City of Djinns

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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.

It was a warm, early October afternoon when I set off to see Trilokpuri. I had never been across the Jumna before and did not know what to expect. Balvinder Singh drove past the battlements of the Old Fort of Humayun, over the Ring Road and headed on across the lower Jumna bridge—exactly the route that he and his cousins had taken in October 1984.

Across the bridge, quite suddenly everything changed. If you took Lutyens’s city to be the eighth city of Delhi, we had crossed zones into a ninth, a sort of counter-Delhi: a Metropolis of the Poor. Here there were no tree-lined avenues, few advertising hoardings, still fewer cars. We passed alongside a rubbish dump crawling with rag-pickers. Thin chickens pecked around a litter of sagging roadside shacks. Women palmed buffalo-dung into chapattis of cooking fuel. Over everything hung a choking grey smog: fly-ash from a nearby power station. Here for the first time you got an impression of a fact which Delhi seemed almost purpose-built to hide: that the city is the capital not just of a resurgent regional power, formerly the jewel in Britain’s Imperial crown, but that it is also the chief metropolis of a desperately poor Third World country; a country whose affluent middle class is still outnumbered four or five to one by the impoverished rural masses.

When the outside world first discovered the Trilokpuri massacres, long after the rioters had disappeared, it was Block 32 that dominated the headlines. Dogs were found fighting over piles of purple human entrails. Charred and roasted bodies lay in great heaps in the gullies; kerosene fumes still hung heavy in the air. Piles of hair, cut from the Sikhs before they were burned alive, lay on the verandas. Hacked-off limbs clogged the gutters.

Yet, as the journalists soon discovered, it was difficult to find anyone who admitted to being present during the madness. Everyone was vague and noncommittal: the killers were men from outside; we were asleep; we saw nothing. Trying to find witnesses or survivors proved no easier five years later. I passed from block to block. What had once been a largely Sikh area was now entirely Hindu. The Sikhs had all moved, I was told. No, none of us were there at the time. We were visiting our villages when it happened. No, no one had seen anything. And the men sat cross-legged on their charpoys, gravely shaking their heads from side to side.

It was Balvinder who, while chatting in a chai shop, discovered that there was one solitary Sikh family left, in Block 30. They had been there at the time, he said, and had survived by hiding in a hole. Moreover, they were also witnesses; through a small chink they had seen everything.

Sohan Singh Sandhu was an old man in a cream-coloured salwar kameez. He had the bushiest eyebrows I have ever seen: they seemed to join with his mutton-chop whiskers and full, Babylonian beard so as to give the impression of a face peeping out through thick undergrowth. He sat cross-legged on a rope bed, backed by a frieze of Sikh holy pictures: icons of beards and swords and haloes filled the wall. Sohan Singh Sandhu was the granthi (reader) of the local gurdwara. He gave us his card, and while we settled ourselves down on his charpoy he shouted through to the kitchen, telling his wife—whom we had not yet seen—to bring us some tea.

His family had originally lived in a pukka house in Shastri Nagar, on the rich bank of the Jumna. But in 1975, during the Emergency, bulldozers flattened their home; they were given half an hour to move their valuables. According to the police, the demolitions were necessary to make way for a line of new electricity pylons, but the last time he had visited the site of his old house the land was still lying vacant. Much later they had received a plot in Trilokpuri, along with a government loan to cover building materials. His three sons and he had built the house with their own hands. It wasn’t a bad area, he said. A little out of the way, but quite tolerable. And their neighbours, who had suffered the same evictions as they, had always been friendly.

The troubles began quite suddenly on 1 November 1984. They had been anxiously listening to the news on the radio when a Sikh boy came running down the gully shouting that a mob, four or five thousand strong, was massing nearby.

‘About 150 of us assembled on the waste land at the edge of the block,’ said Sandhu. ‘The mob stoned us and we stoned them back. It was during the stoning that my son was hit.’

He pointed to a charpoy in a dark corner of the room. There, so silent that we had failed to notice him, lay a boy of about my own age. Like his father he had a full, uncut beard and a powerful physique. But he was behaving oddly. Although he could obviously hear that we were talking about him he still lay on his back on the rope bed, admiring himself in a rickshaw wing-mirror that he held in his hand.

‘He had bad head injuries,’ said his father quietly. ‘Now he has some mental problem.’

The boy ignored us and continued to stare at the mirror. As we watched, his face suddenly suffused with child-like happiness, and still looking at the mirror he burst into a fit of high-pitched giggles. His father frowned and looked away.

‘After the stone throwing had been going on for two hours the police suddenly intervened. They escorted the mob away, then returned and collected all our weapons: they took all our lathis (sticks) and kirpans (swords); they even took away the stones and the bricks that were lying around our houses. They said: "There is a curfew. Lock yourselves up." When we had followed their instructions and retreated inside our houses, they let the mob loose.’

Groups of forty or fifty thugs descended on a single gully, flailing around them with their iron bars: ‘They would knock on a door. If it wasn’t opened they’d beat it down. Sometimes, when people had managed to barricade themselves in, they would climb up on the roof, break open the ceiling and pour in kerosene. Then they would burn everyone inside alive.’

‘They used our own kerosene,’ said Sandhu’s wife, appearing now with the tray of tea. She gave us each a glass and sat down on the bed beside her husband. ‘They stole it from us then used it to murder us.’

‘Once they shouted: "Send out the men and we won’t harm them." A couple of doors opened and some of our neighbours gave themselves up. They took them away. It was only later that we discovered they had taken them to the edge of the block, made them drink kerosene then set them alight.’

‘How did you manage to escape?’ I asked.

