Flip

Every evening at about a quarter to six, the old city stops being three-dimensional. The domes go flat, the minarets go thin, and for twenty minutes Lucknow looks like something cut from paper and held up to a lamp.

I have been climbing the same terrace for a month. The owner, a retired schoolteacher, charges nothing and asks only that I bring him a print of the best one. I have not found the best one yet.

The door was painted blue in 1971, the year her husband came home from the war. Nobody has repainted it since; they only oil the hinges.

Inside, the courtyard holds a neem tree older than the house. She tells me the house was built around the tree, not the other way round, and I believe her.

She does not want her name used. ‘The house is the story,’ she says. ‘I just live in it.’

In 1784, during a terrible famine, Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula began building the Bara Imambara. The story every guide tells is that labourers built by day and nobles, too proud to be seen working, were quietly paid to pull parts of it down by night, so that the work and the wages would last.

Whether that is true or not, you understand why people want to believe it when you stand in the central hall. It is enormous, and there is not a single beam or pillar holding up the roof. The vault simply stands, held by its own shape.

Lost on purpose

Above the hall is the Bhool Bhulaiya, a maze of narrow passages and identical doorways. Children run ahead and call out, and their voices come back from the wrong direction. A guide strikes a match against one wall and you hear it clearly from the far side of the gallery.

Late in the afternoon the stone turns the colour of turmeric and the pigeons settle along the parapets. The city's traffic is right outside the gate, but inside the courtyard it feels very far away.