A Palace in the Fields

June 27, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe2 Comments

Discovering the Princely State of Utelia

For almost six months now, I have travelled to Lothal believing I understood the history of the landscape around me. I mean, what more could there possibly be to these vast stretches of flat fields than the world’s oldest port?

I knew it as the land of an ancient civilisation: a place of dockyards, beads, trade routes and buried streets. The villages that punctuated the journey felt like markers along the road—familiar, yet unremarkable.

Then, last week, I learnt that one of those villages had once been a princely state!

Utelia.

This unassuming village, which from my brief visit appeared to be little more than a scattered collection of houses surrounded by endless fields and the dried-up bed of the Bhogavo River*, was once a small estate ruled by the Vaghelas. I was equally surprised to discover that a palace still stands there amid quiet lanes and cultivated fields, only a short distance from the ruins of one of the world’s earliest ports and the upcoming museum at Lothal.

How I ended up in the village, why I found myself walking along the dry riverbed, and what circumstances led me there are stories I would rather not disclose. Some adventures, after all, are best left discreet.

But there I was, standing in the plain, looking up at a domed palace with elegant arched windows, wondering what an Indo-Saracenic structure of such scale and grandeur was doing in what appeared to be a parched and forgotten landscape.

Stories on the Road

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe6 Comments

Ever since I moved from Mumbai to Dholka, my commute scenes have changed from the crowded chatter of local trains to the typical slow village mornings, where I get to hear birds chirp and see cattle being herded, kids running around, ladies fetching water and men starting off their long day in the fields.

The drive from Dholka to Saragwala is not particularly remarkable on a map. It is a road that bends through villages most people would simply pass through — Begva, Khot, Arnej, Jawaraj, Gundi, Saragwala — names painted on old signboards, sometimes fading into the same dusty browns as the landscape around them.

There are two prominent roads that we often take while travelling to and fro office. One is a state highway that snakes through villages and then there is the Ahmedabad–Dholera Expressway that can get me to Saragwala much faster. While the latter offers smoother roads, less interruption, fewer people and fewer turns, it is the former that I enjoy taking.

Highways and expressways are designed for efficiency. They flatten distance, reduce interruptions and make movement cleaner and faster. In cities like Mumbai, one wants distance from the noise and the endless traffic. In fact, I would have loved to have had personalised private roads and trains taking me to and fro from work! Hahah…

But here… I think the chaos is the texture of life.

Living Through 46°C: One Drink at a Time

May 5, 2026May 5, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe15 Comments

I thought I understood heat.

I had heard the stories of Gujarat summers where the walls stay warm till midnight, where the loo blows like a hairdryer set to maximum, where stepping out at noon feels like walking into a white-hot blur. Relatives had warned me often enough. But there’s a difference between hearing about 46°C and living through it.

Here, mornings don’t begin cool, they begin less hot. I wake up slightly sweaty despite the AC running through the night. The water from the tap is already warm, as if the pipes themselves have given up on the idea of relief. By 9 a.m., the sun is already harsh enough to make you squint through sunglasses.

Town Mouse and Country Mouse – Dholka Edition

April 1, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe12 Comments

I’ve been hearing about potato chips a lot lately.

Not the packed kind. But the kind that starts with sacks of potatoes and involves peeling, slicing, drying, storing. In kilos. Plural. The first time it came up, I instinctively slotted it into a “lot of unnecessary work” category in my head. The kind of thing you do if you absolutely have to (or not even then) or maybe as a one-off, slightly ambitious weekend plan that you later regret.

Except… no one here was treating it like that. It’s not even considered as “extra.” It’s just something that needs to be done alongside everything else that also needs to be done. And no one seems particularly overwhelmed by it.

A lot of the people I work with aren’t from big metropolitan cities. They’re from towns and smaller cities, places that are not necessarily rural, not even as small as Dholka. But they are from places where certain ways of living haven’t been cut down for convenience.

