Some trips you plan carefully. You research neighbourhoods, shortlist restaurants, build a spreadsheet of opening times. And then there are the trips that happen because an old friend sends you a message that simply says: come. I have been promising you Vadodara for ten years. Come now.
Roshan Patel has been saying this to me since university. I finally went in the first week of April, and he was right. He usually is.
Arriving in Baroda
Vadodara, which most people still call Baroda, is a city that takes a day to understand. From the train, it does not announce itself dramatically. The approach is flat, the station busy in the unremarkable way of mid-sized Indian railway stations, and the roads outside the station are the same organised chaos you find almost anywhere.
But Roshan was waiting, grinning, and within twenty minutes we were sitting in the lane near his flat close to the Express Hotel in Alkapuri, two glasses of pale gingery chai in front of us, and the city was already making more sense.
The Express Hotel is one of those old-Gujarat institutions that has not reinvented itself and is better for it. The neighbourhood around it, Alkapuri, is leafy and calm by the standards of a city this size, with wide tree-lined roads and the kind of established, unhurried quality that comes from decades of being a place where the city's professional families have always lived. It was a good base. We used it accordingly.
Laxmi Vilas Palace
We went to Laxmi Vilas Palace on the second morning, before the tour groups arrived.
Nothing quite prepares you for it. Built in 1890 by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, it is roughly four times the size of Buckingham Palace, and it fills a visitor with the particular disorientation of encountering something that is both genuinely magnificent and almost theatrically improbable. The Indo-Saracenic architecture, the turrets and domes and sweeping arched colonnades, sits on 700 acres and looks like the product of someone with unlimited budget, excellent taste, and a determination to create something that would still be standing and impressive in a hundred and fifty years.
It is. It absolutely is.
The interior rooms open to visitors, including the Durbar Hall with its Italian marble floors and Belgian stained glass, are exceptional. The collection of weapons, armour, and European and Indian art collected by the Gaekwad family over generations is extensive. But it was the gardens and the grounds that I kept returning to in my mind afterwards: the late morning light on the stone, the peacocks that wander the lawns as if they own the place, and Roshan explaining the history of the Gaekwad dynasty in the animated, proprietorial way that people explain things about a city they love and feel has been overlooked.
We had chai from a stall just outside the palace complex on the way back. It was strong, sweet, and had the particular quality of chai drunk after absorbing something genuinely impressive.
Sayaji Baug and the Baroda Museum
The following afternoon, Roshan took me to Sayaji Baug, the large public garden named for the same Maharaja Sayajirao who built the palace. It is 113 acres of green in the middle of the city, and on a weekday afternoon it is one of those places that reminds you what cities are for.
There were children playing, older couples on evening walks, students sprawled under the banyan trees with textbooks, families on the grass with tiffins. A miniature train runs through the gardens, which delights everyone over and under the age of reason. The zoo within the grounds is one of the oldest in India and while zoos are complicated things to feel completely comfortable about, the gardens themselves are genuinely lovely.
The Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery, housed in a fine building inside the gardens, holds a collection that would do credit to a much larger and more internationally celebrated institution. The natural history wing is extensive. The Egyptian exhibit, which includes a genuine mummy, surprises most visitors. The art collection, which includes Mughal and Rajput miniatures alongside European works, reflects the cosmopolitan acquisition instincts of the Gaekwad court.
We spent two hours in there and could have spent four. Roshan bought each of us a sugarcane juice from a cart outside afterwards. It was not chai, but it was the right call.
The Old City and Kirti Mandir
One morning we walked the older parts of the city. Vadodara's heritage quarter around Mandvi and the old lanes contains some extraordinary vernacular architecture: carved wooden havelis with intricate jharokha balconies, old merchant houses with inner courtyards, the occasional painted facade that speaks to the wealth that the city accumulated through its position on historical trade routes.
Kirti Mandir, built by the Gaekwad family as a memorial to their royal lineage, is a striking structure worth the short detour. The craftsmanship on the exterior is detailed and precise in the way that serious patronage of traditional artisans produces, and the interior is serene in the early morning before the day's visitors arrive.
Walking these lanes is something that benefits from a guide who knows them, which is to say it benefits from Roshan. He pointed out buildings I would have walked past, explained which family had built which haveli and when, and stopped no fewer than four times at chai stalls, each time pronouncing the tea slightly different and worth the comparison.
He was right every time.
Tambekar Wada and the MS University Campus
Tambekar Wada, a Maratha-era mansion near the old city, is less visited than the palace and the museum but quietly extraordinary. The interior walls are covered in frescoes painted in the early nineteenth century depicting both mythological scenes and what appear to be moments from the everyday life of the era, including the curious detail of British visitors rendered in the visual language of Indian miniature painting. It is a genuinely unusual and affecting place.
The Maharaja Sayajirao University campus, where Roshan did his postgraduate degree and still speaks of with the warmth of someone for whom a place became part of their identity, is beautiful in the way that seriously built institutional architecture from a century ago tends to be. The Faculty of Fine Arts building in particular is striking. We walked it in the late afternoon and the light was falling perfectly on the stone.
Evening Chai on the Terrace
The evenings followed a pattern that I have already decided to remember. Roshan's flat is on the third floor of a building ten minutes from the Express Hotel, and his terrace faces west. At some point in the late afternoon he would disappear into the kitchen and emerge with two cups of chai, which he makes unusually well for someone who claims the recipe is nothing special.
It is ginger-heavy, lightly sweetened, with a small amount of cardamom that arrives as a back note rather than a dominant flavour. He uses full-fat milk and a CTC Assam leaf and the whole thing takes him about eight minutes. The secret, he says with the authority of someone who has thought about this, is not rushing the simmer.
We sat on that terrace and talked for hours. About the things that accumulate over years when you are living separate lives in separate cities: family, work, what we had each expected and what had actually happened, the things that had gone well and the things that had not. The city was spread out below us, and the light changed, and the chai got refilled twice.
These are the conversations you can only have with people who have known you since before you were whoever you are now. Roshan has known me since I was twenty-two and confused about most things. He is, in the way of old friends, the one person I can be honest with in the particular way that honesty requires context.
Leaving Vadodara
On the last morning, Roshan drove me to the station. We stopped for chai at a tapri near the station that he has been going to since he was a teenager, and the chai was excellent, and we did not talk very much because there was not very much left to say.
He has promised to visit me before the year is out. I believe him more than I used to believe the ten years of promises about Vadodara, because now I know that when Roshan Patel tells you something is worth the trip, you should just go.
I am already planning the return.