Pushkin.

This is an I-Heart podcast.

Some time in the 1880s, my great-great-grandfather built a Haveli, a large house in the city of Agra in North India.

The house had many rooms built around a courtyard and a back garden filled with plants and trees.

Outside, there was a bustling market, but behind the high walls, the house was its own secluded world.

That world is gone now. But when I was a child, it was still there. And whenever we went to visit

my grandparents in India, we would stay at the Haveli, the family home. To me, it was a magical

place. Tribes of monkeys roamed through the trees, and they often

came into the rooms. You had to sleep with a stick beside your bed so you could stop the animals

from stealing your shoes. Some rooms were no longer used. The furniture in them was coated with a

thick layer of dust. Outside, the toilet block had spiders, which made it scary to visit in the night, even with a flashlight.

There was electricity sometimes, but if you wanted hot water for a bath, one of the servants had to heat it and bring it to your quarters.

A defining moment of my childhood was the shame of realizing that another little boy, just my age,

had to carry a heavy bucket so I could wash.

It was a house built for a household, a family, and the people who worked for them.

My great-grandfather had loved traditional Indian wrestling.

When he inherited the house, he built a wrestling pit by the servants' quarters in the garden.

The pit was a sandy enclosure where matches could take place.

One year when I was eight or nine, a big tournament was held there,

and I was allowed to sit at the front of the crowd as enormous men with impressive curled

moustaches, oiled themselves up and grappled, competing for a prize given by my grandfather.

At the house, when everyone else was occupied, I would climb out of the windows and walk along ledges high above the street.

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