City of Djinns Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS CITY OF DJINNS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  Glossary

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  PENGUIN BOOKS CITY OF DJINNS

  William Dalrymple is the author of several highly acclaimed books including In Xanadu, The Age of Kali, Sacred India, and From the Holy Mountain. His latest is Viking’s The White Moguls. He divides his time among London, Delhi, and Edinburgh.

  Praise for City of Djinns .

  “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 ... hours and hours of pleasure for his readers.”

  — Jan Morris, The Independent

  “Scholarly and marvellously entertaining ... A considerable feat.”

  — Dervia Murphy, Spectator

  “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.”

  — Daily Telegraph

  “Unlike much of modern travel writing [City of Djinns] is informative, learned and funny ... a lively and sometimes profound book.”

  — Economist

  “On one level there are the amusing rites of passage, the struggles with bureaucracy the eccentricity of Dalrymple’s landlord, all entertaining and related. Dalrymple has a way of letting you smell and feel the city. There are beautiful chiselled descriptions of a grand capital ... but much of the book’s strength lies in Dalrymple’s skill in peeling the historical onion and showing how new Delhi resonates with the old ... A splendid tapestry.”

  — Sunday Telegraph

  “A sympathetic and engaging portrait of this age-old city ... Pursuing his research through the narrow alleys, mosques, abandoned ruins and tombs of Delhi, Dalrymple encounters a range of folk who continue to give Delhi its special character. Pigeon fanciers, Sufi mystics, Moslem healers, musicians, calligraphers, philosophers and a guild of eunuchs all provide Dalrymple with entertaining insights ... It is fine, entertaining, well-written stuff, thoroughly researched but with none of the stern academic tone that so many historical profiles adopt. What sustains it, apart from his erudite knowledge, is Dalrymple’s sense of historical adventure. Just open your eyes, he says. If you know how to look, even the abandoned ruins of the past are alive.”

  — Financial Times

  “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 ... The book is Dalrymple’s journey into the soul of Delhi.” — Books in Scotland

  “An expansive and inclusive work, richly peopled ... an enlightening and entertaining book.”

  — Literary Review

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Of6ces: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1993

  Published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1994

  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  Copyright © William Dalrymple, 1993

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Dalrymple, William.

  City of Djinns : a year of Delhi / William Dalrymple ;

  illustrations by Olivia Fraser.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12701-8

  1. Delhi (India) — Description and travel. 2. Delhi (India) —

  Social life and customs. 3. India — History.

  DS486.D3 C58 2003

  954’.56052 — dc21 2002033382

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any

  other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage

  electronic piracy of copynghted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgements

  This book, the story of one year in Delhi, has taken nearly four times that long to complete. It has been a long haul and on the way I have incurred debts to a great number of people whom I must now thank.

  Firstly, Dominic Arbuthnott, with whom I first explored Delhi as a back-packer nine years ago. Without him I would probably never have come within a thousand miles of India in the first place. Jon Connel and Dominic Lawson both made me their Indian correspondent thus enabling me to return here; both were understanding when the book got in the way of their reports and articles. During that time, Mike Fishwick was a generous (and patient) editor, and Maggie Noach a model agent. During summer breaks in North Berwick, my parents were as long-suffering as ever.

  Malcolm and Kathy Fraser let me loose on their wonderful archives: to them, particular thanks.

  Salman Haidar took on the Delhi bureaucracy and got me my first residence visa; Sunil and Shalini Sethi provided shelter in Delhi until I found a house of my own. Khuswant Singh shoved me in the right direction at the beginning; he later helped with eunuchs and goddesses. Anil Seal, who taught me a little Indian history at Cambridge, helped me to secure an elusive ticket for the Nehru Memorial Library where I did the research.

  Pavan Verma and Satish Jacob showed me some obscure nooks and crannies of the Old City; Dr Yunus Jaffery showed me others, and in addition kept me plied with strong hot tea and improving Sufi anecdotes. Mozaffar Alam helped with the Mughals. Siddarth and Rashmi Singh provided months of hospitality at Rohet Garh where, in a desperate bid for inspiration, I started the manuscript at the desk where Bruce Chatwin wrote The Songlines.

  Several friends read through the manuscript and made invaluable comments. In Britain: Lucian Taylor, Patrick French, David Gilmour, Edward Whitley,
Lucy and John Warrack, Nick and Georgia Coleridge, Fania Stoney, Elizabeth Chatwin, James Holloway, my brother Rob and my parents-in-law, Simon and Jenny Fraser. In India: Sam Miller, Navina Haidar, Tavleen Singh, Javed Abdulla, Manvender Singh, Pavan Verma, Sachin Mulji and Naveen Patnaik.

  But my biggest debt by far is, of course, to my wife Olivia. Not only did she twice encourage (or rather order) me to continue when, in black moments, I decided to throw the whole thing in, she also read and edited each day’s work, put up with tantrums, picked up the pieces, made encouraging noises, wielded a mean red pen, quite apart from drawing the cover, the wonderful maps and pictures.

  This book would, quite literally, never have been completed without her. I dedicate it to Olivia with love and affection and a big hug.

  William Dalrymple

  6.111.93, New Delhi

  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.