The Hawa Mahal Jaipur - The palace of the Winds

This place is so alive with history that you often find yourself drifting off and thinking what it would have been like to have been living in these forts, palaces and gardens.
The recurring thought I have is that for a privileged woman, life had one and only one advantage and that was the communality of other women. This is reflected in the gardens made for them and the hammam baths and all the beautiful food and clothes that they shared.
That is all. I look at the Taj and I look at the Hawa Mahal and so many other places and again and again I am thankful for my origins and my timing on this planet.The Palace of the Winds brought this sharply into focus. This was a place of perforated screens through which the women could watch what was going on in the town.
I have tried and tried to look through the lattice work and all I get are fragmented visions of the world, maddeningly insufficient- that is if I can look through at all. There were so many places that women were just not allowed to go.

It is beautiful and it is worth visiting but it is always a stark reminder to me of constraints and contrasts which simply do not sit well with my own vision of what a woman's life should be.