There is a specific quality to leaving Varanasi by train in the evening.
The ghats disappear first. Then the lanes. Then the sound — that particular layered sound of bells and voices and pigeons and traffic that you stop hearing when you live there but notice immediately when it goes. By the time the train crosses the Ganga, you are already somewhere else, even if you are still technically inside the city limits.
We boarded at 5pm on April 5th. Second AC. The kind of compartment that is neither luxurious nor sparse — curtained berths, cold air that will get colder by midnight, the particular smell of train upholstery that is the same on every Indian railway line. My family settled in. The chai arrived — the platform vendors moving fast before the whistle. I don’t drink chai, but I watched my family hold those small clay cups the way people hold something they have been looking forward to all day.
We had brought food from home. Dinner on a train with home-cooked food is its own kind of ritual. Roti that has cooled just enough. Sabzi in a steel container. The slightly self-conscious feeling of eating while the landscape outside goes dark.
The journey was nineteen hours. Long stretches of nothing between stations, then stations with their own noise and light and people rushing with luggage. The stoppages were many. We talked for a while. Then we didn’t. I watched the fields and the distant lights of small towns pass in the window and thought about where we were going and what we would find there.
Khatu Shyam Ji
The first stop was not Jaipur itself but Khatu — a small town in Sikar district, roughly eighty kilometres from the city. We had come for Khatu Shyam Ji.
If you are not from Rajasthan or Uttar Pradesh, you may not know this name as well as the other names. But in the belt of land between the Ganga plains and the Thar desert, Khatu Shyam Ji is not a minor deity. He is Haare ka Sahara. The support of the defeated. The one who sides with whoever is losing.
The mythology is from the Mahabharat, but not the part that gets told most often.
Barbarika was the son of Ghatotkacha — who was himself the son of Bhima. Three generations of extraordinary warriors, but Barbarika carried something none of the others had. Through intense tapasya, he received three divine arrows from Agni. Three arrows. In all of the Mahabharat, with its millions of combatants and its countless astras, Barbarika stood apart because he had only three, and three was enough.
The first arrow would mark everything he wanted to destroy. The second would mark everything he wanted to protect. The third would destroy every marked target simultaneously.
With three arrows, he could end any war. In minutes.
He made a vow: he would always fight for the side that was losing. It seemed like the right dharma — to balance power, to protect the weaker side. He marched toward Kurukshetra.
Krishna was waiting for him.
What Krishna understood, which Barbarika had not yet worked through, was the implication of the vow. If Barbarika fought for whichever side was losing, the moment he joined a side and began winning, the other side would become the losing side — and his own vow would compel him to switch. He would oscillate endlessly between the two armies, destroying both, until no one remained. The war would not end. It would just stop, with everyone dead.
Krishna arrived disguised as a brahmin and asked Barbarika a single question: before you fight, what do you consider a worthy donation?
Barbarika said his head.
Krishna revealed himself and asked for exactly that.
There is a particular quality to this moment that I have thought about across many retellings. Barbarika does not argue. He does not negotiate. He asks only for one thing: let me witness the war. Let my head be placed somewhere I can see everything.
Krishna agreed. He placed Barbarika’s head on a hill overlooking Kurukshetra. The head watched the entire Mahabharat war from beginning to end. When it was over and the victorious Pandavas began discussing among themselves who deserved the most credit, Krishna told them: ask the head. It saw everything.
The head’s answer: only Krishna’s Sudarshana Chakra won this war. The Pandavas were instruments. The victory was his.
After the war, Krishna gave Barbarika a gift that almost undoes the loss. In Kaliyuga, he said, you will be worshipped by my name. Shyam. The world will know you as Khatu Shyam.
Centuries later, Barbarika’s head was found buried in the earth of a place called Khatu, revealed by a dream to the local king. A temple was built. And now people come from across the country, particularly those who feel the world has not been fair to them, who have been on the losing side of something, who need someone to stand with them not because they are powerful but precisely because they are not.
Haare ka Sahara.
We stood in the queue for a long time. The temple was crowded. When we finally reached the sanctum, the idol is not what you expect — it is a face, serene and dark, with large eyes that are difficult to describe without sounding like you are reaching for something. You stand there and something in the architecture of the myth lands in a way it doesn’t when you are just reading it.
Before leaving the area, we visited the Laxmi temple and the Radha Krishna temple nearby. Both quieter, both beautiful in the way smaller temples often are — less crowd, more stillness, the kind of place where you can actually sit with your thoughts for a few minutes.
Salasaar Balaji
From Khatu, we went to Salasaar.
