City of Djinns

Yet he has his principles. Like his English counterpart, he is a believer in hard work. He finds it hard to understand the beggars who congregate at the lights. ‘Why these peoples not working?’ he asks. ‘They have two arms and two legs. They not handicrafted.’

‘Handicrafted?’

‘Missing leg perhaps, or only one ear.’

‘You mean handicapped?’

‘Yes. Handicrafted. Sikh peoples not like this. Sikh peoples working hard, earning money, buying car.’

Ignoring the bus hurtling towards us, he turns around and winks an enormous wink. ‘Afterwards Sikh peoples drinking whisky, looking television, eating tandoori chicken and going G.B. Road.’

The house stood looking on to a small square of hot, tropical green: a springy lawn fenced in by a windbreak of champa and ashok trees. The square was the scene for a daily routine of almost Vedic inflexibility.

Early in the morning, under a bald blue sky, the servants would walk plump dachshunds over the grass, or, duties completed, would stand about on the pavements exchanging gossip or playing cards. Then, at about nine o’clock, the morning peace would be broken by a procession of bicycle-powered vendors, each with his own distinctive street-cry: the used-newspaper collector (‘Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah!’) would be followed by the fruit seller (‘Mangoes! Lychees! Bananas! Papaya!’), the bread boy and the man with the vegetable barrow. My favourite, the cotton-fluffer, whose life revolved around the puffing up of old mattresses, would twang a Jew’s harp. On Sunday mornings an acrobat would come with his dancing bear; he had a pair of drums and when he beat them the whole square would miraculously fill with children. Early that afternoon would follow a blind man with an accordion. He would sing hymns and sacred qawwalis and sometimes the rich people would send down a servant with a handful of change.

In the late afternoon, a herd of cattle twenty or thirty strong could be seen wandering along the lane at the back of the house. There was never any herder in sight, but they would always rumble slowly past, throwing up clouds of dust. Occasionally they would collide with the household servants wobbling along the back lane on their bicycles, returning from buying groceries in Khan Market. Then followed the brief Indian dusk: a pale Camembert sun sinking down to the treeline; the smell of woodsmoke and dung cooking fires; the last raucous outbursts from the parakeets and the brahminy mynas; the first whirring, humming cicadas.

Later on, lying in bed, you could hear the chowkidars stomping around outside, banging their sticks and blowing their whistles. There were never any robberies in our part of New Delhi, and the chowkidars were an entirely redundant luxury.

But, as Mrs Puri said, you had to keep up appearances. Mr Singh also had strong views about appearances.

‘You are Britisher,’ he said, the very first time I hailed him. ‘I know you are a Britisher.’

It was late afternoon at the end of our first week in Delhi. We had just moved in and were beginning the gruelling pilgrimage through Indian government departments that all new arrivals must perform. We were late for an appointment at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, yet Mr Singh’s assertion could not go unquestioned.

‘How do you know I’m a Britisher?’

‘Because,’ said Mr Singh, ‘you are not sporting.’

‘Actually I am quite sporting,’ I replied. ‘I go for a run every day, swim in the summer …’

‘No Britisher is sporting,’ said Mr Singh, undaunted.

‘Lots of my countrymen are very keen on sport,’ I retorted.

‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘You are not catching me.’

‘We are still a force to be reckoned with in the fifteen hundred metres, and sometimes our cricket team …’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘Still you are not catching me. You Britishers are not sporting.’ He twirled the waxed curlicues of his moustache. ‘All men should be sporting a moustache, because all ladies are liking too much.’

He indicated that I should get in.

‘It is the fashion of our days,’ he said, roaring off and narrowly missing a pedestrian.

Mr Singh’s taxi stand lay behind the India International Centre, after which it took its name: International Backside Taxis. The stand was run by Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s stern and patriarchal father, and manned by Balvinder and his two plump brothers, Gurmuck and Bulwan. There was also a rota of cousins who would fill in during the weekends and at nights. Over the following months we got to know them all well, but it was Balvinder who remained our special friend.

That first week, and the week following it, Balvinder drove Olivia and myself through a merry-go-round of government departments. Together we paid daily visits to the rotting concrete hulk known as Shastri Bhavan, nerve centre of the Orwellian Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Here, in the course of nine visits, I deposited four faxes, three telexes, two envelopes of passport photographs (black and white only) and a sheaf of letters from my editor in London, all in an effort to get accredited as a foreign correspondent.

