Just when you think India couldn’t sock you in the nose again with its fabulousness, it does.

The Orchha sky is a deep slate grey, the kind of colour that’s so painterly you only ever see it in Indian miniatures. Outlined against it in the deepening dusk are the spires and turrets of a crumbling palace, literally rising up off an island that’s in the centre of this tiny village.

Nothing can prepare you for this first glimpse. A palace; an island; a sky that looks like a bucketful of rain: it’s so fairytale in its construction, so impossibly not-of-this-world in its whimsy, that it winds you.

The fact that the palace has fallen half to pieces and turned a million shades of decrepitude saves it from being saccharine. A far-off image of perfection gives way to a more realistic image of crumbling age close-up. Long-legged monkeys amble across impossibly high platforms, leaping with Icarus-like hubris from turret to turret.

Climbing several flights of stairs and arriving at an open platform, you surprise one of them. If it stood, it would be almost as tall as you, but it crouches defensively and bears a god-awful set of fangs again and again. Long, white monkey teeth and a rasping, desperate hiss are surprisingly fearsome.

The only other sounds are the cries of birds wheeling in the sky, returning home in the dying light. It’s like having stumbled on some abandoned princely fortress, its human inhabitants having fled hurriedly and in toto.

Crossing the bridge that connects the island to the tiny village is like crossing the Ponte Vecchio in Florence in another age altogether. It’s achingly beautiful, but there is no worldly city here, just a tiny hamlet lit up with a handful of bare electric lights. The few cars that ply the streets are curvy, retro Ambassadors – only ever in white – and the power supply in the streets is liable to fail at a moment’s notice.

It’s chill in the wind as you dodge the steaming cow turds and the other gruesome detritus that’s been ground into the mud roads by a day’s-worth of village life and a handful of rain. But your insides are warmed by the best chai you’ve had yet in India: unctuously sweet, hotter than hot, and spiked with shards of ginger.