The interviews and reporting for this feature were conducted in 2024.

The palace was overgrown with brambles; the manor barely visible through the forests that threatened to suffocate it. Even the highest points of the castle hadn’t been spared. Wild plants held the towers in a vice-like grip. In some places, the roof had crumbled; in others it had shattered, closing off entrances and exits. No one knew for sure what the house held within it. Were there wild beasts lurking inside? Or something more ferocious?

As much as it sounds like an excerpt from one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the incident is a real-life scene that awaited Pallab Roy (60) and his family when they revisited their ancestral palace in Kasim Bazar, Murshidabad, West Bengal. The 300-year-old architecture had fallen into a state of despair since its last occupant, Pallab’s grandfather Raja Kamalaranjan Roy, passed away in 1993.

Pallab has my unwavering attention as he narrates his story, a tale that takes me back to an Enid Blyton adventure. He, along with his parents Prosanta Kumar and Supriya Roy, his wife Sudeshna, his son Saurav, and his daughter-in-law Priya, would in the coming days take upon them the arduous task of restoring the Cossimbazar Palace of the Roys (Rajbari) to its former glory. The goal was to turn this spectral ruin into a liveable space.

‘Operation clean-up’: Battling snakes and lizards

“We began approaching one room at a time,” Pallab says as he recalls the renovation process. However, it was only when ‘operation clean-up’ commenced that the family could ascertain the extent of the devastation. The years of isolation had taken a toll on the royal beauty.

Insects, five-inch thick layers of dust and crumbling roofs marred the family’s efforts to restore what had once been a symbol of grandeur. “The place was infested with snakes and monitor lizards,” Pallab exclaims.

As the family scoured the rooms of the ancestral palace, attempting to identify the degree of cleaning each required, they were met with more surprises, or rather shocks. “Some rooms’ arches were blocked with bricks. When we managed to get into the rooms, we noticed that the doors and windows had vanished. We guessed that they had been vandalised or eaten by termites. Even some of the supporting beams were missing,” Pallab recalls. The cleaning spree went on for years, yielding three rooms that were deemed fit to live in.

Initially, the family decided to turn the ancestral palace into a guesthouse. However, Pallab explains that the plan flopped as social media wasn’t as popular back then and most people’s first choice wasn’t a guest house. It seemed like the 18th-century........

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