When Nikhil and I set out on that trip, we weren’t expecting royalty. But Domli had other plans.
It started with a phone call from the Rani Saheba herself — her voice filled with pride about her great-grandfather, Tribhuvansinhji Bapu, a Cambridge-educated ruler who once gave his kingdom modern sewage systems and cricket grounds. Her words carried both nostalgia and complaint: that history had forgotten her ancestor’s legacy. Before we knew it, we had been invited as “guests of royalty.”
Royal guests, of course, don’t refuse.
Three days later, we found ourselves not in a palace, but in a crumbling hotel, run by one old man who played every role: cook, caretaker, housekeeper, and waiter. He never forgot to remind us, with a bow, that we were “Rani Saheba’s guests.”
The rooms were enormous, creaking, and eerily empty. The food, however, was warm and heavy with ghee, offered with the insistence of someone who had nothing else to give but his hospitality.
Then arrived Khetobaji, the royal family’s lifelong retainer, who took us to see the palaces. First, the “old palace,” where Ambalika Devi, the Rajkumari, spoke with longing about the past while showing us dark corridors and cobwebbed halls. Then, the “new palace,” where the reigning Rani Saheba and Raja Saheb served us snacks, weaving between heritage pride and business pitches about converting rooms into a hotel.
It felt less like visiting royalty and more like wandering through the ruins of ambition.
Later that night, we overheard hushed voices — servants speaking about unpaid wages, court cases between family members, and a dynasty cracking under its own weight. Their words echoed louder than the royal proclamations we’d heard all day.
Domli, once a kingdom with gun salutes and grandeur, was now a fading memory. Its royals, prisoners of their own past, unable to embrace the present, still clung to titles, portraits, and stories.
When we left at dawn, we slipped some cash into an envelope for the old caretaker. Above his sleeping body, a portrait of Tribhuvansinhji seemed to weep.
Every place has its stories. Some are written in history books. Others linger quietly in forgotten palaces, in voices that carry both pride and pain.
Not all kingdoms are lost to conquest. Some are lost to time, to memory, and to the unwillingness to let go.
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