City of Djinns

City of Djinns

A Year in Delhi

William Dalrymple

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1994

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

Copyright © William Dalrymple 1993

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006375951

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 9780007378784

Version: 2017-03-10

Praise

From the reviews of City of Djinns:

‘Dalrymple has pulled it off again … At a time when the book of travels is beginning to lose its fashionable allure, City of Djinns is not really a travel book at all. It is a kind of memoir recording the response of a single, gentle, merry and learned mind to the presence of an ancient city … Dalrymple is anything but a voyeur. Even his excursions into the world of the eunuchs are conducted with a kind of grave innocence. He is more a pilgrim than an observer, always trying to understand … It is the work of a man who has consciously chosen to commit himself to the profession of letters, and in it we see the first fine rapture of In Xanadu deepening to a profounder dedication … hours and hours of pleasure for his readers.’

JAN MORRIS, Independent

‘As the author of the best travel book of recent years at the intensely irritating age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple has now shown that In Xanadu was no fluke. City of Djinns is an entertaining mix of history and diary informed by a deep curiosity about the ways in which the ghosts of even the most distant past still walk Delhi in the twentieth century.’

CHRISTOPHER LOCKWOOD, Daily Telegraph

‘City of Djinns is a delight. William Dalrymple is in command of his subject, seizes the reader and uses his skill to tempt and tantalize … The city of djinns is Delhi and Dalrymple reveals it like a Dance of the Seven Veils. It is very intricately organized: ostensibly structured around a year which he and his artist wife Olivia spent in Delhi, paced by vivid descriptions of weather change as signal of seasons, and by the formal punctuation of life, learning, loving, and death. These episodes are interspersed in counterpoint with historical sketches, which (as you suddenly realize at the end) are organized in reverse chronology, beginning with the Sikh massacres after Indira Gandhi’s death, back through Partition, the Empire, and the East India Company, back through the Mughal empire into prehistory and archaeology … The book is Dalrymple’s journey into the soul of Delhi.’

CHARLES MCKEAN, Books in Scotland

‘Delhi has more layers of culture, civilisation and history extant in it than any other city in India, arguably, in the world. It is this, the enthralling and enigmatic features of this ancient-modern city, that William Dalrymple sets out to trace in City of Djinns, and he manages to do it with such pleasing success that henceforth defenders of the city can use his book as a club to beat off Delhi-haters … [The book is] a stationary travelogue that moves more through time than space, looping and whorling in circles and parabolas of past and present. Dalrymple performs these acrobatics of storytelling with the ease of a trapeze artist … One great merit of his book is that the author conducts himself without prejudice or bigotry. He explores Delhi without ideological or racial baggage; in fact, wonderfully, he is not in the least cramped by the need for political correctness. He does not feel the need to be nice or nasty to anyone. What he is, constantly, is curious, scholarly, engaging, the scholarship carried by a light touch … the finest labour of love on the capital in recent times.’

TARUN TEJPAL, India Today

‘An expansive and inclusive work, richly peopled … an enlightening and entertaining book.’

IAIN WETHERBY, Literary Review

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

Keep Reading

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

IT WAS in the citadel of Feroz Shah Kotla that I met my first Sufi.

Pir Sadr-ud-Din had weasel eyes and a beard as tangled as a myna’s nest. The mystic sat me down on a carpet, offered me tea, and told me about the djinns.

He said that when the world was new and Allah had created mankind from clay, he also made another race, like us in all things, but fashioned from fire. The djinns were spirits, invisible to the naked eye; to see them you had to fast and pray. For forty-one days, Sadr-ud-Din had sat without eating, half-naked in the foothills of the Himalayas; later, he had spent forty-one days up to his neck in the River Jumna.

One night, asleep in a graveyard, he was visited by the King of the Djinns.

‘He was black, as tall as a tree, and he had one eye in the centre of his forehead,’ said the Pir. ‘The djinn offered me anything I wanted, but every time I refused.’

‘Could you show me a djinn?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ replied the Pir. ‘But you would run away.’

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices.

Moreover the city—so I soon discovered—possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. Friends would moan about the touts on Janpath and head off to the beaches in Goa, but for me Delhi always exerted a stronger spell. I lingered on, and soon found a job in a home for destitutes in the far north of the city.

