Walls, now and then

The car snakes its way around the hill, through the bastis and mandis. We are momentarily distracted by the women in their red,yellow and pink lehengas and silver chudis. A bright sun beam bounces off a metal pot carefully balanced on a woman's head. Our driver squints for a moment. He shifts from the third to the second gear. The car slowly purs up the gradient. Brown stone walls stealthily creep up against the blue of the sky. The pale blue transforms into a dramatic space as battles of yester years peek through the small windows, chiseled out of stone. Mouthfuls of the sky emerge from behind the open windows of the thick fort walls.  He tells us it was a city ravaged in the past by pillage, murder and deceit. Every window has a steep decline, going all the way down. Buckets of hot oil were poured down these slopes if an enemy tried to scale the walls to enter. What bloody walls they must have been. Now they stand as a silent relic of the city's past. Mute spectators to the unfolding of a new history.