The collection
Telangana · The city the diamonds paid for
Clap once under the arch at Fateh Darwaza and the sound arrives at the top of Golconda, a kilometre up the hill — it was the garrison's alarm, and four hundred years on it still works. That is the register of the place: things built to do a job and still doing it. The fort was cut out of the same grey rock the diamonds came from, the bazaar under the Charminar is selling bangles on the lane it was laid out for, and the evening is still taken with black tea and a biscuit at an hour when other cities have gone to bed.
Hyderabad was laid out in 1591 by a king who wanted a capital with water in it, and it has spent four centuries being two places at once. South of the Musi the streets still run to the pattern the Qutb Shahis set — four roads out of the Charminar, a bazaar down each of them, attar and frying onion over all of it, and lanes that have sold the same lacquered bangles since before the Mughals came. North of the river the Nizams built palaces, then the cantonment arrived, then the software, and the ground rises through Banjara Hills into glass. What holds the two halves together is appetite: this is a city that argues about biryani the way other cities argue about politics, drinks its tea black and sweet at eleven at night, and considers a wedding under-catered at four hundred.
A citadel stacked up a granite hill, walled twice and gated eight times, with iron spikes still set in the doors at elephant height. The acoustics under the outer arch were the alarm system: a hand clapped there carries to the durbar at the summit, and the guides will make you do it.
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Falaknuma
The Nizam's own palace on a rock above the old city, and a table that seats 101.
Seven kings and their households under grey granite domes in a walled garden below the fort, each tomb on its own plinth with the stucco slowly coming back after a decade of restoration. Go early; the light is low and there is nobody in it.
Four arches, four minarets and a mosque on the upper floor, put up in 1591 at the crossing that the whole city was then drawn around. The market has been packed against its feet ever since, which is the point of it rather than an indignity.
The Nizams' own seat: four palaces around a long water court, and a durbar hall with nineteen Belgian chandeliers hung over a marble platform where the succession was announced. The vintage-car sheds at the back are a better museum than they have any right to be.
One man's collection, and he collected everything — Mughal jade, Aurangzeb's sword, a veiled marble Rebecca, and a British bracket clock in which a small figure comes out to strike the hour, which the whole room gathers to watch.
Down a residential lane in Pisal Banda, the burial court of the Nizams' most powerful noble family: white stucco worked into screens so fine they read as lace, no two panels alike. Barely signposted, and worth the trouble of finding.
Madhapur, HITEC City
A curved glass tower on Durgam Cheruvu Lake, in the HITEC City business district, with 8 dining rooms, two rooftop bars and a spa spread across 3 floors.
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