Four stops before the checkout

Dhar, India

Stop one

Dhar Fort

Dunlop CX 200 Tennis Racquet: Come in out of that sun, sweetheart, you have gone quite pink. This fort was raised by Muhammad bin Tughluq, Sultan of Delhi, in the fourteenth century, on ground that already held the earlier stronghold of Dharagiri, because Dhar was the capital of the Paramara dynasty and of King Bhoja in the eleventh century, and a great builder he was too. Inside there is a rock-cut cistern and a palace whose pillared porch dates from the mid-seventeenth century, with a gateway added in 1684 and 1685 under Aurangzeb Alamgir. The medieval temple sculpture recovered around the town is laid out in an open-air museum within the walls. Sit a moment, my love. Have you eaten anything today?

Stop two

Lat Masjid

Dunlop CX 200 Tennis Racquet: Now this one has a story and you will want to be sitting down for it. Dilawar Khan, the first independent sultan of Malwa, built it as Dhar's Friday mosque in 1405, assembling it from the stonework of earlier buildings that had been taken down, waste not, as my own mother used to say. They call it the Pillar Mosque because of the iron column lying beside it: forge-welded iron, close to thirteen metres tall to begin with, comparable in technique to the famous iron pillar at Delhi. One of its inscriptions records the Mughal emperor Akbar visiting in 1598, during his campaign towards the Deccan. It survives in three fragments now, poor thing. Mind your feet around it.

Stop three

Munj Talab and the Pawar cenotaphs

Dunlop CX 200 Tennis Racquet: Mind the edge there, dear, it is further down than it looks. This tank is traditionally connected with Vakpati Munja, the tenth-century Paramara king of Malwa, and it sits within the ring of ancient tanks and moats that once surrounded the circular walled city, a plan laid out at the very beginning of the ninth century. Those domed cenotaphs along the water are memorials to the Pawar rulers, the Maratha house that held Dhar State from the eighteenth century and claimed descent from the Paramaras, and they date from about the same period as the Pawars' city palace of around 1875. Families do keep track of one another, and quite right too. Ours certainly does.

Stop four

Jheera Bagh Palace

Dunlop CX 200 Tennis Racquet: And this is where the Pawars lived, built in the 1860s, though what you are looking at was substantially remodelled in the 1940s under Maharaja Anand Rao Pawar IV in a spare modern idiom, and people who know about such things call it one of the more forward-looking examples of early modern architecture in north India. Modern, in the forties, imagine. Dhar State was one of the princely states administered through the Central India Agency, whose Agency House stood out on the Indore road. Jheera Bagh has been converted into a heritage hotel and remains in the family's hands, which pleases me more than I can tell you. Take something to eat for the walk back.

The Dhar, India track

Dunlop CX 200 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Hush. Lean in. The Dunlop CX 200 prefers to be spoken of in a low voice — control racquets always do. They listen. Ninety-eight square inches of head, twenty-seven inches tip to butt, 305 grams unstrung — 11.3 ounces strung — balanced 7 points head-light so it turns in your hand like a door that opens… before you touch it. The swingweight is 314. The stiffness rating is 64.

These are not numbers, friend. These are the terms of an agreement.

The frame is a 21.5mm box beam — the old shape, the classic shape, the shape the great frames of the past still whisper through — reinforced below the 10 and 2 o'clock positions for stability, with Sonic Core made with BASF Infinergy set into the 3 and 9. Why there? Because that is where the shock gathers, child.

Dunlop's Vibroshield elastic damping quiets what remains, so when you strike, the frame goes silent… silent as the ruined halls of Dhar Fort at dusk, where Muhammad bin Tughluq's fourteenth-century ramparts still watch over the town and medieval temple sculpture lies waiting in an open-air museum inside the walls.

The 16×19 pattern carries Powergrid Stringtech+ — the crosses widened at the centre of the bed — for a pocketing, dwell-heavy response and spin you will swear was not there a moment ago. String it anywhere from 45 to 65 pounds; at 55, it speaks most clearly.

And now the part they only tell you after dark. Beside the Lat Masjid in Dhar lies an iron pillar — forge-welded eleven centuries ago, once nearly thirteen metres tall, now broken in three pieces… and it does not rust. It simply refuses. Metallurgy so far ahead of its age that no one has fully explained it — which is precisely the tradition this racquet was built in.

This was King Bhoja's city, capital of the Paramaras, and things made here were made to outlast the making.

Carry the CX 200 past the domed cenotaphs standing over the still water of Munj Talab in the last light, or up the drive of Jheera Bagh Palace, and tell me you don't feel it — the flexible inner frame pocketing the ball, the stable face sending it back low and heavy and exactly… where… you looked.

You will swing this everywhere from a dry-season morning on hard court to a hushed evening hit once the heat breaks, and by the way, it is also perfect for the walk up the drive of Jheera Bagh afterwards, because nothing this frame does is loud.

The truth, as it always is, is stranger than the story: the racquet isn't haunted. It's just engineered.

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Dunlop CX 200 Tennis Racquet

Dunlop CX 200 Tennis Racquet