When I was a kid, in the early ’90s, the National Museum of Natural History was, without limitation or exaggeration, my favourite place in the whole world. I was the sort of nerdy child who’d whisper taxonomic names to himself and blithely discuss gestation periods of mammals at family dinners. I would bother my parents to take me to the museum with my animal books, where I’d compare the mounted specimens with what was on the page. The staff would encourage us to stroke Mohan the Rhinoceros at the entrance (touching an exhibit felt deliciously transgressive) and then I would climb through the building.

The building felt like a giant spiral to that child, turning through the cosmos, the montages of rainforest, mountain and ocean. Big cats crouched in leaves, their eyes gleaming, the skeletons of dolphins and sea cows hung from the ceilings. I think my favourite creature in the whole building was the platypus—its strangeness reaffirmed for me that the books did not lie. And it always seemed unfair when we got to the upper storeys with the human beings—hunting, fishing, the birth of agriculture; these creatures were not like the others. They did not belong.

The building felt like a giant spiral to that child, turning through the cosmos, the montages of rainforest, mountain and ocean.

Two years ago, I went back to the Natural History museum with a girl—a sort of affected hipster date. I had promised her a Wes Anderson wonderland, the innocence of my childhood.

From the entrance itself, it was a world under water. We were submerged in a dim light, reflected off the green walls. Mohan the Rhinoceros had been rubbed smooth. The big cats were stuffed amateurishly in strange, unnatural positions. Their ears had fallen off, their glass eyes had fallen out, their skin had patches where the fur had fallen out. A jaguar on a branch had tilted almost perpendicular to the floor. A gharial under glass had acquired an even inch of dust on its skin. The paints on the montages had faded and the plastic leaves had somehow turned brown. There were no children anywhere, only an eerie silence. It had gotten so bad that for a moment, I thought the plastic painted penguin trash can was yet another horror of taxidermy. We hightailed it out of there, and never went back.

Maybe I should never have gone back and let 20 years of reality fall onto my childhood. But the museum shouldn’t have been allowed to go to pieces. It was wrong to neglect a place that meant so much to so many children for so long. When I read about the fire today, all I could think was that that museum was dead long before it burned. And that breaks my heart.

Satyajit Sarna is a writer, lawyer and cocktail socialist based in Delhi.