It’s like your first dinner with a date – you take a while to gather gusto. Except for the food on the way you know little else. You look around and take in the décor with intensity, inspect the chandeliers, peer approvingly at paintings and nod at waiters. You laugh nervously, not mirthlessly, a few decibels above normal. You forget to drink water. In Pachkoti Hotel – the original, there’s an imposter even, apparently, which is the one you didn’t go to – I sat with my feet off the
There is not much difference when you look at Bahraich from half a kilometre in the sky and from street level. It is a tumbleweed cluster of shanty dwellings, lean-to shops, road-facing sculleries, pointy minarets, lowing buffaloes snacking on plastic, milling rickshaw pullers and little figurines cowering in black, chaffering with lingerie and veggie vendors on pushcarts. Main drags radiate like a Merc-sign from the town centre, the ‘Ghantaghar’ or Clock Tower. The grounds of this Raj relic are the only place where you can stretch your limbs without
