CITY OF DJINNS

 Authour : William Dalrymple

Publisher : Harper Collins 1993, Bloomsbury 2017; Pages 350 including two pages of maps.

 

Review by : Indra Mani Lal

Excerpts :

( ) I had been living in Delhi for some months before I began to realise  quite how many of the people I met every day were Partition refugees. Even the most well established of Delhi figures – newspaper editors, successful businessmen, powerful politicians – had tales to tell of childhoods broken in two, of long journeys on foot over the Punjab plains, of houses left behind, of sisters kidnapped or raped; the ghastly but familiar litany of Partition horrors. Like the Palestinians a year later, they expected to come back within a few months when peace had been restored. Like the Palestinians, they never returned.

( ) The new season also brought about changes downstairs in the Puri household. From the middle of October, Mr Puri embarked on his winter routine of taking a morning walk around the square below the house. Though the square was only half the size of a football pitch, getting Mr Puri around it was quite an operation, and a new servant was contracted to oversee the business of his daily perambulation. He was a tiny Nepali boy. Every day the boy, Nickoo, performed the tricky task of winding a new white turban around Mr Puri’s head and winching the cantankerous old man down the stairs. He then had to push Mr Puri around the square – the old man all the time raving or propositioning passer-by  before pushing him back up again. There was no doubt, however, that Mr Puri clearly enjoyed the whole thing enormously. His spirits rose in anticipation of his daily treat, and if crossed while on tour he could be positively frisky.

( ) Near Ajmeri Gate lies the old Cobbler’s Bazaar. Most of the Muslim shoemakers who worked here fled to Karachi in 1947, and today the Punjabis who replaced them sell mostly locks and chains and hardware. But a few of the old shopkeepers remain, and among them is the shop of Shamim and Ali Akbar Khan. Despite the position of their workshop, the father of Shamim and Ali was no cobbler; he was one of the most famous calligraphers in Delhi. Shamim continues his father’s trade and still lives by producing beautifully inscribed title deeds, wills and marriage documents.

( ) In Shahjehanabad the town houses were so planned that a plain façade, decorated only with an elaborate gatehouse, would pass into a courtyard; off this courtyard would lead small pleasure gardens, the zenanas, a guardhouse or a miniature mosque, the haveli,  library and the customaray shish mahal . The haveli was a world within a world, self-contained and totally hidden from the view of the casual passerby. Now, however, while many of the great gatehouses survive, they are hollow fanfares announcing nothing. You pass through a great arch and find yourself in a rubble-filled car-park where once irrigation runnels bubbled. The shish mahals are unrecognizable, partitioned up into small factories and workshops; metal shutters turn zenana screens into locked store rooms; the gardens have disappeared under concrete. Only the odd arcade of pillars or a half-buried fragment of finely-carved late Mughal ornament indicates what once existed there.

( ) One day in late October, Olivia and I stumbled across Ali Manzil, the home of Begum Hamida Sultan. It was one of the last havelis still occupied in the old style. A narrow passageway led from the gatehouse into a shady courtyard planted with neem and mulberries; the open space was flanked by a pair of wooden balconies latticed as intricately as a lace ruff. Ahead lay an arcade of cusped Shahjehani arches. This was recently the house of the former Indian President Fakruddin Ali Ahmed, and so was saved from the rapid eclipse that had blacked out many similar households. Yet the decay had set in. the courtyard was destroyed and its space given over for shops. Balconies were collapsing, paint was flaking, veranda unswept. Begum Hamida Sultan sat bolt upright with her silent younger sister at a large teak table. ‘I do not need anything,’ replied the Begum haughtily, ‘Do not come back.’ She paused, and then added huskily, ‘I just want to be forgotten.’

( ) To best appreciate New Delhi I used to walk to it from the Old City – I would find myself suddenly in a gridiron of wide avenues and open boulevards. There was no dust, no heat; all was shaded, green and cool. This was Rajpath (Kingsway), one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysees, but far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe. Yet the most startling of all lay in the use of two different shades of pink Agra sandstone; one pale and creamy; the other a much darker burnt crimson. The two different colours were carefully arranged, the darker at the bottom as it it was somehow heavier, yet the two contrasting tones blending as effortlessly into one another as they went up in the walls of the Secretariat blocks.

( ) Norah Nicholson was an old lady with white hair and narrow wrists living in an old shack. ‘They cut off my pension and I found I couldn’t afford to rent even basic rooms. So I ended up here, with my books, furniture, two packing cases and a grand piano – all under this tree.’  She was living under a tarpaulin with a dozen stray dogs and some peahens. The peacocks kept falling down from the tree onto her bed. She claimed to be a great-niece of Brigadier General John Nicholson, who was killed in the storming of Delhi in 1857. The British High Commission quietly insisted that she was an Anglo-Indian and so ineligible for automatic British citizenship, Norah would have none of it. She maintained that she was a full-blooded Englishwoman, was briefly nanny of Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi. What was absolutely certain was that she had never been to Britain, had no living relations there, and she had fallen on hard times in a quite spectacular manner.

My Take : Dalrymple comes to Delhi as correspondent of a British paper, and stays with wife for several years. His adventurous writing about the nooks and corners, and people of Delhi is delightful, making you want to know more. He peels the history, showing the Old with the New in a firsthand narrative. A thoroughly enjoyable book.

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Subject type : Exploring the life and people  of Delhi

Narrative Style : Informative, entertaining in the first person

Readability : Excellent

Reader’s Interest : Maintained excellently

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