I DREAM OF INDIA

Palaces, peacocks, tigers, and jewels: few places have the power to bewitch children quite like Rajasthan, in northwestern India. Flora Stubbs takes her kids on a spring break like no other.

- Flora Stubbs

Were are the two main things I'm excited about in India," said Leo, our six-year-old. "Painting, and elephants."

Leo and his nine-year-old sister, Stella, are both into art, and in the weeks leading up to our spring break trip, my husband, Dave, and I had told them we'd be visiting a miniature painting studio in Rajasthan. But elephants-and specifically riding an elephant? No one is quite sure where that idea came from. Yet somehow, by the time we set off last March, there the elephants sat: kings of Leo's imagination, and top of his India to-do list.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that in 2023, putting elephants to work as tourist vehicles isn't seen as a great or even particularly acceptable thing to do, from an animal welfare perspective. So when, about five days into our trip, the four of us arrived at Amber Fort outside Jaipur to find that the sorry, chained-up herd that used to carry visitors up to the 16th-century palace on the hill was nowhere to be seen, I breathed a secret sigh of relief.

Leo, however, was downcast. Our driver, Mr. Singh, could feel it; we all could. Singh, a mustachioed older gentleman in a beige uniform, drove us up to the palace gates instead, and in we all went. There was a Hindu festival that day, and a crowd of worshippers had gathered around a temple in the central courtyard. Over loudspeakers, a sermon reverberated off the fortress walls. Further inside the complex, we stopped to take a picture of the glittering Sheesh Mahal, or Mirror Palace. Nearby, we came across the hammam once used by the fort's founder, Maharaja Man Singh, and, to the kids' inevitable fascination, his latrine. We clambered up narrow stone staircases and along cool, dark passageways, at one point popping out in a turret where a family of gray langurs swung and leaped from side to side, and the sheer walls of the fort fell away to a patchwork of rooftops hundreds of feet below.