‘Look,’ said Sandhu. And getting up from the charpoy he pulled back a drape which covered the top of one wall. Behind lay a tiny cubby-hole filled with a metal trunk and two packing-cases laid end to end. ‘Ranjit,’ he indicated the son still lying in the corner, ‘Ranjit and I hid in there for three days.’

‘But you couldn’t possibly have fitted,’ I said.

‘We managed,’ replied Sandhu. ‘There was no other choice.’

‘Did they never think of looking behind the drapes?’ I asked.

‘We scattered all our jewellery and valuables at the front of the house. Most of the mob were interested only in looting. They took the jewellery and forgot about us.’ Sandhu smiled: ‘Once one of their leaders—a local Congress politician—came inside and rebuked them: "You are just looting," he said. "You should be killing." He flicked back the drape and saw our attic but we had placed the cases and mattresses in front of us. He said: "It is too small. Nobody can hide there."

‘That was the worst moment. I whispered to Ranjit: "Do not be afraid. It will be a quick pain, then it will be over." And I told him that he was a Sikh and that he must be brave. I said: "They have to kill you. When the moment comes do not beg them for your life."’

‘You were very lucky,’ I said.

‘I was,’ replied Sandhu. ‘But my other two sons were less fortunate. On the second day they were discovered hiding in the shop of some Hindu friends. The mob burned the shop. Then they put rubber tyres around the necks of my sons, doused them with petrol and burned them too.’

The old man was sitting cross-legged beside his wife. His voice was lowered yet he spoke almost matter-of-factly. Up to that point he had hardly mentioned his other two sons at all.

‘God is behind every act,’ he said. ‘There must have been something wrong that we did in the past.’

‘Yet you were spared.’

‘It was not our turn,’ he replied. ‘That was why we were saved.’ He shrugged and pointed to the ceiling: ‘He is the one who saves.’

There was a halt in the conversation. There was nothing more to say.

Sandhu brought out an album of old photographs: the two dead boys—formal black and white studio photographs, two youths in turbans staring straight at the camera, one with heavy plastic glasses, the other with a slight squint; a shot of the wreckage in the house after the looting—clothes strewn everywhere, smashed crockery, a half-burned charpoy; a snap of a smashed-up autorickshaw, a lump of buckled metal with a frosted windscreen.

‘That was Ranjit’s,’ said his father. ‘He used to be a driver.’

For a few seconds no one spoke. Then I asked: ‘Aren’t you frightened it might happen again?’

‘No: now we are no longer worried. I am still the granthi of the gurdwara. I give langoor (food) to the poor Hindus; the rich Hindus give us offerings. These wounds are healed now.’

‘But isn’t it upsetting to stay on in the same street? To live where your children were murdered?’

‘Personally I would like to leave. To return to the Punjab. It is my wife who wishes to stay. She says: "This is where my children used to eat, to sleep, to play, to laugh …"’

‘I feel they are still here,’ said Mrs Sandhu. ‘They built this house with their hands. They fitted the bricks and the mud.’ She shook her head. ‘Since they died not for one day have I left this place. I will die here.’

On the bed in the corner, her one surviving son suddenly broke out laughing again. We all turned towards him. He was still staring at himself in the wing-mirror of his old rickshaw.

Delhi had many failings, but I had never felt it was a violent city. In all the time I had spent in the dark mohallas (quarters) of the old walled city I had never once felt threatened. There were no areas that I felt uneasy to visit after sunset. Instead I had always found Delhi-wallahs, particularly the poor, remarkable for their gentleness and elaborate courtesy. Wherever we went, complete strangers would invite Olivia and me to sit and talk and share a glass of tea with them. To one brought up on a diet of starchy English reserve this habitual kindness of the Delhi-wallah was as touching as it was strange.

Yet as Balvinder and Sandhu could witness, when provoked the inhabitants of this mild town could rise up and commit acts of extreme brutality. Men would avert their eyes as next door neighbours were burned alive or disembowelled. The same people who would invite you to share their last plate of food could, with equal spontaneity, lose control and run amok. Then, with equal ease they could return to their bazaars and shops, factories and offices and carry on as if nothing had happened. It was difficult to understand.

Moreover, despite Delhi’s historic reputation as the most cultured town in India, the city’s history was punctuated with many such flashes of terrible, orgiastic violence. It was not just invaders who put the people of Delhi to the sword. During the Middle Ages and throughout the long Mughal twilight the town was continually rent with bloody riots, even small civil wars. Out of the first twelve Sultans, only two died peacefully in their beds; the rest were killed, usually in a horrible manner and almost always by their courtiers or subjects. Invaders like Timur the Lame were able to storm the high walls of the city only because the inhabitants were already busy cutting each others’ throats. The death toll from bazaar disputes such as the eighteenth-century Shoe Sellers’ Riot could run into tens of thousands.

The last great conflagration was Partition. In the dying days of the British Raj, when the subcontinent was split into Muslim-only Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, twelve million people were made refugees. Hordes of non-Muslims—Sikhs and Hindus—fled their ancestral villages in Pakistan; India’s displaced Muslims struck out in the opposite direction. It was the greatest migration the modern world had ever seen. Yet again Delhi was consigned to the flames. Following some of the worst rioting in its history, nearly half of its ancient Muslim population—the descendants of the people who had erected the Qutab Minar and lined the streets to cheer the Great Mogul—packed their bags and headed off to a new country. Their place was taken by refugees from the Western Punjab, among them Mr and Mrs Puri and Punjab Singh. Delhi was transformed from a small administrative capital of 900,000 people to a Punjabi-speaking metropolis half the size of London.

Of the two peoples who had ruled Delhi during the previous thousand years, the British disappeared completely while the Indian Muslims were reduced to an impoverished minority. In the space of a few months, the face of the city was probably changed more radically than at any other time since the Muslims first came to India, a millennium before.