Mandu, or the "City of Joy", is a superb hilltop fort, deserted, dramatic, and alive with ghosts! It is a dream city steeped in legends of the love of Baz Bahadur for his beloved Rani Roopmati. Breathtakingly beautiful, this former capital of the Sultanate of Malwa is perched high on a hill in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, 283 km away from the capital city Bhopal. A ghost city now, Mandu was once the monsoon retreat of the Mughal emperors. For one thing, Mandu is far from the coast. It does not have the sort of sluicing rain that inundates some of our seaboard destinations. Moreover, Mandu is on a plateau and regardless of how much it rains, the water pours off in silver-threaded waterfalls which gives it a sort of designer magic that no designer but only nature can replicate. And finally-and this is a big plus-many of the monumental buildings of Mandu have been fashioned to use this play of water and rain-heavy thunder clouds to superb effect.

You'll get an inkling of what you should expect in Mandu when you drive through the sub-montane lands that lead up to the plateau. Rising out of the tangles of scrub vegetation are no-nonsense, foursquare, staging posts for horse-mounted messengers and guardhouses. Some of them have domes which look rather like the qullas, or foundation caps around which some turbans are tied. Then the road winds up and pierces the edge of the escarpment through a succession of massive gates. It is only then that one enters the hamlet of Mandu flowing through the old monuments. The living hamlet and the well-preserved ruins now form a seamless whole and it is virtually impossible to see where one ends and the other begins.