In due course, as the slow wheels of bureaucracy turned, my application did get processed—but not until about a year after the newspaper I represented had ceased publication. Undaunted, to this day Shastri Bhavan still refuses to acknowledge the downfall of the Sunday Correspondent, and continues to send its India representative daily press releases detailing the reasons for the decline in the production of Indian pig iron, or celebrating the success of the Fifth International Conference on the Goat (theme: The Goat in Rural Prosperity).

More depressing even than Shastri Bhavan is the headquarters of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited. The Telephone Nigam is India’s sole supplier of telecommunications to the outside world. Without the help of the Telephone Nigam one is stranded. This is something every person who works for the organization knows; and around this certainty has been built an empire dedicated to bureaucratic obfuscation, the perpetration of difficulty, the collection of bribes and, perhaps more than anything else, the spinning of great glistening cocoons of red tape.

It was a hot, dusty late September morning when I first entered room 311, home to Mr Ram Lal. Mr Lal was sitting beneath a poster of Mahatma Gandhi on which was written: ‘A customer is the most important visitor to our premises. He is not dependent on us, we are dependent on him.’

As if in deliberate subversion of the Mahatma’s message, Mr Lal held in his hands the Times of India, open at its sports page. The paper formed a barrier between Mr Lal and the asylumful of supplicants who were bobbing up and down in front of him, holding out chits of paper, arching their hands in a gesture of namaste or wobbling their turbans from side to side in mute frustration. A Punjabi lady sat weeping in a corner, repeating over and over again: ‘But I have a letter from the Minister of State for Communications … but I have a letter … a letter …’ Menials passed silently to and fro through the door, carrying files and sheaves of xeroxes. Behind Mr Lal, placed there for apparently purely decorative purposes, sat a dead computer.

When Mr Lal eventually deigned to lower his paper—which he did with infinite slowness, folding it into perfect quarters—he rang a bell and ordered one of his peons to bring him a cup of tea.

‘Right,’ he said, looking up for the first time. ‘Who’s first?’

A hundred hands were raised, but one voice stood out: ‘I am.’

The speaker pushed himself forward, holding together his bulging dhoti with one hand. He was an enormously fat man, perhaps seventy years old, with heavy plastic glasses and grey stubble on his chin.

‘My name is Sunil Gupta—please call me Sunny.’ He strode forward and grabbed Mr Lal by the hand, shaking it with great verve.

‘I am a nationalist,’ said Mr Gupta. ‘A nationalist and a freedom fighter. I am also an independent candidate in the forthcoming municipal elections. My election office will be opposite Western Court, adjacent to the paan shop. I want a temporary telephone connection, and would be most grateful if you could expedite.’ He stroked his belly. ‘Early action would be highly appreciated.’

‘Have you already applied for a connection?’ asked Mr Lal.

‘No, gentleman,’ said Sunny Gupta. ‘This is what I am doing now.’

‘First applications Room 101. Next, please.’

‘But,’ said Mr Gupta. ‘I have to maintain contact with my constituents. I need a phone immediately. I would be very grateful if you would expedite a VVIP connection without delay.’

‘Are you a member of the Lok Sabha?’

‘No. I …’

‘In that case you must contact Mr Dharam Vir …’

‘Gentleman, please listen …’

‘… in Room 101.’

With a great flourish, Mr Gupta pulled a much-pawed piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Gentleman,’ he said. ‘Please be looking here. This is my manifesto.’

Across the top of the piece of paper, in huge red letters, was blazoned the slogan: A NATIONALIST TO THE CORE AND A FREEDOM FIGHTER. Mr Gupta straightened his glasses and read from the charter:

‘I was a Founder Member cum Chairman of the Religious and Social Institute of India, Patna Branch …’

Mr Lal was meanwhile studying the application of the weeping Punjabi lady. He read it twice and, frowning, initialled it at the top right-hand corner: ‘See Mr Sharma for countersignature. Room 407.’