The nuns gave me a room overlooking a municipal rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking berms of refuse; overhead, under a copper sky, vultures circled the thermals forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.

In summer I preferred the less claustrophobic avenues of Lutyens’s Delhi. Then, under a pulsing sun, I would stroll slowly along the shady rows of neem, tamarind and arjuna, passing the white classical bungalows with their bow fronts and bushes of molten yellow gulmohar.

In both Delhis it was the ruins that fascinated me. However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient Islamic colleges – medresses – would intrude, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens, curving the road network and obscuring the fairways of the golf course. New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties. Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi, and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. All agreed that the crumbling ruins of these towns were without number.

But where Delhi was unique was that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too. Somehow different areas of Delhi seemed to have preserved intact different centuries, even different millennia. The Punjabi immigrants were a touchstone to the present day; with their nippy Maruti cars and fascination with all things new, they formed a lifeline to the 1980s. The old majors you would meet strolling in the Lodhi Gardens were pickled perhaps half a century earlier. Their walrus moustaches and Ealing comedy accents hinted that they had somehow got stuck in about 1946. The eunuchs in the Old City, some speaking courtly Urdu, might not have looked so out of place under the dais of the Great Mogul. The sadhus at Nigambodh Ghat I imagined as stranded citizens of Indraprastha, the legendary first Delhi of the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic.

All the different ages of man were represented in the people of the city. Different millennia co-existed side by side. Minds set in different ages walked the same pavements, drank the same water, returned to the same dust.

But it was not until months later, when I met Pir Sadr-ud-Din, that I learned the secret that kept the city returning to new life. Delhi, said Pir Sadr-ud-Din, was a city of djinns. Though it had been burned by invaders time and time again, millennium after millennium, still the city was rebuilt; each time it rose like a phoenix from the fire. Just as the Hindus believe that a body will be reincarnated over and over again until it becomes perfect, so it seemed Delhi was destined to appear in a new incarnation century after century. The reason for this, said Sadr-ud-Din, was that the djinns loved Delhi so much they could never bear to see it empty or deserted. To this day every house, every street corner was haunted by them. You could not see them, said Sadr-ud-Din, but if you concentrated you would be able to feel them: to hear their whisperings, or even, if you were lucky, to sense their warm breath on your face.

In Delhi I knew I had found a theme for a book: a portrait of a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic, a city of djinns.

Five years after I first lived in Delhi I returned, now newly married. Olivia and I arrived in September. We found a small top-floor flat near the Sufi village of Nizamuddin and there set up home.

Our landlady was Mrs Puri.

ONE

THE FLAT PERCHED at the top of the house, little more than a lean-to riveted to Mrs Puri’s ceiling. The stairwell exuded sticky, airless September heat; the roof was as thin as corrugated iron.

Inside we were greeted by a scene from Great Expectations: a thick pall of dust on every surface, a family of sparrows nesting in the blinds and a fleece of old cobwebs—great arbours of spider silk—arching the corner walls. Mrs Puri stood at the doorway, a small, bent figure in a salwar kameez.

‘The last tenant did not go out much,’ she said, prodding the cobwebs with her walking stick. She added: ‘He was not a tidy gentleman.’ Olivia blew on a cupboard; the dust was so thick you could sign your name in it.

Our landlady, though a grandmother, soon proved herself to be a formidable woman. A Sikh from Lahore, Mrs Puri was expelled from her old home during Partition and in the upheavals of 1947 lost everything. She arrived in Delhi on a bullock cart. Forty-two years later she had made the transition from refugee pauper to Punjabi princess. She was now very rich indeed. She owned houses all over Delhi and had swapped her bullock for a fleet of new Maruti cars, the much coveted replacement for the old Hindustan Ambassador. Mrs Puri also controlled a variety of business interests. These included the Gloriana Finishing School, India’s first etiquette college, a unique institution which taught village girls how to use knives and forks, apply lipstick and make polite conversation about the weather.

Mrs Puri had achieved all this through a combination of hard work and good old-fashioned thrift. In the heat of summer she rarely put on the air conditioning. In winter she allowed herself the electric fire for only an hour a day. She recycled the newspapers we threw out; and returning from parties late at night we could see her still sitting up, silhouetted against the window, knitting sweaters for export. ‘Sleep is silver,’ she would say in explanation, ‘but money is gold.’

