City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  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 autorick shaw, 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 lin
ed 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.

  THREE

  ‘OUR VILLAGE was famous for its sweets,’ said Punjab Singh. ‘People would come for miles to taste the jalebis our sweet-wallahs prepared. There were none better in the whole of the Punjab.’

  We were sitting on a charpoy at International Backside Taxi Stand. For weeks I had been begging Balvinder’s father to tell me the story of how he had come to Delhi in 1947. A stern and sombre man, Punjab would always knit his eyebrows and change the subject. It was as if Partition were a closed subject, something embarrassing that shouldn’t be raised in polite conversation.

  It was only after a particularly persistent bout of badgering, in which Balvinder took my side, that Punjab had agreed to relent. But once started, he soon got into the swing of his story.

  ‘Samundra was a small and beautiful village in District Lyallpur,’ he said. ‘It was one of the most lovely parts of the whole of the Punjab. We had a good climate and very fertile land. The village stood within the ruins of an old fort and was surrounded on four sides by high walls. It was like this.’

  With his hands, the old man built four castle walls. From the details that he sketched with his fingers you could see he remembered every bastion, every battlement, each loophole.

  ‘Our village was all Sikh apart from a few Hindu sweepers. Our neighbours were Mahommedan peoples. We owned most of the land but before 1947 we lived like brothers. There were no differences between us ...’ Punjab stroked his beard. He smiled as he recalled his childhood.

  ‘On the 15th of August 1947 the Government announced Partition. We were not afraid. We had heard about the idea of Pakistan, but we thought it would make no difference to us. We realized a Mahommedan government would take over from the Britishers. But in our Punjab governments often come and go. Usually such things make no difference to the poor man in his village.

  ‘Then, quite suddenly, on the 10th of September, we got a message from the Deputy Commissioner in Lyallpur. It said: “You people cannot stay. You must leave your house and your village and go to India.” Everyone was miserable but what could we do? All the villagers began loading their goods into bullock carts. The old men were especially sad: they had lived their whole lives in the village. But we were young and could not understand why our grandfathers were crying.

  ‘In the villages round about the Mahommedans heard we were being forced to move. Many came and said: “You must stay, do not go,” but others were thinking dirty thoughts. They wanted to take our possessions.

  ‘At about six or seven o’clock on the morning we were due to leave, too many Muslim peoples - perhaps five or six thousand — suddenly appeared outside our fort, waving their swords and calling us dogs and infidels. The watchmen shut the gates. Inside, there were only nine hundred of us, including old women and childrens. We had no weapons. We thought we would be killed.

  ‘Then the Pradhan [head] of the Sweet-Makers said: “We have no guns but we have our pans and our sugar and our water. Let us make jalebis for our Muslim friends.” Some of our people thought that the Sweet-Maker had gone mad, and they shook their heads and tore the bristles from their beards. They said: “This is crazy man. The Mahommedan peoples will not go away when they taste our delicious jalebis. Instead they will come inside and kill us.” These old men were very sad and went off to the gurdwara to say their prayers.

  ‘But the Sweet-Maker took his assistants up on to the battlements and he built a big fire. He boiled the water in a pan and he added the sugar. He stirred the mixture until it was thick and flies were buzzing all around. He told the other mithai-wallahs to take their pans and to make jalebis over the other three gates. His assistants did as he said.

  ‘Down below, the Mahommedans had a tree trunk and were running with it against the great gates of the fort, but the gates still held. Eventually the mixture was ready, and the Pradhan shouted down: “You like our jalebis?” and he tilted his pan over the parapet. The boiling sugar poured over the wicked Muslims and they were all burned alive.’

  Punjab beamed a bright smile: ‘All day and all night these dirty Mahommedans tried to find a way to enter the fort, but whenever they tried to get near the gates the sweet-makers gave them a taste of our celebrated jalebis. Then, some time about two a.m. the second night, our peoples saw headlights coming towards us across the fields. It was the British army. They had seen the fires of the sweet-makers burning on the battlements and had come to investigate. The convoy was led by an English colonel. He fired six shots into the air and the Mahommedan fellows ran off into the night as if their Shaitan [satan] was after them.

