruments, a block printer's carved teak block, a stethoscope of my mother's, Papa's polo mallet, and one of Pandit Hariprasad's pens. Dadosa started that practice in the 1970s. "A sword defends a house," he said, "but a pen and a chisel build one."

In the afternoon comes the procession, down from the fort, through the old town and out to the open ground by the Rani Sagar, with the horses in front and the brass band behind. In Bapji's time it was elephants and camels and the whole court in silk. Now it is Papa on a gray Marwari, Tara walking beside him with a careful eye on the horse's legs, and behind them the school bands, the cooperative's banners, and half the town in its best clothes. Mangla Ram's grandson leads the horses still, in a red safa that has been passed down to him from his grandfather. When the procession reaches the ground, the whole town falls quiet for the evening prayer, and then the fireworks begin and the children scream with joy and the horses, who have heard it all before, stand perfectly still.

* * *

And then Diwali, the festival I would choose if I could keep only one. For a week beforehand the household is in turmoil. The palace is whitewashed, the brass is polished, and Ghulam Rasool's kitchen produces sweets in quantities that defy arithmetic. On the night itself, as the sun goes down, a hundred people from the town and the palace climb the ridge to light clay lamps along the walls of Kesargarh Fort. There are thousands of them, set in every niche and along every parapet, and when they are all lit the fort seems to float above the town in a necklace of fire. You can see it, people say, from twenty miles out in the desert. Travelers on the old road from Jodhpur used to stop their camels just to look.

After the lamps comes the dinner, and the dinner is in the Durbar Hall, at the long table that seats forty. By a custom that nobody remembers starting, the elders sit at the head of the table near the great chandelier, and the cousins sit at the far end, near the kitchen door, where the food arrives first and the supervision arrives last. I spent twenty Diwalis at the far end with Ishaan, Kabir and Tara, and I can tell you that the far end has all the fun. We had a competition every year for who could eat the most of Kaki-sa's dal baati, and a secret rule that whoever lost had to go up to the head of the table and ask Bhim Dada for a story, which he would then tell to the entire table at the top of his voice. Nobody ever really minded losing.

The year I turned forty, Papa announced that I was to move up to the head of the table. It was one of the saddest promotions of my life. Mira and Arjun now sit at the far end with Ishaan's children and Kabir's daughter, and I listen to them laughing, and I know exactly what they are plotting.

* * *

Holi is the one festival when no one in the family is dignified at all. The courtyard of the zenana, which was once the most private place in the fort, becomes on Holi morning the most public, and the household families, the cooperative members, the hotel staff and the family all throw colored powder at one another without distinction of age or rank. Dadosa, who was otherwise a formal man, used to put on his oldest white kurta for Holi and stand in the middle of the courtyard to be colored by every child in Kesarmer. By noon he looked like a painted god. Dadisa, wiser, watched from an upstairs window with a bowl of gujiya, the sweet fried dumplings, and threw them down to anyone who looked hungry.

* * *

Then there are the occasions that are not on any calendar. Weddings in our family are long and loud and full of relatives one meets only at weddings. At mine, the baraat procession rode from the palace to the fort temple with the band playing, and the leheriya safa I wore came from the cooperative's vats. Ananya's family came from the south and had never seen a Rajput wedding, and her grandmother told me afterward that she had expected a ceremony and been given a festival. She was right.

And then there are the birth trees. For every child born in the family, and since Dadosa's time for every child born to the household families as well, a khejri sapling is planted along the fort road. The khejri is the tree of the desert. It asks for almost no water, it feeds goats and people, and it lives for centuries. Bapji's tree, planted in 1889, is now a gnarled giant at the bottom of the road. Dadosa's and Bhim Dada's and Baisa's stand together near the first bend. Papa's, Bua's and Kaka-sa's are a little farther up. Mine is just past the old water trough, and Mira's and Arjun's are near the top, still slender, each with a small stone at its foot carved with a name and a date. Every birth is also written in the silver-bound birth ledger, which sits in the family temple at the top of the fort, and in which the handwriting changes from generation to generation while the ink stays the same deep red.

Each year on their birthdays, the children walk up the fort road and water their own trees. Then, on the way back, they water all the others. It takes most of the morning. It is, I think, the best morning of the year.

Visitors to the palace have a custom of their own, which is not really ours but which we have kept for them. At the gate, every guest is offered a small brass cup of warm kesar milk, sweet and gold with saffron. My great-great-grandmother began it, they say, so that no one who came to the house would leave without having been given something. Ghulam Rasool's family still makes it, every morning, in the same copper pan. It is the first thing I drink when I come home, and the last thing my mother presses into my hands before I leave.