This was all very admirable, but the hitch, we soon learned, was that she expected her tenants to emulate the disciplines she imposed upon herself. One morning, after only a week in the flat, I turned on the tap to discover that our water had been cut off, so went downstairs to sort out the problem. Mrs Puri had already been up and about for several hours; she had been to the gurdwara, said her prayers and was now busy drinking her morning glass of rice water.

‘There is no water in our flat this morning, Mrs Puri.’

‘No, Mr William, and I am telling you why.’

‘Why, Mrs Puri?’

‘You are having guests, Mr William. And always they are going to the lavatory.’

‘But why should that affect the water supply?’

‘Last night I counted seven flushes,’ said Mrs Puri, rapping her stick on the floor. ‘So I have cut off the water as protest.’

She paused to let the enormity of our crime sink in.

‘Is there any wonder that there is water shortage in our India when you people are making seven flushes in one night?’

Old Mr Puri, her husband, was a magnificent-looking Sikh gentleman with a long white beard and a tin zimmer frame with wheels on the bottom. He always seemed friendly enough—as we passed he would nod politely from his armchair. But when we first took the flat Mrs Puri drew us aside and warned us that her husband had never been, well, quite the same since the riots that followed Mrs Gandhi’s death in 1984.

It was a rather heroic story. When some hooligans began to break down the front door, Mr Puri got Ladoo (the name means Sweety), his bearer, to place him directly behind the splintering wood. Uttering a blood-curdling cry, he whipped out his old service revolver and fired the entire magazine through the door. The marauders ran off to attack the taxi rank around the corner and the Puris were saved.

From that day on, however, the old man had become a fervent Sikh nationalist. ‘Everyone should have their own home,’ he would snort. ‘The Muslims have Pakistan. The Hindus have Hindustan. The Punjab is our home. If I was a young man I would join Bhindranwale and fight these Hindu dogs.’

‘It is talk only,’ Mrs Puri would reply.

‘Before I die I will see a free Khalistan.’

‘You are daydreaming only. How many years are left?’

‘The Punjab is my home.’

‘He may have been born in the Punjab,’ Mrs Puri would say, turning to me, ‘but now he could not go back to village life. He likes flush toilet and Star TV. Everybody likes flush toilet and Star TV. How can you leave these things once you have tasted such luxury?’

Since the riots, Mr Puri had also become intermittently senile. One day he could be perfectly lucid; the next he might suffer from the strangest hallucinations. On these occasions conversations with him took on a somewhat surreal quality:

MR PURI (up the stairs to my flat) Mr William! Get your bloody mules out of my room this minute!

WD But Mr Puri, I don’t have any mules.

MR PURI Nonsense! How else could you get your trunks up the stairs?

During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.

It had been a bad monsoon. Normally in Delhi, September is a month of almost equatorial fertility and the land seems refreshed and newly-washed. But in the year of our arrival, after a parching summer, the rains had lasted for only three weeks. As a result dust was everywhere and the city’s trees and flowers all looked as if they had been lightly sprinkled with talcum powder.

Nevertheless the air was still sticky with damp-heat, and it was in a cloud of perspiration that we began to unpack and to take in the eccentricities of our flat: the chiming doorbell that played both the Indian national anthem and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; the geyser, which if left on too long, would shoot a fountain of boiling water from an outlet on the roof and bathe the terrace in a scalding shower; the pretty round building just below the garden which we at first took to be a temple, and only later discovered to be the local sewage works.

But perhaps the strangest novelty of coming to live in India—stranger even than Mrs Puri—was getting used to life with a sudden glut of domestic help. Before coming out to Delhi we had lived impecuniously in a tiny student dive in Oxford. Now we had to make the transition to a life where we still had only two rooms, but suddenly found ourselves with more than twice that number of servants. It wasn’t that we particularly wanted or needed servants; but, as Mrs Puri soon made quite clear, employing staff was a painful necessity on which the prestige of her household depended.

The night we moved in, we spent our first hours dusting and cleaning before sinking, exhausted, into bed at around 2 a.m. The following morning we were woken at 7.30 sharp by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Half asleep, I shuffled to the door to find Ladoo, Mr Puri’s bearer, waiting outside. He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai.

