City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  The violence totally gutted many of the poorer parts of Delhi, but even the very richest districts were affected. While shoppers looked on, Hindu mobs looted the smart Muslim tailors and boutiques in Connaught Place; passers-by then stepped over the murdered shopkeepers and helped themselves to the unguarded stocks of lipstick, handbags and bottles of face cream. In Lodhi Colony, Sikh bands burst into the white Lutyens bungalows belonging to senior Muslim civil servants and slaughtered anyone they found at home.

  In some areas of the Old City, particularly around Turkman Gate and the Jama Masjid, the Muslims armed themselves with mortars and heavy machine guns. From their strongpoints in the narrow alleyways they defied not only the rioters but also the Indian Army. Many of the Muslim families who remain in Delhi today survived by barricading themselves into these heavily defended warrens.

  Meanwhile, refugees poured into India: ‘300,000 Sikh and Hindu refugees are currently moving into the country,’ stated one small page three report in a 1947 edition of the Hindustan Times. ‘Near Amritsar 150,000 people are spread 60 miles along the road. It is perhaps the greatest caravan in human history.’ It was this steady stream of Punjabi refugees who, despite the great exodus of Muslims, still managed to swell the capital’s population from 918,000 in 1941 to 1,800,000 in 1951. The newspaper stories were illustrated with pictures showing the dead lying like a thick carpet on New Delhi Railway Station. Other photographs depicted the refugee camps on the ridge, the white tent cities in which Punjab Singh had stayed on his arrival. There were also shots of some fire-blackened and gutted houses standing in the rubble of the Subzi Mandi. It was in a house such as this that Mr and Mrs Puri had taken shelter for their first months in their new city.

  The more I read, the more it became clear that the events of 1947 were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city’s central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture.

  This paradox also exposed the principal tensions in the city. The old Urdu-speaking elite who had inhabited Delhi for centuries - both Hindu and Muslim - had traditionally looked down on the Punjabis as boorish yeoman farmers. With their folk memories of the mushairas (levees) of the old Mughal court and the mehfils (literary evenings) of the great Delhi poets, with their pride in the subtlety and perfection of Delhi Urdu and Delhi cooking, they could never reconcile themselves to the hardworking but (in their eyes) essentially uncivilized Punjabi colonizers. It was as if Bloomsbury were made to absorb a deluge of mud-booted Yorkshire farmers. To these people, of course, Mrs Puri’s finishing school was the ultimate presumption: a Punjabi immigrant using western textbooks to teach etiquette to Delhi-wallahs - and this in a city which for centuries had regarded itself as the last word in refinement and courtly behaviour.

  In their turn, the Punjabis despised the old Delhi-wallahs as effeminate, slothful and degenerate: ‘Maybe these Delhi people are not always lazy,’ Punjab Singh once said to me. ‘But they are not too active either. Punjabi people are good at earning money and also at spending it. They enjoy life. Delhi peoples are greedy and mean. They expect to live well, but never they are working for it.’

  Today the two worlds, Mughal Old Delhi and Punjabi New Delhi, mix but rarely. Each keeps to itself, each absolutely certain of its superiority over the other. Even on common festivals such as Dusshera, in Delhi traditionally celebrated by the Hindu and Muslim communities without distinction, entirely separate ceremonies are now held, one set around the Red Fort and the Ram Lila Grounds of Old Delhi, the other in the parks and gardens of Punjabi residential colonies south of Lutyens’s city.

  Despite all that politicians of both faiths have done to create a division between Hindu and Muslim, from the early days of the Muslim League to the recent sudden rise of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, in Delhi that communal chasm is still far less marked than the gap separating the Old Delhi-wallah from the Punjabi immigrant.

  Dusshera is the Hindu feast celebrating the victory of Lord Ram over the demon Ravanna; the feast also marks the incipient victory of the cool season over summer’s heat.

  According to the legend, Ravanna kidnapped Sita, Ram’s bride, and carried her off to Lanka, his island fortress. There he tried a number of strategies to enrol her into his splendid harem. But with the help of Hanuman, the Monkey God, Ram leaped across the straits to Lanka, rescued Sita, and after an epic struggle lopped off all ten of the demon’s heads.

  For the last two weeks of September, in the Delhi parks and maidans, huge wickerwork effigies of Ravanna and his two monstrous brothers, Meghnath and Kumbhakaran, were being erected: workmen clung like sparrows to rickety bamboo scaffolding, busily hammering noses and ears into place. On the feast day, amid a flurry of celebrations, all the effigies were to be burned.

  The day of Dusshera - hot, dusty and humid - burned out into a fine warm evening. A Delhi journalist friend had invited Olivia and me to celebrate the festival with him in South Extension. Together we walked to a park near his house. Ravanna was a giant corn dolly 120 feet high, dressed in bright pink pyjamas. He was held upright by six straining guy-ropes. In some of the big gardens in Old Delhi whole circles of hell had been erected — ten or eleven demons, Ravanna’s whole family, all lined up in menacing rows, black moustaches curled — but our friend was very proud of his single pink devil, and there was no denying that he was a very fine demon indeed.