Salasaar is also in Sikar district. Another town, another temple, another deity who arrived in an unusual way.
The story here is simpler but no less strange. Centuries ago, a farmer was plowing his field near Salasaar. The plowshare struck something hard. He dug and found a stone idol — a face with a beard and mustache. Unusual for Hanuman, who in most forms is clean-shaven, young, the eternal brahmachari. This form was different. Older. More like a householder than a celibate warrior.
On the same night, a woman in a village called Nagaur had a dream. She was told to send an idol she had found — her brother had dug it up in similar circumstances — to Salasaar. The two fragments arrived. They matched. The bearded face found in the field was completed by what came from Nagaur.
The combined idol was installed. The temple built around it.
Salasaar Balaji is known for being fiercely responsive to prayer. People come here with specific requests — not the vague goodwill you ask of many deities, but particular things. A job. A marriage. A health crisis. The deity is not abstract here. He is local, personal, almost municipal in his concern for individual lives.
I am not someone who arrives at temples with neat prayers. I stood and looked and let the thing be what it was.
Jaipur
The Pink City revealed itself across two days after the temples.
Hawa Mahal is smaller in person than it looks in every photograph ever taken of it. Not disappointing — just correctly scaled once you are standing in front of it. It was built in 1799 by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh, the five-storey facade designed so the women of the royal household could watch street festivals below without being seen from the street. Nine hundred and fifty-three small windows, each one a lattice of carved sandstone.
I kept thinking about the reversal — a building designed entirely around the act of watching, where the watchers are invisible. The whole structure is an architectural solution to a social constraint. You could spend a long time with that idea, or you could just accept that it looks extraordinary in the afternoon light and take the photograph.
Amer Fort required more effort. The hill, the long walk up, the sun. But Amer is the kind of place that earns its reputation. The Sheesh Mahal — the hall of mirrors — is genuinely strange. Tiny pieces of glass set into plaster, thousands of them, so that a single lamp becomes a small galaxy. The effect is not subtle. It is maximalist and deliberate and somehow still not excessive.
The fort as a whole is a record of what it meant to be powerful in a particular time and place. Large rooms for different purposes. Corridors designed for defence. Gardens designed for pleasure. Everything built with the assumption that it would last centuries, and it has.
Jal Mahal you see from the road. The palace sits in the middle of Man Sagar Lake — only one storey visible above the water, four submerged below. We did not go inside; it is not open to the public. But you stop on the road and look at it across the water and it has the quality of something that was designed specifically to be looked at from exactly where you are standing.
Albert Hall Museum is the last of the city. Built in 1887, named after the Prince of Wales, now the state museum of Rajasthan. Egyptian mummies, carpets, natural history, miniature paintings, metalwork. A building designed in the Indo-Saracenic style that was the British Empire’s attempt to synthesize something it did not fully understand. The result is genuinely interesting architecture regardless of what you think of the politics. We spent a quiet afternoon inside. My feet were tired. It was enough.
The Return
We boarded the return train at 1:45pm on April 10th.
Nineteen hours again, in reverse. The same landscape, different light.
Somewhere around the three-hour mark, the family got hungry and someone opened Swiggy. I had not known you could do this — order food on a moving train to your seat. The logistics of it seemed absurd, a rider on a motorcycle finding your specific coach on a moving train at a specific station. But it worked. Food appeared. We ate.
The night passed the way nights on trains pass when you are tired from several days of walking. Not quickly. But not badly either. Small stoppages at stations you have never heard of. The occasional light in the darkness outside that is a village, someone’s window, a life you are passing through at 80 kilometres an hour and will never know anything about.
Varanasi came back the way it always does — not as arrival but as recognition. The sound before the station. The smell of the river. The density of it, the sense that the city is not a place you enter so much as a place that re-admits you after an absence.
We were back.
It is worth asking, when you return from a trip like this, what you actually took away. Not the photographs. Not the souvenirs. Something that sits differently inside you than it did before you left.
I think it was Khatu Shyam. Not the temple, not the queue, not the logistics of getting there and back. The idea at the centre of it: a deity who sides with whoever is losing.
Not the righteous. Not the powerful. Not the chosen. The defeated.
There is a theology in that which I am still turning over. Most religious traditions offer some version of cosmic justice — the idea that goodness is eventually rewarded, that the universe has a preference for right over wrong. Khatu Shyam is something different. He is not saying the defeated will eventually win. He is saying: while you are losing, you are not alone. The support precedes the outcome. The solidarity is unconditional.
That is a harder promise to make and a harder one to receive.
Shyam teri bansi pukare radha naam.
Written in Varanasi, April 2026.