‘Chota hazari, sahib,’ said Ladoo. Bed tea.

‘What a nice gesture,’ I said returning to Olivia. ‘Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.’

‘I wish she had sent it up two hours later,’ said Olivia from beneath her sheets.

I finished the tea and sank down beneath the covers. Ten seconds later the Indian national anthem chimed out. I scrambled out of bed and again opened the door. Outside was a thin man with purple, betel-stained lips. He had a muffler wrapped around his head and, despite the heat, a thick donkey-jacket was buttoned tightly over his torso. I had never seen him before.

‘Mali,’ he said. The gardener.

He bowed, walked past me and made for the kitchen. From the bedroom I could hear him fiddling around, filling a bucket with water then splashing it over the plants on the roof terrace. He knocked discreetly on the bedroom door to indicate he had finished, then disappeared down the stairs. The mali was followed first by Murti, the sweeper, then by Prasad, the dhobi, and finally by Bahadur, Mrs Puri’s Nepali cook. I gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs.

‘Mrs Puri,’ I said. ‘There has been a stream of strange people pouring in and out of my flat since seven-thirty.’

‘I know, Mr William,’ replied Mrs Puri. ‘These people are your servants.’

‘But I don’t want any servants.’

‘Everyone has servants,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘You must have servants too. This is what these people are for.’

I frowned. ‘But must we have so many?’

‘Well, you must have a cook and a bearer.’

‘We don’t need a bearer. And both of us enjoy cooking.’

‘In that case you could have one cook-bearer. One man, two jobs. Very modern. Then there is the mali, the sweeper, and a dhobi for your washing. Also you must be having one driver.’ Mrs Puri furrowed her brow. ‘It is very important to have good chauffeur,’ she said gravely. ‘Some pukka fellow with a smart uniform.’

‘I haven’t got a car. So it’s pointless having a driver.’

‘But if you have no car and no driver,’ said Mrs Puri, ‘how will you be getting from place to place?’

Balvinder Singh, son of Punjab Singh, Prince of Taxi Drivers, may your moustache never grow grey! Nor your liver cave in with cirrhosis. Nor your precious Hindustan Ambassador ever again crumple in a collision—like the one we had with the van carrying Mango Frooty Drink.

Although during my first year in Delhi I remember thinking that the traffic had seemed both anarchic and alarming, by my second visit I had come to realize that it was in fact governed by very strict rules. Right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle. Buses give way to heavy trucks, Ambassadors give way to buses, and bicyclists give way to everything except pedestrians. On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

Yet Mr Balvinder Singh is an individualist who believes in the importance of asserting himself. While circumstances may force him to defer to buses and lorries, he has never seen the necessity of giving way to the tinny new Maruti vans which, though taller than his Ambassador, are not so heavily built. After all, Mr Singh is a kshatriya by caste, a warrior, and like his ancestors he is keen to show that he is afraid of nothing. He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing ‘chicken’ with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.

Or rather was. One month after our arrival in Delhi, Mr Singh and I had an accident. Taking a road junction with more phlegm than usual, we careered into the Maruti van, impaling it on its bows, so that it bled Mango Frooty Drink all over Mr Singh’s bonnet. No one was hurt, and Mr Singh—strangely elated by his ‘kill’—took it stoically. ‘Mr William,’ he said. ‘In my life six times have I crashed. And on not one occasion have I ever been killed.’

Although I am devoted to him, Olivia is quick to point out that Mr Singh is in many ways an unattractive character. A Punjabi Sikh, he is the Essex Man of the East. He chews paan and spits the betel juice out of the window, leaving a red ‘go-fast’ stripe along the car’s right flank. He utters incoherent whoops of joy as he drives rickshaws on to the pavement or sends a herd of paper boys flying into a ditch. He leaps out of his taxi to urinate at traffic lights, and scratches his groin as he talks. Like Essex Man, he is a lecher. His eyes follow the saris up and down the Delhi avenues; plump Sikh girls riding side-saddle on motorbikes are a particular distraction. Twice a week, when Olivia is not in the car, he offers to drive me to G.B. Road, the Delhi red light district: ‘Just looking,’ he suggests. ‘Delhi ladies very good. Having breasts like mangoes.’