Udaipur: The Trip That Planned Itself

March 27, 2026March 27, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe5 Comments

There are trips you plan for months with meticulously saved pins, bookmarked cafés, colour-coded itineraries.

And then there are trips like this one. This trip was not planned. At least not for me.

This one began as a passing conversation on a Friday morning. A bunch of colleagues were casually talking about heading to Udaipur for the weekend. For me it seemed like the kind of a plan that usually sounds exciting at 9 AM and disappears by 11.

Except this one didn’t.

Ahalya

March 9, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe6 Comments

The story of Ahalya is one of the most haunting episodes from the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. Over centuries it has been told and retold in many forms, sometimes portraying her as guilty, sometimes as innocent, and sometimes simply as a woman caught in circumstances beyond her control.

This short piece is my attempt to imagine those long centuries of silence from Ahalya’s own perspective.

Between Two Skies: A Mumbaikar in Dholka

March 5, 2026March 5, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe22 Comments

Living in Dholka is often a roller-coaster ride of emotions.

Most days, I love the quiet stillness of this town. I love living alone. There is something oddly satisfying about the independence. And yet, sometimes, it can be lonely.

The loneliness becomes most apparent when someone from Mumbai comes to visit. The moment they arrive, the house feels alive again. The two days they stay pass in a blur of laughter, long conversations, shared meals, and a familiar comfort that only people from home can bring.

But a few hours before they are meant to leave, a small pit begins to form in my stomach.

Suddenly, I feel the urge to ask them to stay a little longer. Or, more dramatically, to pack my bags and simply go back to Mumbai with them.

Faith, Folklore, and a Diverted Railway Line

February 21, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe18 Comments

In India, every nook and corner seems to hold a story. People and their lives are deeply entwined with both the physical and the metaphysical worlds around them. It is the people, their beliefs, conventions, and collective memory that make places come alive. Otherwise, it’s just a tree. Or a road. Or a railway track. It is the stories layered onto them that give them character.

Perhaps that is why I enjoy speaking to locals. They carry versions of the world that don’t exist on maps or information boards. And that makes their stories interesting.

For someone from Mumbai, where the city’s lifeline is its local trains, I was oddly excited the first time I saw a railway crossing on the way to my office from Dholka. Rail tracks, for me, are not just infrastructure they are routine.

And as it often happens here, a story sprang from that small observation.

My driver pointed toward a turning near Arnej and said, almost casually,
“Boot Bhavani ka mandir hai yahan. Railway line bhi unke chakkar mein mud gayi thi.” (There’s a temple here. The railway line bent because of it.)

The Day We Woke Up at 5 AM for Chaos

February 14, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe12 Comments

Living away from home does strange things to weekends. You either sleep through them, work through them, or suddenly decide to drive somewhere at sunrise without thinking it through.

A few days earlier, our motley group of archaeologists, architects, engineers, and project people held together by deadlines and long site days, had been having one of those casual conversations that start with banter and quietly drift into truth. Someone mentioned how isolated life out here can feel (we are in Saragwala, a small village near Dholka, Ahemdabad). We’re far from “civilisation”, and once work ends, the day ends. No spontaneous meet-ups, no late coffee runs, no city chaos to disappear into.

We laughed it off. Like always.

Then someone said, “Let’s go somewhere this weekend.”

And that’s how the “plan” to visit Nal Sarovar happened.

Except… it wasn’t really a plan.

Kindness of Strangers — The People of Dholka

February 6, 2026February 14, 2026 Ashwini Nawathe10 Comments

When I first moved to Dholka, I did not expect to be held by a town like this. And the credit goes entirely to the people around me, who slowly began to fill the unfamiliarity with warmth. My neighbours. My driver. The maids. The man who delivers the water camper. The istriwala. The hotel staff near my house. The salesperson at the local departmental store.

Now I understand, in the most practical way, what we mean when we say “Man is a social animal” and that “it takes a village.”