Royal fantasy: The Tijara Fort is really a world and a few epochs apart

Although Tijara Fort opened for business in January 2016, a distant drone of drills and grinders told us work was still in progress

Every winter, when the extended family returns like a pack of homing pigeons, it’s my job to come up with a weekend destination for us to visit. After a disastrous road trip to Corbett Tiger Reserve, when we found ourselves in an epic 14-hour traffic jam near Garhmukhteshwar, the family is understandably less than enthusiastic about places that involve journeying for over four hours. So when a friend suggested the Neemrana property, Tijara Fort in Alwar, it seemed too good to be true. Given that it is barely 100 km from Delhi, I reckoned it would be a stone’s throw