The “last prince of Awadh” who lived in abject penury was found dead on September 2 in Delhi’s ‘Malcha Mahal,’ a Tughlak-era hunting lodge tucked deep inside a patch of forest overrun by moss and disrepair.
The news of the death was broken by a section of the media on November 6, over two months after a team of police officers found Cyrus lying motionless inside the derelict 14th century structure.
He was the last surviving member of a family that traced its lineage to the royals of Awadh — a claim that was never verified.
Cyrus had been staying here since 1985, after his imperious mother Begum Wilayat Mahal, who allegedly swallowed crushed diamonds to kill herself in the early 1990s, forced the then Union government to provide them accommodation that behove their royal antecedents.
The Begum started camping in a first class waiting room of the New Delhi Railway Station in the 1970s, demanding recognition for the sacrifice made by her family during the 1857 war of independence.
Sometime in 1985, the Begum and her two children — Cyrus and his sister Sakina — moved into the lodge, which was then known as ‘Bistadari ruins’.