Before he was sultan, Ghazi Malik was a feudatory of the Khalji rulers of Delhi -- a Turco-Afghan dynasty that had governed northern India since the late thirteenth century. The story goes that during a walk with his Khalji master, Ghazi Malik pointed to a hillock in southern Delhi and suggested that the king build a fortress there. The king laughed and told Ghazi Malik to build it himself when he became king. In 1321, Ghazi Malik did exactly that. He drove out the Khaljis, assumed the title Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, and founded the Tughlaq dynasty. His first order of business was the construction of a fortified city on that same hillock -- a city beautiful enough to impress his subjects and strong enough to repel the Mongol raiders who had been terrorizing northern India for decades. He connected his new capital to the Grand Trunk Road, the ancient highway linking Kabul to Bengal, ensuring that Tughlaqabad would sit at the crossroads of trade and military power.

Trouble began almost immediately. The revered Sufi mystic Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya was building a stepwell -- a baoli -- at his residence, and many of Delhi's laborers worked on it by night. Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq wanted every available hand on his fort. To force the workers to stop, he banned the sale of kerosene, cutting off the light they needed for nighttime construction. Nizamuddin's response was not compliance but prophecy: the curse that the fort would remain desolate, inhabited only by nomads. When the sultan departed for a military campaign in Bengal, he vowed to punish the saint upon his return. Nizamuddin offered a second, quieter pronouncement: "Hunuz Dilli dur ast" -- Delhi is still far off. The words carried the weight of certainty rather than defiance, as though the saint already knew what would happen on the road home.

Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq's campaign in Bengal was a success, and he turned homeward in triumph. At Kara in Uttar Pradesh, his son Muhammad bin Tughlaq came to meet him. A celebratory pavilion -- a shamiana -- had been erected for the occasion. According to the medieval chroniclers, the structure collapsed on the sultan, killing him and his younger son in 1324. Whether the collapse was an accident, an assassination arranged by the prince, or the fulfillment of Nizamuddin's curse depends on which account you trust. What is certain is that Muhammad bin Tughlaq inherited the throne and showed little interest in his father's fortress city. By 1327, Tughlaqabad was abandoned. The curse, it seemed, had come true.

Even in ruin, Tughlaqabad's scale is imposing. The fort was divided into three distinct zones: a wider city area where houses were arranged along a rectangular grid between massive gates, a citadel crowned by the tower known as Bijai-Mandal with its underground passages still intact below, and a palace quarter that held the royal residences. South of the main fortress, an artificial lake once stretched between the walls and a fortified outpost containing the mausoleum of Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq himself. The tomb remains well preserved and is connected to the fort by an elevated causeway 600 feet long, carried on 27 arches across what was once water. In the twentieth century, the Mehrauli-Badarpur Road was punched through the causeway, severing the tomb from the fort it was built to guard. To the southeast stand the remains of Adilabad, a secondary fortress built by Muhammad bin Tughlaq between 1325 and 1351.

Today, the vast majority of Tughlaqabad is inaccessible. Dense thorny vegetation has reclaimed the interior, and illegal settlements have encroached on the former city area, particularly around its lakes. The walls remain massive -- built of enormous blocks of stone, they dwarf the surrounding neighborhood and stand as one of the most substantial medieval fortifications in India. The fort sits within the Northern Aravalli leopard wildlife corridor, a chain of green spaces stretching from the Sariska Tiger Reserve to Delhi, and its wild edges shelter species that the sultans never anticipated. Abandoned open-pit mines in the surrounding Delhi Ridge have filled with water, creating dozens of small lakes in the forested hills. The irony would not have been lost on Nizamuddin Auliya: the fortress designed to project imperial permanence has become, seven hundred years later, exactly what the saint predicted -- a place where wildness, not power, holds the ground.