The woman broke down in a convulsion of grateful sobs. Beside her Mr Gupta was still in full flood:

‘… I am ex-member of the Publicity Committee of the All-India Congress I, Bhagalpur division. Ex-Joint Secretary of the Youth Congress Committee, Chote Nagpur, Bihar. I am a poet and a journalist. A war hero from the 1965 Indo-Pak war, Jaisalmer sector …’

‘Madam,’ continued Mr Lal. ‘Please make payment with Mr Surwinder Singh, accounts, Room 521.’

‘… I was the founder editor of Sari, the Hindi monthly for women and Kalidasa, the biannual literary journal of Patna. I have donated five acres of land for the Chote Nagpur Cow Hospital. Four times I have been jailed by the Britishers for services to Mother Bharat.’

‘If you think it is bad now,’ said Mr Lal, taking my application. ‘You should see this office on Fridays. That’s the busiest time.’

I left Mr Lal’s office at noon. By four-thirty I had queued inside a total of nine different offices, waiting in each for the magic letter, seal, signature, counter-signature, demand note, restoration order or receipt which would, at some stage in the far distant future, lead to my being granted a telephone.

‘Phone will be connected within two months,’ said Mr Lal as he shook my hand, the obstacle course completed. ‘Two months no problem. Or maybe little longer. Backlog is there.’

Mr Gupta was still sitting at the back of Mr Lal’s office. He was quiet now, though still tightly clutching at his election manifesto. I gave him a sympathetic wave as I left.

‘To think,’ he said, ‘that I was in British prison seven times with Gandhiji for this.’

At his desk, Mr Lal had returned to the sports page of the Times of India.

Although parts of the city still preserved the ways of the Mughal period or even the early Middle Ages, Delhi was nevertheless changing, and changing fast.

Mr Gupta’s world—the cosy world of the Freedom Struggle, of homespun Congress Socialism and the Non-aligned Movement—all of it was going down; driving around New Delhi you could almost feel the old order crumbling as you watched, disappearing under a deluge of Japanese-designed Maruti cars, concrete shopping plazas and high-rise buildings. Satellite dishes now outnumber the domes of the mosques and the spires of the temples. There was suddenly a lot of money about: no longer did the rich go up to Simla for the summer; they closed their apartments and headed off to London or New York.

The most visible change was in the buildings. When I first saw Delhi it was still a low-rise colonial capital, dominated by long avenues of white plaster Lutyens bungalows. The bungalows gave New Delhi its character: shady avenues of jamun and ashupal trees, low red-brick walls gave on to hundreds of rambling white colonial houses with their broken pediments and tall Ionic pillars.

One of my strongest memories from my first visit was sitting in the garden of one of the bungalows, a glass to hand, with my legs raised up on a Bombay Fornicator (one of those wickerwork planter’s chairs with extended arms, essential to every colonial veranda). In front lay a lawn dotted with croquet hoops; behind, the white bow-front of one of this century’s most inspired residential designs. Over the rooftops there was not a skyscraper to be seen. Yet I was not in some leafy suburb, but in the very centre of New Delhi. Its low-rise townscape was then unique among modern capitals, a last surviving reminder of the town planning of a more elegant age.

Now, perhaps inevitably, it was gradually being destroyed: new structures were fast replacing the bungalows; huge Legoland blocks were going up on all the arterial roads radiating from Connaught Circus. The seventeenth-century salmon-pink observatory of Rajah Man Singh—the Jantar Mantar—lay dwarfed by the surrounding high-rise towers that seemed purpose-built to obscure its view of the heavens. Over the great ceremonial way which led from Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House to India Gate now towered a hideous glass and plastic greenhouse called the Meridien Hotel.

Other, still more unsympathetic blocks were already planned. On Kasturba Gandhi Marg (originally Curzon Road) only two of the old Italianate villas still survived, and one of these was in severe disrepair. Its plaster was peeling and its garden lay untended and overgrown. In front of its gate stood a huge sign:

A PROJECT FROM THE HOUSE OF EROS

ULTRAMODERN DELUXE MULTISTOREYED

RESIDENCE APTS.

COMPLETION DATE 1994.

It was said that not one private Lutyens bungalow would survive undemolished by the turn of the century.

