FLAMES FROM MIND

Chapter 2 Chawand At around 8'o clock we reached our hotel in Udaipur city. Now we are heading towards Chawand. It had been the home to Maharana Pratap for the last 12 years of his life. Chawand is 2 hours from here, till then I choose to sit back and dream.  Earlier while reading about Mewar, I came to know that the Mewar dynasty still continues and the present Rana is Maharana Arvind Singh. His son is Lakshara Singh and is married to a princess of a still continuing dynasty from Orissa. Looking through the window, a signboard catches my attention, it reads  "Banswara" with an arrow marked in other direction and "165 km" written in white. "Which place is Banswara?" I ask, out of curiosity.  "Bheels, the tribe which helped the Rana in the battle still continues to live in Banswara", says the taxi driver, who is patient enough to my intricate questions, I believe, as he replies calmly.  After a pause, pointing towards a distant pla

Chapter 1 On the train We, three of us, Mom, Dad and I are on the train now, already having spent one night listening to the engine stop and start off again, and somehow trying to sleep as it would keep us rocking. But, I had given up trying. Not because of the disturbance that the train would create, in my mind I was much too excited and preoccupied to see in real what I had read so much about, what all I had imagined it to be. All the stories of the great Ranas of Mewar were flushing through my mind as the train wooshed past the lands between Delhi and the"Rajputana". We started off on 9th November 2015. Today it's 10th, and I had got up early, rather rose up, as I was just lying down with my eyes open as if the roof of the train was a screen, filming tales from the history. It was 5:45 am when I peeped out of the window to watch the transient trees, villages and miles of farmlands as they would move into oblivion. "By this time we must be in the mid-wa