  Beside Ravanna’s ankles a marquee had been erected, and in it a band of Goan boys were playing songs from recent Hindi movies. We took a seat and listened to a number called ‘Ding Dong’ — apparently a great hit a few months before. A plump man in a dhoti passed a collection plate around.

  Then, to the great excitement of the two hundred children present, the sun set and the pyrotechnics began. Some Roman candles spluttered between Ravanna’s legs. A volley of rockets arched above his shoulders. With a small pirouette, the plump man in the dhoti took a burning torch and touched both Ravanna’s feet. A slow blue flame licked up his legs and hovered around his waist. Suddenly his pink pyjama top took.light; and in a trice the whole effigy was in flames. We could feel the heat like a furnace in our faces. Then a canister of Chinese crackers secreted in Ravanna’s chest blew up with a deafening roar. The crowds cheered; and a full moon rose over the demon’s smouldering carcass.

  That October was a season of strange and fiery sunsets: great twilight infernos blazing in the heavens. Sometimes, just as the sun was going down, the evening fumes would mingle with the dung fires of the jhuggi-dwellers to form a perfectly straight sheet of mist along Lodhi Road. Beyond, the thick and dusty air would turn weird, unnatural colours in the gloaming: vivid, luminous mauves; dark, dingy crimsons; deep, bloody reds. Once I saw the great onion dome of Safdarjang’s Tomb illuminated by a beam from the doomed sun. The light remained constant for less than a minute, but it picked out the great Mughal tomb with an unearthly brightness, spot-lit against an abattoir sky.

  Compared with the months before the temperature was suddenly quite bearable. Up in the high Himalayas the first snows had begun to fall and cool winds were blowing down, quenching the fires of the plains. Though it was Still very warm, the bottled-up irritations, suppressed during the previous six months of white heat, came bubbling out in a burst of righteous indignation. Delhi suddenly blossomed with little encampments: every traffic island had someone fasting to death; every day a new pressure group would march on Parliament. You could see them trotting along in a great crocodile, banners held aloft, or else sitting sweating under canopies in Rajpath: there were the teachers and the Tibetans, the blood donors an
d the dog owners; once, to Balvinder Singh’s delight, there was even a delegation of prostitutes from G.B. Road. All the sit-ins, walk-outs and protest marches were remarkably good-humoured; even the hunger strikers seemed strangely to be enjoying themselves.

  It was now cool enough for Olivia to go out painting in the mornings. Every day she would get up at eight and disappear with her brushes and her watercolours. She had given up her place at art school to come out to Delhi and she was determined to make the most of the opportunity. For the rest of the cold season she toured Old Delhi’s kuchas and mohallas sketching the people, the buildings and the ruins. Some days she would not return until dusk.

  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, clearly not a day older than eight. I said as much to Mrs Puri.

  ‘He is nineteen,’ she replied.

  ‘But he is only three and a half feet tall.’

  ‘He is Nepali,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘Nepali people are small.’

  ‘But he has no beard. His voice hasn’t broken. He should be at primary school.’

  Mrs Puri considered this. ‘They have bad food in Nepal,’ she explained. She wobbled her head: ‘In a year, when he has eaten our nutritious dal and rice, he will double in size. Then he will have a moustache and maybe a beard also.’

  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 prop ositioning passers-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.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Puri,’ Olivia once ventured on meeting him and Nickoo half-way around the square.

  ‘My darling, my sweetheart,’ replied Mr Puri, somewhat unexpectedly. ‘Be my wife.’

  ‘You’ve picked the wrong girl, Mr Puri,’ replied Olivia, marching off, brushes in hand.

  This put-down, like the others before it, failed to put Mr Puri off the scent, although he did initiate enquiries, through Nickoo, as to whether Olivia and I really were married. In the meantime he continued to shoot around the flat on his zimmer, chasing Olivia if ever she ventured downstairs to borrow some milk. Finally he got caught.

  One day Olivia was standing in the doorway chatting to Mrs Puri when Mr Puri appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He had just returned from his morning walk and did not realize his wife was the other side of the door.

  ‘My sweetheart: are you damsel or madam?’ he asked.

  Olivia turned round to see Mr Puri advancing towards her.

  ‘This man,’ he said pointing to Nickoo, ‘says you are madam. I say you are damsel.’

  Mrs Puri flung open the door and fired a burst of rapid-shot Punjabi at her husband. Then she turned to Olivia.

  ‘He means you are married now so you are “madam”,’ she said, glowering at her husband, ‘while before you were “damsel”.’

  ‘Are you damsel or madam?’ repeated Mr Puri, undaunted, grabbing hold of Nickoo and propelling himself upwards towards Olivia.

  Olivia held up her wedding ring like garlic to a vampire. ‘Mr Puri,’ she said. ‘I am madam.’

  That October I often accompanied Olivia on her expeditions into the alleys of Old Delhi, once Shahjehanabad, the capital of the Empire of the Great Mogul. It was an area I had always loved, but there was no denying that it had fallen on hard times. The Old City had been built at the very apex of Delhi’s fortunes and had been in slow decline virtually from the moment of its completion. The final and most dramatic wrecking of its fortunes had, however, taken place in 1947.