Peacocks at Breakfast

The first sound I remember from Sheesh Niwas is not a voice but a peacock. It came from the roof above my nursery before dawn, a long, rising cry that sounded like someone being surprised over and over again, and I believed for years that the palace itself was calling out. My mother, who had night duty at the hospital then, said she never needed an alarm clock in May. The peacocks did it for her.

They were everywhere. They walked the gravel paths of the char bagh as if they had paid for them, they slept in the old neem trees by the east wall, and every morning a handful of them came to the edge of the breakfast terrace, where Ghulam Rasool left out a tin plate of broken millet rotis. Dadosa would not allow them to be fed from the table, on the principle that a bird should remain a bird, but he never objected to the tin plate, and I noticed he always ate his own breakfast facing it.

* * *

The gardens were laid out in the 1890s in the old four-part pattern, divided by narrow water channels that met at a central fountain. In my childhood the fountain worked on festival days and whenever an important guest arrived, which to a boy of seven seemed like the same thing. Bougainvillea climbed the arcades in magenta and a pale orange that Dadisa called "the color of a good dal." There were neem trees for shade, two old pipal trees near the gate, and along the outer wall a line of khejri, the tree of the desert, whose pods the camels loved and whose roots, Bua Shailaja explained to me once with an architect's seriousness, went down farther than the fort walls were high.

Beyond the garden was the orchard: pomegranates, lemons, a few stubborn guava trees, and a ber thicket that the langurs raided every winter when the fruit turned. The langurs lived on the fort walls above us, gray-coated and black-faced, sitting in rows along the battlements like a council in session. They were Hanuman langurs, and they were treated by everyone in Kesarmer with a mixture of reverence and exasperation. Once a large male took an entire tray of laddoos from the kitchen courtyard during Diwali preparations. Ghulam Rasool stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips and said, to nobody in particular, "Well, at least he has good taste."

* * *

Great-uncle Bhim Singh was my guide to all of it. He was the stable master and the family's best storyteller, and he believed that a child should be outside before the sun was properly up. On winter mornings he would knock on the door of the room where Kabir, Ishaan and I slept during the holidays, and Tara, who was younger and fiercer than all of us, would already be standing behind him in a shawl, insulted that we were late.

He took us down to Rani Sagar in the cold, when mist lay on the water and the far bank was invisible. The demoiselle cranes came every year in late September or October, after flying over the Himalayas from Central Asia, and they stayed until March. At dawn they stood in the shallows in their hundreds, slate-gray, with black throats and a white plume behind each red eye, and when they lifted off together the sound was like a great sheet of cloth being shaken out. Their call is a soft, rolling kurr, and the women of the town sang songs about them, the kurja, the bird that carries messages to people far from home. Bhim Dada said that was why they called out as they flew: they were reading the messages aloud.

With the cranes came the bar-headed geese, pale with two black bars across the back of the head, who grazed the fields below the tank at night and floated on the water by day. Bhim Dada told us they flew higher than any other bird, over the top of the mountains, and Ishaan, who was already practical at ten, asked how anyone could know. "Climbers have seen them," my great-uncle said, "and the climbers were very annoyed, because they had walked."

* * *

The Kesarmer rakhat lay west of the town, a long sweep of grassland and scattered khejri and ker bushes that had been kept as a reserve for generations. In the 1950s Dadosa made the family's rule explicit, and it has held ever since: no animal on the estate is to be harmed, not on the grassland, not in the garden, not at the lake. He had the rule painted in Hindi on a board at the rakhat gate, and Pandit Hariprasad entered it in the ledger in both his scripts, as if it were a law of the state, which in our house it more or less was.

So the blackbuck stayed. To see them we rode out with Mangla Ram, the head syce, in the old jeep or, when we had earned it, on the quietest of the Marwari mares. Mangla Ram knew the herds the way he knew his horses. The males were nearly black on the back with white bellies and white rings around the eyes, and their spiral horns caught the low sun. The females and young were a warm fawn. When something startled them they bounded straight up, all four feet off the ground at once, and Tara named this "the popcorn," which Mangla Ram adopted immediately and used for the rest of his life.

The chinkara were shyer and preferred the rougher ground near the dunes, small and sandy-colored, with a dark stripe down each side of the face. They could go a long time without drinking, Mangla Ram said, living on the dew and the plants. And there were nilgai, the big blue-gray antelope, which looked to us like a horse put together by a committee. They raided the edges of the farmers' fields, and the trust paid compensation for damaged crops rather than allow them to be driven off with dogs. Papa still keeps that ledger.

