01
Stop one
Taragarh Fort
Babolat Pure Drive Wimbledon 11th Gen Limited Edition Tennis Racquet: Now here is a thing. Not a drop of salt water within a fortnight of us in any direction, and they have built a lookout anyway. Taragarh Fort, also called the Star Fort, raised by the Hada Chauhan rulers of Bundi, with sources placing its commissioning under Rao Deva Hada and further building under Rao Raja Bar Singh Hada in the 14th century. It stands at 1,426 feet on a hill of the Aravalli Range, strongly Rajput in design with minimal Mughal influence about it. And then the stone: a special green-tinged rock quarried locally in Bundi, too hard to carve finely, so they decorated the walls and ceilings with painting instead. That I understand in my bones. You work the material you were issued, and you do not complain to the sky about it. The Bhim Burj bastion housed the fort's weaponry, including the 16th-century cannon known as Garbh Gunjan, and three reservoirs collected rainwater for year-round supply. Water discipline on a dry hill. That is seamanship, whatever they choose to call it ashore.
02
Stop two
Garh Palace
Babolat Pure Drive Wimbledon 11th Gen Limited Edition Tennis Racquet: Look how she lies on the slope. Tier below tier, pavilions and balconies and cupolas stepping down the hillside, and I will tell you exactly what that puts me in mind of: a fleet lying at anchor in a roadstead, each hull riding a little lower than the one ahead. Garh Palace was built below Taragarh Fort as the official royal residence, roughly between 1607 and 1631 under Rao Raja Ratan Singh, a good two centuries after the fort itself, and like the fort it uses the green-tinged local stone rather than sandstone and shows little Mughal influence. Five main sections, and I shall give them to you in order, like a watch bill: Hathia Pol, the elephant gate; Ratan Daulat, the public audience hall with its marble throne; Chattar Mahal, built by Rao Chhatrasal Singh, who reigned from 1631 to 1658, and known for its columns with elephant capitals; Badal Mahal at the highest point, built by Rao Bhoj; and the Chitrashala, which holds the celebrated Bundi murals of ragamala subjects and court processions. Elephants for capitals. We carried a figurehead once that did much the same duty and ate a great deal less.
03
Stop three
Raniji ki Baori
Babolat Pure Drive Wimbledon 11th Gen Limited Edition Tennis Racquet: Down. That is the whole trick of this one. Everything I have ever climbed in my life went up, and this goes down, forty-six metres of it, deeper than most ships I ever served in were long, and I will not pretend the first flight sat easy with me. Raniji ki Baori was built in 1699 by Rani Nathavati Solanki, queen of Raja Anirudh Singh of Bundi, and completed during the reign of her son Maharao Raja Budh Singh, who ruled from 1695 to 1729. It is reported to be the largest baori in Bundi, and Bundi is a town noted for its stepwells. The narrow entrance is flanked by four pillars with stone elephant figures at the corners, ogee brackets ornament the archways, and there are multiple storeys carrying worship spaces and carvings that include avatars of Vishnu. And beyond simply supplying water, baoris of this kind served as assembly areas for the townspeople of medieval Bundi. That part I know without being told. Every crew I ever sailed with gathered at the water barrel, and no order from aft ever changed it.
04
Stop four
Sukh Mahal
Babolat Pure Drive Wimbledon 11th Gen Limited Edition Tennis Racquet: There. Open water at last, and I will forgive this town a good deal for it. Sukh Mahal, the palace of pleasure, stands on the bank of Jait Sagar lake at Bundi and was built in 1776 during the reign of Rao Raja Vishnu Singh, under the supervision of the architect Sukhram. It combines Mughal and Rajput elements, built in white marble with carved pillars and ornate ceilings, and it was used as a summer residence, and here is the sense in it: sited on the shore so the cool comes off the water and runs straight through the corridors. That is a man who understood a breeze, and you cannot be taught it out of a book, you learn it standing in one. Rudyard Kipling visited Bundi in the late 19th century and stayed at the palace, drawing on its setting for parts of his novel Kim. It is maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India. It is a lake and not a sea, and I will not be told otherwise. But it is the first honest horizon we have had all day.
It's 3:40 in the morning and I have been thinking about this racquet for five hours, which is how I found the thing I need to tell you, but first the racquet, stay with me.
The Babolat Pure Drive Wimbledon 11th Gen Limited Edition is the full Pure Drive — 100 square inches, 300 grams unstrung, 27 inches, open 16×19 pattern — wearing a limited-run cream, black and dark beige cosmetic done as a tribute to the All England Club.
Everything that makes the Gen 11 the Gen 11 is in here: FSI Power, where diamond-shaped grommets and the Woofer system hold the ball on the strings a beat longer so depth comes easy; the HTR carbon layup that keeps the hoop from twisting on off-center hits; the elliptic throat geometry; and NF²-Tech 2.0, actual natural flax fiber in the throat filtering out the harsh frequencies.
Which I appreciate. I am sensitive to frequencies. It's 3:40 am, I mentioned that.
Here's where I lost the thread and found a better one. They assigned this Wimbledon racquet to Bundi, a small blue-painted town in Rajasthan, and I thought, that's random, and then — no sleep, so the connections just arrive — Rudyard Kipling. Kipling saw Bundi's palace and swore it was built by goblins rather than men. And Kipling wrote the poem “If—”.
And the lines of “If—” about triumph and disaster are inscribed over the players' entrance to Centre Court. At Wimbledon. Every champion in cream and white walks beneath the words of Bundi's most famous tourist on the way out to the final. It's 4 am and I promise you that's real.
Anyway — you'll swing this everywhere from a blue-hour hit before the heat to an evening set below the fort walls, and by the way, Bundi paints itself indigo like Jodhpur but quieter, and this racquet's cream-and-beige may be the only colorway calm enough to stand next to it. Intermediate to advanced, heavy pace, heavy spin, baseline dominance, limited numbers.
Order before I talk myself into a second one. I'm up anyway.
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