Sasaram

Farid Khan, the son of an Afghan jagirdar in Sasaram, earned the name Sher — 'tiger' — for killing one unarmed, rose through Mughal service, and then threw the Mughals out of India. In five years as emperor (1540–45) he built the Grand Trunk Road from Bengal to the Indus, minted the first rupee, mapped and surveyed the land revenue, and set up the postal system the Mughals and British later took credit for. Humayun, whom he defeated twice, got the empire back only after Sher Shah's death at the siege of Kalinjar.

The mausoleum he commissioned in his hometown was finished three months after he died. It is the climax of the Lodi-Sur style — an octagon on a square terrace in the middle of an artificial lake, bigger than any Mughal tomb before the Taj — and is widely regarded as the finest Indo-Islamic building between the Delhi Sultanate and Humayun's Tomb. His father Hasan Khan Sur lies in a smaller tomb a kilometre away; his son Salim Shah's tomb, unfinished, stands in another lake nearby.

Sasaram is a dusty junction town on the Grand Trunk Road that has never really noticed the masterpiece in its middle. You walk down from the road, through a gate, and the lake opens with the tomb floating on it — grey-red sandstone, three storeys of arcades and chhatris, a dome that reads as a mountain. A stone causeway crosses from the north bank. Inside, the octagonal hall is high and dim, with traces of the original coloured glaze, and the acoustics return a whisper from the far wall.

The town is also the base for the Kaimur edge: Rohtasgarh fort on its plateau, the Dhua Kund and Manjhar Kund waterfalls, and Mundeshwari temple. The Tarachandi shrine in a cleft of the hills south of town is where Sasaram's own people go at dusk.