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City of Djinns
William Dalrymple
This is William Dalrymple’s captivating memoir of a year spent in Delhi, a city watched over and protected by the mischievous invisible djinns. Lodging with the beady-eyed Mrs Puri and encountering an extraordinary array of characters – from elusive eunuchs to the last remnants of the Raj – William Dalrymple comes to know the bewildering city intimately.He pursues Delhi’s interlacing layers of history along narrow alleys and broad boulevards, brilliantly conveying its intoxicating mix of mysticism and mayhem.‘City of Djinns’ is an astonishing and sensitive portrait of a city, and confirms William Dalrymple as one of the most compelling explorers of India’s past and present.
City of Djinns
A Year in Delhi
William Dalrymple
Copyright (#ulink_14807f45-2983-5d8b-b19b-3b8f19ffa063)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://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 (#ulink_8eaee6ea-167e-58c3-aa6a-32c7f36321d7)
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 (#u9b1b5369-9b8d-59cd-97b0-bc31eb1130d3)
Copyright (#uade57e28-9df1-5055-8aeb-ad6be80cc40b)
Praise (#u0a7170f2-3857-5372-a409-2a91ce81fba8)
PROLOGUE (#ufbd827c5-72bb-5c3f-a5cb-3b36511ed573)
ONE (#ua28c08dc-3ab6-5c19-9772-505f8d5b9953)
TWO (#u0c13a28c-508d-584a-bcd0-566fe465b8d7)
THREE (#ua3e6ce15-6c70-5097-b69d-5fee4af51cf8)
FOUR (#uac941a5d-7286-5b0a-8037-a8059cffeac0)
FIVE (#uf86033cd-c918-55ff-a54d-79d8d0ee82ad)
SIX (#u452e74e7-e0c9-5125-970e-6530b04ae91c)
SEVEN (#u6ee0c6b0-6e5a-5726-988e-00d237fe0e56)
EIGHT (#u5e336a23-07c4-5fa1-a951-0cc78c2ab4d6)
NINE (#u0c6f9f08-ddb9-5910-a061-7962be11fcdd)
Keep Reading (#u8ca739b3-2540-5ec2-b259-0f3667864a75)
Glossary (#ueed4ba88-60ce-5495-965e-6538ba8edae3)
Select Bibliography (#u17f3fb98-f2a9-51a8-8ddf-487b602ced70)
Index (#u740b30f1-94b0-5ea9-a3ec-4970c8f85000)
Acknowledgements (#u8cf18f1c-2039-5ee2-8f3a-2c4b005d725f)
About the Author (#ubc1e6158-e6dc-5bab-b067-49ca545712d5)
About the Publisher (#u2e71d32b-68cb-581c-ab15-9c3ace91c536)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_649578f0-17e4-5646-a1d3-516cab2294fd)
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 (#ulink_9492adeb-3881-50c6-8cd5-2dea3f6b0dd2)
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.