In the cool hours we sometimes saw a desert fox, sandy with black-backed ears and a white tip to its tail, trotting home to its den in the sand bank. A Bengal monitor lived in the old well behind the stables, a long, unhurried lizard that came out on warm afternoons to lie on the stone. Kabir called him the Dewan, because he looked as if he were waiting for someone to bring him papers.

* * *

The sky over the ridge belonged to the raptors. Tawny eagles nested in the acacias on the far side of the rakhat and circled the fort on the morning thermals, and Egyptian vultures, white with black wing tips and a yellow face, rode the air above the old garbage pits outside town and, in Bhim Dada's opinion, did more for public health than any committee. They were common in my childhood. They are far fewer now, and the trust has worked with the forest department and the veterinary college on keeping the carcasses at the old dumping ground safe for them.

In the fort itself, in a niche of the outer wall below the family goddess's temple, lived an Indian eagle-owl. We were taken up one January evening to see it, all four of us cousins forbidden to speak. It sat in the dusk with its orange eyes and its ear tufts raised, and then it called, a deep, double hoot that seemed to come out of the stone. Tara grabbed my arm so hard I had marks the next day. Nobody said anything until we were back at the bottom of the steps, and then all four of us talked at once.

* * *

The peacocks had their season too. In May, when the heat was at its worst and the first clouds began to build in the south, the males raised their trains in the garden and danced. They turned slowly, shivering the great fan of eyes so that it rattled, and the females went on pecking at the ground as though nothing at all was happening. Bhim Dada watched this every year with great sympathy. When the monsoon broke in late June or July the peacocks screamed from the palace roof at every roll of thunder, and the whole household went out into the courtyard to feel the first rain, Dadisa included, with her sari pulled over her head and her face turned up.

And there were the camels, the stable camels, who carried water drums to the rakhat troughs in summer and walked in the Dussehra procession in autumn. Mangla Ram let us sit on the oldest of them, a patient female named Sundari, who knelt with a great deal of groaning and complaint, and then rose in three stages so that each of us in turn was flung first forward and then back, and screamed, and asked to go again.

* * *

Mira, you were nine the first time I took you to the lake at dawn. Arjun was five and asleep on Mangla Ram's grandson's shoulder for most of it. The cranes were there, as they have been every winter of my life, and when they rose you said nothing at all, which for you was remarkable.

This past January we went again. Arjun is ten now and insists on carrying the binoculars. He counted the cranes in blocks of ten, the way Bhim Dada taught me and I taught him, and arrived at a number that was certainly wrong and very confident. You photographed a pair of bar-headed geese and labeled the picture that night with the date and the place and who was with us, so it will not end up in a trunk with nothing written on the back. On the way home a blackbuck crossed the track in front of the jeep, and Arjun shouted "Popcorn!" before it had even jumped. Nobody had told him the word. Somebody must have said it once in the house, and it had simply been waiting for him.

At breakfast the next morning the peacocks came to the tin plate at the edge of the terrace. Arjun asked whether they had always come. I told him yes, as long as anyone remembers, and that no one in this family has ever been allowed to harm them, and that this will be up to him one day. He thought about it, broke off a piece of his roti, and put it on the plate.

Everything That Should Have Been Recorded

I began this book in the Tosha Khana, with a trunk full of faces I could not name. I want to end it there too, because the trunk has taught me the one lesson I most want to pass on: that a family's memory is not lost all at once. It slips away one unwritten name at a time.

When I add up what we lost, it is not the grand things. The fort still stands, the ledgers survived, the birth trees grow. What we lost is everything that lived only in someone's voice. Bhim Dada's stories of the horses, with all the voices. The songs Dadisa sang at Gangaur, some of which nobody in the family can now sing all the way through. The joke that made Mangla Ram's horse turn its head in that photograph from the 1960s. The recipe for the marmalade Dadosa loved, which the kitchen stopped making after he died and which no one, it turns out, had written down. The name of the young woman laughing beside Baisa on the steps of the Rani Sagar in 1946. A hundred small moments that someone should have recorded, and that no one did, because everyone thought there would always be time.

There is never always time. I learned that in 2011, when Bhim Dada died at eighty-six. I had been meaning, for years, to sit down with him with a recorder and get the stories properly. I had a list of questions in a drawer. We had talked about doing it "next winter" for perhaps six winters running. Then one morning Mangla Ram's grandson came to the house to say that Bhim Dada had not come down to the stables, and that was that. The list is still in my drawer. I keep it as a reminder.

