India, May 3 -- For decades, reporters were obsessed with the aristocratic family who lived in Malcha Mahal, a medieval hunting lodge, without electricity or running water, in Delhi's Ridge forest. [Begum Wilayat Mahal and her children Princess Sakina and Prince Ali Raza (who called himself Prince Cyrus) claimed to be descendants of the last nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, and his freedom fighter wife Hazrat Mahal. Previously, for a decade, they had occupied the first-class waiting room of the New Delhi railway station, demanding that some of the properties of the erstwhile House of Awadh, usurped by the British in 1856, be restored to them. In 1986, the family moved to the dilapidated Malcha Mahal. Wilayat allegedly committed suicide by swallowing crushed diamonds in 1993. But Sakina and Ali Raza lived there for the rest of their lives, more than two decades.] The siblings only gave interviews to foreign journalists, but you spoke to Ali Raza for a story published in 2014... Kumar: There was this rumour that Sakina had died. I used to cover minorities in the city, so it kind of fell to my beat. I could never compete with the mainstream. Working with a smaller newspaper, I didn't have the resources to go after the big stories. I used to keep an eye out for offbeat ones. So, Sakina had died. I first saw the news on the internet. Someone had written about it in a blog, and I thought I would just check. I managed to call Ali Raza. He spoke to me a couple of times. I knew he used to give interviews to foreign journalists. I sometimes think that if I had asked Aletta to come with me, maybe he would have met me. It didn't happen, it was only phone calls. Kumar: We must have made quite a few trips, at least a dozen. The place was a mess. There were faeces everywhere, and cobwebs; a lot of clothes. There were bits of paper with phone numbers, and flyers for art exhibitions. There were also newspaper cuttings - they were interested in the environment and foreign news, especially about Israel and Palestine. Their whole lives were scattered there, in these bits and pieces. Andre: A BBC journalist broke the news of Ali Raza's death, approximately one month after he had died. Abhi went a few days after that. For a long time, their things remained there - because even two years later, when we went to Malcha Mahal with Kasim [who worked as their servant for many years from their time at the railway station to the early years at Malcha Mahal], there were still clothes lying around and he could point out, "This belonged to Sakina. That belonged to me." The more valuable things disappeared. Kumar: The dining table did. And the carpets were cut up, I think, over a period of time, and then taken. Kumar: After the Ellen Barry story, I wanted to respond in some way, because I felt that there were loopholes in it. By then, I was already in touch with Kasim, and he had agreed to talk to us. Andre: We were already working on a piece about Malcha Mahal, including the history of the House of Awadh and the royal family that lived there, for Atlas Obscura. When the Ellen Barry story came out, the editors thought we should make it even more about the monument and less about them, because we could not go against the story or compete with it. We knew there was more to it; that if we wanted to really do the story, we'd have to dig deeper. Kumar: It was quite intense. Her broken syntax didn't throw me off, I was more than willing to make sense of it. But it's very depressing. It circles around Wilayat's death. At one point Sakina simply gives up, especially after Ali Raza burns the mother's corpse. There is real madness here at times. Some parts are extremely hard to read. It gets a bit convoluted, especially where she's actually writing poetically. But other parts can be understood. There are interesting tidbits: their relationship with the mother, how Sakina stopped combing her hair... Their knowledge of history was quite accurate. Her emotional judgments were accurate too. It's interesting how Wilayat transferred her delusions to her children. They were educated, came from an elite family. They could have made real lives for themselves. Andre: I still find that hard to understand completely. I understand her background, but you're right that the kids, they were in Kashmir, they went to school. And in Promilla Kalhan's Hindustan Times article from the railway station in 1975, they said they had ambitions to become doctors. They must have been in their early twenties by then. One can also wonder, if at that time somebody had made an effort to kind of get them out of there, if it could have happened for them. But then they had such a deep attachment to their mother, maybe that made it hard. If she had accepted a house in Lucknow in the 1970s [which the government offered, to placate her], maybe it would all have turned out differently. Kumar: Society failed them at some level... When somebody's identity is so scattered - Shia, Sunni, Kashmiri, Indian, Pakistani - you cannot be accommodated. It's just too much navigating these ideas drastically different from each other. Some people slip through the cracks....