  ‘The next day the English colonel evacuated us in his trucks. We were only able to take one small bag each, and we had to leave all our carts and goats and sheep and buffalo and oxen. This made us very sad, but at least we were alive. The colonel took us to Amritsar and from there we caught the train to Delhi. Ah! To me Delhi was a wonderful town. I was amazed by all the beautiful cars in the streets. All the Mahommedan tonga-wallahs had gone to Pakistan, so I decided to become a taxi-wallah. This is the job I have been doing ever since.

  ‘After that day, for good luck, my brother Kulwinder began to make jalebis. He still has a shop in Begampur and I have heard some people say that he makes the best jalebis in all of Delhi ...

  I had been living in Delhi for some months before I began to realize quite how many of the people I met every day were Partition refugees. Even the most well-established 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.

  The Puris’ story was fairly typical. Before Partition they had a large town house in Lahore. When the riots came they packed a couple of suitcases, bought their bullock cart and headed off towards Delhi. Their possessions they left locked up in the haveli, guarded by Muslim servants. 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.

  On arrival in Delhi they found a gutted house in Subzi Mandi, the vegetable bazaar of the Old City. It had belonged to a Muslim family that had fled weeks before. The Puris simply installed a new door and moved in. There were still killings, and occasionally stray bullets ricocheted around the bazaar, but gradually the Puris began to find their feet.

  ‘We acquired slowly by slowly,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘My husband started a business making and selling small houses. I knitted woollens. At first it was very hard.’

  After a year of carrying water in leaky buckets, the house was connected to the water mains; later the Puris got electricity installed. By 1949 they had a fan; by 1956 a fridge. In the late 1960s the Puris moved to a smart new house in South Extension. They had arrived.

  We heard the same story repeated over and over again. Even the most innocuous of our neighbours, we discovered, had extraordinary tales of 1947: chartered accountants could tell tales of single- handedly fighting off baying mobs; men from grey government ministries would emerge as the heroes of bloody street battles. Everything these people now possessed was built up by their own hard labour over the last few years.

  Mr Seth, our next door neighbour, was a retired official in the Indian Railways. A safari-suited civil servant, he was polite, timid and
anonymous. After passing out of Walton Railway Training School, Seth’s first posting came in 1946: he was made Assistant Ticket Inspector at Sheikhapura near Lahore. One year later there came the great divide and Mr Seth, a Hindu, found himself on the wrong side of the border. The killing had started. Sikhs and Hindus stopped trains carrying refugees to Pakistan and killed all the Muslims. Muslims stopped trains going to India and killed all the Sikhs and Hindus.

  ‘Every train from India that passed our station was totally smashed,’ remembers Mr Seth. ‘Women, children, old, young: all were killed. Blood was pouring from the bogies [carriages].’

  Then one day, a refugee train from Rawalpindi under the custody of the Gurkhas passed through Sheikhapura. Nervous of being attacked by Muslims, the Gurkhas - all Hindus - let off a barrage of shots through the train windows. A stray bullet hit the wife of the Muslim station master. The station master, unhinged with grief, tried to shoot the only Hindu in the station - his Assistant Ticket Inspector, Mr Seth. He missed. But Mr Seth realized that the moment had come to flee Pakistan. He jumped off the platform and ran down the line towards India. There, a little later, he was ambushed by a party of Muslims heading in the opposite direction. They took everything he owned, including his shoes, his shirt and his trousers.

  ‘I travelled barefoot down the lines having only a knicker,’ said Mr Seth. ‘Four times I escaped death. Four timesl I arrived at Amritsar station at midnight, and got a new uniform from the station master. The next day I reported for duty at nine a.m. exactly.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Promotion!’ said Mr Seth, beaming a red betel-nut smile. ‘I became Commercial Accountant bracket Parcel Clerk, Booking Clerk, Goods Clerk etcetera unbracket. Later I was transferred to Delhi and was given a temporary house in Lodhi Colony. It was previously owned by a Muslim. I was told he had been shot dead on the veranda.’