* * *

So, rather late, we started. I want to describe what we did plainly, because it was not difficult, and I would like other families to know that.

First, we made a private family space online, a place that belongs only to us, where nothing is public and every member of the family can be invited by name. Into it went everything from the trunk: every photograph scanned and labeled, with names where we knew them and question marks where we did not. Those question marks turned out to be the most useful thing we did. Relatives who had never shown much interest in family history would look at a photograph of a picnic in 1958 and write, "That is my mother, and that is her cousin from Bikaner, and the boy with the kite is your grandfather." Pandit Hariprasad's grandson helped name many faces in one afternoon. Baisa's grandchildren in Gujarat filled in twenty more.

Then we began recording the elders. Not formally, and not with any great equipment, just a phone propped against a teapot and a few questions. Each recording is kept with who was speaking and when, so that in fifty years someone will know it was Kaki-sa's aunt telling the story of the 1956 flood, and not merely "an old lady." We recorded my mother talking about the twins she delivered from Bhadrasar village in 1982, the story I had found in Dadisa's diary. We recorded Ghulam Rasool explaining his laal maas, step by step, though he refused to give the quantities and said that anyone who needed measurements should not be cooking it. We recorded Dhapu Bai, now ninety, on her first day at the cooperative in 1965. We recorded Papa telling the story of the Teej swing, and then Kaki-sa telling it, and the two versions are so different that we kept both.

And we began choosing, for each memory, who it is for. Some things are for the whole family. Some are for one person: a recording of Dadisa's Gangaur songs set aside for Tara, who wants to learn them; a letter from Baisa marked for Ishaan, because it is about his mother as a little girl; Papa's account of his first polo match marked for Arjun, to be heard when he is older. Choosing who a memory is for turned out to be a way of loving the person you are choosing it for. Everybody I asked to record something asked, before anything else, "Who will hear this?" Once they knew, they spoke differently. They spoke to someone.

* * *

We did one more thing that I want to mention. We turned Dadisa's diary, all nineteen notebooks of it, into something the whole family could read. My mother and Bua spent a winter transcribing it from her small, sloping Hindi, and Kabir translated it into English for the cousins who do not read Hindi well. We left the pages as they were, ordinary entries and all, because the ordinary entries are the point. "Rain today. The neem tree smells sweet. Aditya rode the gray mare and fell off twice and laughed both times." That is my father at fifteen, and I would not trade that sentence for a palace.

* * *

Mira, Arjun, this last part is for you.

You asked me once, Mira, when you were eleven, why I spend so much time with "old photos of dead people." I did not have a good answer then. I think I have one now. I spend time with them because they are not strangers. They are the people who planted the trees you water on your birthday. They are the reason the girls' school exists, and the hospital where your grandmother saved all those babies, and the cooperative that made your bangles and your brother's squeaking slippers. They are the voices in the stories you already know without knowing where they came from. When you laugh with your whole body, Arjun, you are laughing like Bhim Dada, and you have never even heard him.

I want you to know three things.

First, that nothing about our family was ever done by one person alone. Every chapter of this book has a dozen names in it that are not ours: syces and cooks, secretaries and stonemasons, printers and dyers and doctors and teachers. Remember them as you remember us. They are our family too.

Second, that what we were given was given in trust, and the only honest answer to that is work. Your great-great-great-grandfather built roads and dug canals. Your great-great-grandfather built schools and a hospital. Your great-grandfather built a cooperative and a medical college, and your great-grandmother gave a thousand women a voice. You do not have to build anything as grand. But you do have to build something.

Third, and most important: ask. Ask your grandparents everything, now, while they are here. Ask Dadosa about the polo field and your grandmother about the hospital, and ask them both what they were laughing at in every photograph. Record it. Label it. Decide who it is for. Do not leave a list of questions in a drawer, the way I did.

The trunk in the Tosha Khana is empty now. Everything that was in it has a name, or at least a question mark, and a place where all of us can find it. When you are grown, and your own children ask you why you keep all these old pictures of people they never knew, I hope you will open that family space and show them Bhim Dada on his white mare, and Dadisa on the steps of the Rani Sagar, and Dadosa in his painted Holi kurta, and say, "These are your people. Let me tell you who they were."

And then, I hope, you will tell them about me, and about your mother, and about the summer you sat on the bangle maker's mat and came home with eleven bangles on one arm. Somebody should record that. I already have.

With all my love, and all of theirs,

Papa