Moment: July 10th at 2:43 PM IST
“The king never lost a game of Parcheesi because he always played alone.”
Long before the capital of India was Delhi, it was Fatehpur Sikri, which means “City of Victory.” "Fateh" is Arabic for victory, "Pur" is Hindi for city, and "Sikri" is the name of the village that once occupied the land on which this city was built.
Emperor Akbar, the grandfather of Shah Jahan, was the third emperor of the Mughal Empire. He built this city, with buildings and palaces sprawled across a huge garden with a pool in the center, but later abandoned it because the nearby lake, which was their only source of water, dried up due to a drought during the monsoon season. The emperor then moved to Agra, making it the new capital city.
As we walked through the court of public audiences where Akbar used to sit and listen to people’s grievances and the courtyard with a life-sized Parcheesi board (which we used to play hopscotch), this ghost town seemed to come alive. Don’t worry, our tour guide made sure to tell us that there are “definitely no ghosts." We also saw Akbar's court of private audiences, where he would sit in the middle of the floor while his nine ministers, who were called the nine jewels of the court, all sat around the perimeter.
We even got to see the house of Birbal, Emperor’s Akbar favorite minister. I have heard of Akbar and Birbal ever since I was a child, as I would read about them in books that my grandfather would mail to us from India. I grew up learning about Akbar’s wisdom and Birbal’s brilliance with his out-of-the-box thinking. I was even asked to read a story of this dynamic duo when I went to the optometrist’s office in Ongole to get my eyes checked, so they are clearly an integral part of Indian culture and are regarded as some of the wisest leaders in Indian history.
Because of this, it was really cool to realize that although Akbar was the powerful emperor of the Mughal empire, he just a regular person too. He brought in musicians because he loved listening to music and built secret hiding spots in the walls that he covered with plants. Our tour guide told us that he used to play hide-and-seek in the palace, and challenged us to a round. It was a lot harder than we thought, because sound bounces around and you can't really tell where people's footsteps are coming from, so the game was over in about five minutes.
Emperor Akbar also had a bit of a Napoleon complex in that he was fairly short, so he built the ceilings of his buildings pretty low (I could touch them and I'm a little over five feet tall), which forced visiting foreign leaders bow down in order to enter his court. I accidentally hit my head on a doorway and was actually kind of happy about it, because that literally NEVER happens to me.
I’ve never been to a ghost town before, but I always imagined them as run-down, with cobwebs occupying the corners of the rooms and a slightly eerie feel about them. However, Fatehpur Sikri was so vibrant and lively, probably because that was how the city was centuries ago when the emperor and his family lived there. It didn't feel like a monument where you were blocked off from areas or you had to be careful not to touch anything, and we had so much fun just playing games and exploring all of the little nooks that were left behind over 400 years ago, which made this one of the most beautiful cities I have ever experienced.
