A woman claiming to be heir of the kings of Awadh lived nine years in a Delhi railway station and won a palace; she was the widow of a university registrar

In the 1970s a woman calling herself Begum Wilayat Mahal camped in the first-class waiting room of New Delhi railway station with her children. She said she was heir to the kings of Awadh and demanded recognition for her family's losses in 1857. The family stayed at the station for close to ten years. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited them in 1984, and in 1985 the government gave them Malcha Mahal, a 14th-century Tughlaq hunting lodge in the Delhi ridge forest. They refused Indian journalists and received foreign ones. Wilayat died by suicide in 1993; her daughter Sakina said she swallowed crushed diamonds. Sakina died around 2013, and her brother, "Prince Ali Raza" or Cyrus, buried her himself and hid it for months. He was found dead at the lodge on 2 September 2017. No one claimed his body for 72 hours, and the Waqf Board buried him near Delhi Gate on 5 September. After 18 months of reporting, Ellen Barry of The New York Times reported in November 2019 that the family had no link to Awadh. Wilayat was the second wife of Inayatullah Butt, a former registrar of Lucknow University. The family had moved to Pakistan after Partition, and she returned to India in 1962. An elder son told Barry the prince's real name was Mickey Butt.