There were other changes, too. The damburst of western goods and ideas that were now pouring into India had brought with them an undertow of western morality. Adulterous couples now filled the public gardens; condom advertisements dominated the Delhi skyline. The Indian capital, once the last bastion of the chaperoned virgin, the double-locked bedroom and the arranged marriage, was slowly filling with lovers: whispering, blushing, occasionally holding hands, they loitered beneath flowering trees like figures from a miniature. Delhi was starting to unbutton. After the long Victorian twilight, the sari was beginning to slip.

Other changes in the city were less promising. The roads were becoming clogged; pollution was terrible. Every day the sluggish waters of the Jumna were spiced with some 350 million gallons of raw sewage.

Alongside the rapidly growing wealth of the middle class, there was also a great increase in poverty. Every week, it was said, six thousand penniless migrants poured into Delhi looking for work. You could see them at the traffic lights along Lodhi Road, hands outreached for alms. The jhuggis— the vast sackcloth cities in which these people lived—had quadrupled in size since 1984. New jhuggi outposts were spreading along the dry drainage ditches, filling the flyovers, sending tentacles up the pavements and the hard shoulders. At night, cooking fires could be seen flickering inside the old Lodhi tombs.

Attitudes were changing too. A subtle hardening seemed to have taken place. In the smart drawing-rooms of Delhi, from where the fate of India’s 880 million people was controlled, the middle class seemed to be growing less tolerant; the great Hindu qualities of assimilation and acceptance were no longer highly prized. A mild form of fascism was in fashion: educated people would tell you that it was about time those bloody Muslims were disciplined—that they had been pampered and appeased by the Congress Party for too long, that they were filthy and fanatical, that they bred like rabbits. They should all be put behind bars, hostesses would tell you as they poured you a glass of imported whisky; expulsion was too good for them.

Strangely, in these drawing-rooms, you never heard anyone complain about the Sikhs. But of course it was they and not the Muslims who had most recently suffered the backlash of this hardening, this new intolerance which, like an unstable lump of phosphorus, could quite suddenly burst into flames.

TWO

AS WAS HER HABIT, Indira Gandhi had toast and fruit for breakfast. It was 31 October 1984 and the bougainvillaea was in flower.

At 9.15 she stepped out of the portico of her white bungalow, crossed the lawns by the lotus pond, then passed into the dim green shade of the peepul avenue. There she smiled at her Sikh security guard, Sub-Inspector Beant Singh. Singh did not smile back. Instead he pulled out his revolver and shot her in the stomach. His friend, Constable Satwant Singh, then emptied the clip of his sten gun into her.

Today, Mrs Gandhi’s house is a shrine dedicated to the former Prime Minister’s memory. Busloads of school children trail through, licking ice creams and staring at Mrs Gandhi’s rooms, now permanently frozen as they were on the day she died. Her Scrabble set, a signed photograph from Ho Chi Minh (‘loving greetings to Indira’), a pair of her knitting needles and her books—an unlikely selection, including Marx, Malraux and The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh— all lie behind glass, numbered and catalogued. Outside, in the middle of the avenue, a strangely tasteless memorial stands on the spot where she fell: a bouquet of red glass roses on a frosted crystal plinth, a gift from the people of Czechoslovakia. It is as if it marked the place of her death. But in fact as she lay there, pouring with blood from some twenty bullet wounds, Indira Gandhi was still alive.

An ambulance was waiting outside the gate of her house, as regulations demanded, but, this being Delhi, the driver had disappeared for a tea break. So Indira’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, bundled the Prime Minister into the back of a decrepit Hindustan Ambassador, and together they drove the three miles to the All-India Medical Institute.

Indira was probably dead on arrival, but it was not until one o’clock that the news was broken to the waiting world. The effect was immediate. When the crowds learned that their leader had been assassinated, and that a Sikh was responsible, the thin ice of Delhi’s tenuous peace was shattered. The mourners wanted blood. Grabbing sticks and stones and whatever else came to hand, they set off looking for Sikhs.

In those days Mr and Mrs Puri had a house beside the Medical Institute. They were thus the very first Sikh family to receive the attentions of the mob. Mrs Puri had just finished her lunch—as usual, dal, two vegetables and one hot aloo paratha—and was deep in her customary post-prandial knit, when she looked up from her woollies, peered out of her window and noticed three hundred emotional thugs massing around her garden gate and chanting: ‘Khoon ka badla khoon’- blood for blood, blood for blood, blood for blood.

