Siri

Alauddin Khalji built Siri while Mongol armies were camped outside Delhi, and the speed shows in the story that grew around it: that the heads of Mongol prisoners were laid in its foundations, which is where the name is supposed to come from. It was the first of Delhi's cities built on fresh ground rather than inside an older one, and for a few decades it was the seat of the most powerful sultanate India had seen.

Its afterlife was less kind. Two centuries later Sher Shah Suri's builders treated Siri as a quarry for stone, and the walls went into other people's cities. What is left is fragments — sections of rubble wall surfacing between houses in the urban village of Shahpur Jat, and, two kilometres west, the great tank Alauddin dug to keep the place in water.