  Just as Partition resulted in prosperity and growth for the new Delhi, it led to impoverishment and stagnation for the old. The fabulous city which hypnotized the world travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the home of the great poets Mir, Zauq and Ghalib; the city of nautch girls and courtesans; the seat of the Emperor, the Shadow of God, the Refuge of the World, became a ghetto, a poor relation embarrassingly tacked on to the metropolis to its south. Since 1947 the Old City has survived only by becoming one enormous storehouse for North India’s wholesale goods; one by one the old palaces and mansions have been converted into godowns (warehouses) and stores. It has become more remarkable for its junk markets and car parts bazaars than for any fraying beauty or last lingering hints of sophistication. The crafts and skills developed over the centuries for the tastes of the old Urdu-speaking Delhi elite either adjusted to the less sophisticated Punjabi market, or simply died out.

  Near the Ajmeri Gate lies the old Cobblers’ 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.

  I met Shamim in a chai shop outside the Ajmeri Gate mosque. He was a tall and elegant man in his early fifties, dressed in an immaculate sherwani frock coat and a tall lambskin cap. He had high cheekbones, fair skin, and narrow, almond-shaped eyes that hinted at a Central Asian ancestry. On his chin he sported a neat goatee beard. He sat down beside me at a table in the rear of the shop and over a glass of masala tea we began to talk.

  ‘My forebears were writers at the Mughal court,’ said Shamim. ‘And before that we were calligraphers in Samarkand. My family have always been in this business.’

  ‘And you illuminate your documents in exactly the way your father taught you?’

  ‘My father was a very accomplished man. He knew the shikastah script as well as the nastaliq; he could write both Persian and Urdu. I learned only the nastaliq. Slowly the skills are dying. Today there are only two other calligraphers in Delhi and they are of inferior quality.’

  Shamim called the chai-boy over and asked for the bill. When it finally came he totted it up, checking all the figures in a slightly pedantic manner.

  ‘Today most of the work is in Hindi,’ he said. ‘Because of this there is little demand for our skills.’

  ‘Can you not learn the Hindi script?’ I asked.

  ‘I know it. But with the change from Urdu has come a loss of prestige. Earlier it was a highly respected job that few people were qualified to perform: you had to be familiar with Islamic law, had to know the old Delhi customs, and most of all you had to be a talented calligrapher. Now I am just a clerk; most of the work is done quickly on typewriters.’

  He downed the rest of the tea in a single swallow and swirled the dregs around in his glass: ‘It is because of the newcomers. They have a very different culture; they have no interest in fine calligraphy.’

  We walked together through the jostling crowds to his office; and while we walked he told me about Ali. With his share of the inheritance, the raffish younger brother had, it seemed, started some sort of shady photography studio at the front of the shop.

  ‘My brother cannot write in Urdu,’ said Shamim. ‘Like many of the young men he has no knowledge of his own culture. Only he is interested in photography.’ The calligrapher’s face set in a deep frown. ‘Ali got involved with men of very bad character,’ he whispered. “Photography was the only way we could divert his attention from even worse occupations. Still I am very ashamed. How can you explain these pictures?‘

 
We had arrived at the shop - little more than a small cavity in the street-frontage - and Shamim was pointing to a frieze of pin-ups cut from Indian magazines. It was quite a collection: voluptuous actresses lying scantily-clad on tiger-skins, topless white girls posing on the beaches of Goa, a selection of portly Egyptian belly-dancers covered with earrings and bracelets; diamonds flashed from the folds around their belly-buttons. Beyond the counter in the studio I could see Ali taking passport photographs with a new Japanese camera. He was dressed in cream-coloured slacks and a polyester shirt.

  ‘These pictures are the concern of my brother,’ whispered Shamim, still grimacing at the pin-ups. ‘They are not my business. But because of them I cannot invite to this office any of my religious-minded relatives. Because of these pictures no good Muslim will come near this shop. It is all most un-Islamic.

  ‘Maybe in time Ali will take them down,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe,’ agreed Shamim. ‘When men are young they are getting involved in photography, beer-drinking and nudity. But,’ he continued, ‘when they are older they return to Islam.’

  ‘When people get older they decide to wear the long beard and to look very pious,’ said Ali. He had come over to the counter and overheard the end of our conversation. ‘But people do not change. I know several men who look like Shamim - with beards and sherwani - yet they run brothels in G.B. Road.’

  Shamim frowned, but Ali had not finished.

  ‘The problem with people around here is narrow thinking,’ he said airily. ‘They are not broadminded. They are not reading magazines from Bombay. They do not know what is happening in the world.’

  ‘You obviously read a lot of Bombay magazines,’ I replied, pointing at the pin-ups.

  ‘You like them?’

  ‘I’m not sure about the Egyptian ladies.’

  ‘I put them up to attract the customers,’ replied Ali. ‘My brother is unhappy with me only because I am doing much better business than he. Today no one wants a calligrapher. Even in a town like Delhi.’