‘They were very jungli peoples—not from good castes. So I told Ladoo to lock the door and stop them from coming in,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘We could hear them talking about us. They said: "These people are Sikhs. Let us kill them." Then they began to throw some stones and broke all the glasses. We switched off the lights and pretended no one was at home. We thought we would be killed. But first we wanted to kill some of them. You see actually we are kshatriyas, from the warrior caste. My blood was boiling and I very much wanted to give them good. But they were standing outside only. What could I do?’

The mob smashed every window in the house, burned the Puris’ car and incinerated their son’s motorbike. Then they attacked the front door. Luckily, Mr Puri was on the other side, leaning forward on his zimmer frame, armed to the teeth. He fired three times through the door with his old revolver and the mob fled. As they did so, old Mr Puri got Ladoo to kick open the door, then fired the rest of the round after them.

Three hours later, cruising in his taxi, Balvinder Singh passed Green Park, an area not far from the Medical Institute, when he encountered another mob. They surrounded the taxi and pelted it with stones. Balvinder was unhurt, but his front windscreen was shattered. He swore a few choice Punjabi obscenities, then returned quickly to his taxi stand. The next day, despite growing unrest, Balvinder and his brothers decided to return to work. For an hour they sat on their charpoys looking nervously out on to the empty streets before agreeing the moment had come to hide the cars and shut up the stand. At five past eleven they received a phone call. It warned them that the nearby Sujan Singh Park gurdwara was burning and that a large lynch mob was closing in on them. Leaving everything, they hastily set off to their house across the Jumna, twelve cousins in a convoy of three taxis.

They were nearing one of the bridges over the river when they were flagged down by a police patrol. The policemen told them that there were riots on the far side and that it was not safe to proceed. Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s father, said that there were riots on the near side too, and that it was impossible to go back. Moreover, they could not leave their wives and children without protection. The police let them through. For five minutes they drove without difficulty. Then, as they neared Laxmi Nagar, they ran into a road block. A crowd had placed a burning truck across part of the road and were massing behind it with an armoury of clubs and iron bars. The first two cars, containing Punjab, Balvinder and two of his brothers, swerved around the truck and made it through. The third taxi, containing three of Punjab’s young nephews, was attacked and stopped. The boys were pulled out of the cars, beaten with the rods, doused with kerosene and set alight.

That night, from their roof, Balvinder and his family could see fires burning all over Delhi. To save themselves from the fate of their cousins the brothers decided to cut their hair and shave off their beards; the first time they had ever done so. Punjab reminded them of their religion and tried to stop them; afterwards, in atonement, he refused to eat for a whole week.

In the meantime, the Singhs also took more concrete steps to protect themselves. The family lived in an entirely Sikh area—a taxi drivers’ colony—and the residents quickly armed themselves with kirpans (Sikh ceremonial swords) and formed makeshift vigilante forces to defend their narrow alleys. Preferring to concentrate on less resolutely guarded areas, the mobs left them in peace. For four days they lived under siege. Then the army was deployed; and as quickly as they had appeared, the rioters vanished.

Balvinder had lost three cousins in the riots. There were other, smaller losses too: Bulwan, Balvinder’s elder brother who lived slightly apart from the others, had his house burned to the ground; he had left it and taken shelter with his brothers. Everything he owned was destroyed. Over at the International Backside, the taxi stand’s shack was broken into; its primus, telephone and three rope-strung charpoys were all stolen. Someone had also discovered Balvinder’s hidden taxi and ran off with the back seat, the battery and the taxi meter. Yet compared to many other families of Sikhs in the capital, Balvinder Singh’s family were extremely lucky.

Trilokpuri is the dumping ground for Delhi’s poor.

It was constructed on a piece of waste land on the far side of the Jumna during the Emergency of 1975. It was intended to house the squatters whom Sanjay Gandhi evicted from their makeshift shelters on the pavements of Central Delhi; the area remains probably the most desperately poor neighbourhood in the whole city. During 1984 it was here, well away from the spying eyes of the journalists, the diplomats and the middle classes, that the worst massacres took place: of the 2150 Sikhs murdered in the capital during the three days of rioting, the great majority were killed here.