Arriving in Puri, which is a charming coastal city in Odisha, I had a clear objective: to discover abandoned places that often tell forgotten stories.
The abandoned hotel on Puri Beach
The first sight was an old hotel a few steps away from the beach. With its windows now blind and its walls consumed by salt, the building stood there like a tired colossus, overlooking the sea. The interior was a series of bare rooms, stained by moisture, and filled with windblown sand. The waves, in the silence, resonated like a distant echo through the emptiness of those deserted spaces.
The summer residence of Kankhya Pracir Roychoudhury
A little later, along a more hidden dirt road, I came upon an old residence, what some locals called ‘Kankhya Pracir Roychoudhury’s house’. When I asked to enter, the locals tried to dissuade me, with suspicious looks and vague phrases. Pretending to be a journalist working on a report, I managed to convince them.
Inside, the ancient residence had been engulfed by nature: lianas climbed up the window jambs, intertwining along the corridors and forming makeshift arches between the rooms. What was once a place of life and wealth was now nothing more than a repository of rubbish and forgotten relics. The remains of the decorations told of a noble past, a past that seemed far away as I moved through the debris.
Once outside, an elderly man told me that this had been one of the many houses of a raja, a local king. The name of Kankhya Pracir Roychoudhury may have been forgotten by most, but the mystery and charm of his summer retreat endures.
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