When I heard of Mayfair Tea Resort, situated in the mountainous lap of Eastern India, it reminded me of the Victorian setting in the novels of Thackeray and Wilde. On Googling, Mayfair is featured as one of the world's most affluent and expensive districts in London. As the picturesque description of the Tudor-style architecture in the novels got manifested during my stay, I quickly dived into the history of this scenic location as well as the word, Mayfair. 

The annual May Fair was held from the 1660s to the latter half of the 18th century in the rural parts of London. Later, after receiving lousy repute, the Grosvenor family acquired the land that soon developed into an upper-class residential area. 

Interestingly one of the churches, St. George's has seen Shelley, as well as Disraeli, tie the knot. In fact,  Brown's, one of London's oldest hotels, witnessed Alexander Graham Bell making the first phone call in 1876. Agatha Christie and Sir Rudyard Kipling have written sections of their novels while their stay in Brown's. 

While galleries, museums, retail etc mushroomed in Mayfair, it also has been a setting in a number of popular novels. In Thackeray's The Newcomes, May Fair is the home of Sir Brian. Other handfuls of novels are P.G.Wodehouse's The Mating Season (1949), Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest and The Picture of Dorian Grey. 

The MAYFAIR group of hotels in India captivated me by coalescing vintage with the modern. The storybook-styled English cottage sophistically crafted with wooden beams held me in awe. I felt myself in a novel. The tea gardens spread over acres, the dancing peacocks, the colonial touch, Victorian-styled bathrooms, the Shiva temple and antique collectables added to the mosaic. Moreover, luxurious restaurants clicked with the memory of the sparkling dining scene from the movie Titanic. It truly was a collage.