City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  Ali stepped out on to the pavement and made a disdainful gesture out over the street: ‘Look! This city is now so dirty. Everything is old and falling down. Why should I stay in a place like this? One day I will leave and go to Bombay. Delhi is finished.’

  A black silk bundle walked into the shop accompanied by her heavily bearded husband. The man talked to Ali and all three headed off into the curtained booth reserved for taking passport pictures of women in chador.

  ‘This family were clients of my father’s,‘ said Shamim, trying to explain why any decent Muslim families would dream of using his brother’s services.

  ‘Don’t your father’s old customers support you too?’ I asked.

  ‘There was much bloodshed in this area in 1947,’ replied Shamim. ‘Most of my father’s customers are either dead or living in Karachi. The old Delhi-wallahs continue to come here, but now they are so few.’

  ‘So your skill will die?’

  ‘My son does not want to learn the trade. He wants to become a businessman or to join some modern profession.’

  ‘But you will carry on?’

  Shamim’s face fell. ‘Inshallah I will continue,’ he replied. ‘There is no money in it — but this is my craft, the craft of my fathers.’

  He said: ‘I must be loyal to it.’

  Since I had first explored the labyrinths of Shahjehanabad five years previously, I had read some of the descriptions of the area penned by the seventeenth-century writers and poets: ‘Its towers are the resting place of the sun,’ wrote Chandar Bhan Brahman in 1648. ‘Its avenues are so full of pleasure that its lanes are like the roads of paradise.’ ‘It is like a Garden of Eden that is populated,’ echoed Ghulam Mohammed Khan. ‘It is the foundation of the eighth heaven.’ ‘It is the seat of Empire ... the centre of the great circle of Islam ...’

  For all the Old City’s considerable charm, it was impossible to reconcile the earthly paradise praised by the poets with the melancholy slum that today squatted within the crumbling Mughal walls. Even allowing for the conventions of Persian hyperbole (and for the fact that most of the writers were professional flatterers — sycophancy being throughout history the pervasive vice of the ambitious Delhi-wallah), the chasm between the two visions seemed unbridgeable.

  The greatest disappointment was Chandni Chowk. In the poems and travelogues, the Moonlight Bazaar is praised as a kind of Oriental Faubourg St Honoré, renowned for its wide avenues, its elegant caravanserais and its fabulous Mughal gardens. Having read the descriptions of this great boulevard, once the finest in all Islam, as you sit on your rickshaw and head on into the labyrinth you still half-expect to find its shops full of jasper and sardonynx for the Mughal builders, mother-of-pearl inlay for the pietra dura crafts-men ; you expect to see strings of Bactrian camels from Kashgar and logs of cinnamon from Madagascar, merchants from Ferghana, and Khemer girl concubines from beyond the Irrawady; perhaps even a rare breed of turkey from the New World or a zebra to fill the Imperial menagerie and amuse the Emperor.

  But instead, as you sit stranded’ in a traffic jam, half-choked by rickshaw fumes and the ammonia-stink of the municipal urinals, you see around you a sad vista of collapsing shop fronts and broken balustrades, tatty warehouses roofed with corrugated iron and patched with rusting duckboards. The canal which ran down the centre of the bazaar has been filled in; the trees have been uprooted. All is tarnished, fraying at the edges. On the pavement, a Brahminy cow illicitly munches vegetables from the sack of a vendor; a Muslim ear-cleaner squats outside the Sis Ganj gurdwara and peers down the orifices of a Sikh nihang (gurdwara guard). A man grabs your arm and stage-whispers: ‘Sahib, you want carpets hashish smack brown sugar change money blue film sexy ladies no problem!’

  Another vendor waves some cheap plastic trinkets in your face. ‘Hello, my dear,’ he says. ‘You want?’

  His brother joins the serum, his arms full of posters: ‘Whatyou- want ? I have everything! Guru Gobind Singh, Alpine meadow scene, Arnold Swartznegger, two little kittens, Saddam Hussein, Lord Shiva, Charlie Chaplin ...’

  A crowd gathers.

  ‘Your mother country?’

  ‘This lady your wife?’

  ‘How many childrens?’

  The gridlock tightens; it is time to jettison the stationary rickshaw and beat a retreat.

  Turkman Gate on the south of the Old City is less crowded, but even more depressing. The area is named after an eleventh-century Turkoman nomad who turned Sufi and built his hermitage here; but the Punjabis who moved here in 1947 have confused the name, and it is now known as Truckman Gate after the lorry drivers who come to eat in the roadside restaurants.

  The streets here are narrow and full of goats being fattened for Bakri Id. Pack-donkeys trot past carrying saddlebags full of rubble. As you pass into the Sita Ram bazaar and take in the grand old gateways tumbling down on either side of you, you begin to realize what has happened here. The same walls that now form the rickety paan shops and dirty godowns once supported sprawling mansions and the lovely Delhi courtyard houses known as havelis. You can see it for yourself: the slum was once a city of palaces.

  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 (harems), a guardhouse or a miniature mosque, the haveli library and the customary shish mahal or glass palace. The haveli was a world within a world, self-contained and totally hidden from the view of the casual passer-by. 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 here.

  The desolation is even sadder when a haveli is associated with a known piece of history. At the end of the Sita Ram Bazaar stands the Haksar Haveli. Here, little more than seventy years ago, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, married his wife Kamla. The house belonged to one of the most distinguished of the Kashmiri Pandit families in Delhi, the Haksars, and was famed for its size and magnificence. The gatehouse survives still as a witness to this grandeur: with its Dholpur sandstone façade, its delicate jharokha balconies and its fine fish-tail mouldings it is still a magnificent sight. But the interior is a gutted ruin. Through the locked grille you can see the desolation: collapsed rafters now act as a sort of walkway for the cook who squats in the rubble frying his samosas; the cellars are gradually overflowing with his kitchen refuse and old potato peelings. Cusped sandstone arches are buried up to their capitals in rubble; vaults hang suspended in a litter of disintegrating brickwork. No one seems to care. It is as if the people of Delhi had washed their hands of the fine old mansions of the Old City in their enthusiasm to move into the concrete bunkers of the New.

  There is still continuity here, a few surviving traditions, some lingering beauty, but you have to look quite hard to find it.

  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 Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and so was saved from the rapid eclipse that had blacked out many similar households. Yet even here, the inevitable decay had set in. The outer courtyard had recently been destroyed and its space given over for shops. The balconies were collapsing, the paint was flaking. The veranda lay unswept.

  Begum Hamida Sultan sat with her silent young
er sister at a large teak table. She was dressed in tatty cotton pyjamas. She was old and frail, with white hair and narrow wrists, but she sat bolt upright, as if still animated by some lingering, defiant pride of her Mughal blood. She had fair skin, but her fine aristocratic face - obviously once very beautiful - was now lined with frown-marks.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said, indicating the litter on the floor and the unswept dust. ‘We have no servants. The last one died two years ago.’

  As girls, she said, she and her sister used to be driven from Ali Manzil to Queen Mary’s School in a horse-drawn landau. In those days the house was full of writers, musicians, politicians and poets; you needed to have an appointment to be let into even the outer courtyard.

  ‘We had fifty visitors a day. Now ...’ Her voice tailed off. ‘It was Partition that destroyed our Delhi.’

  ‘Can you remember it?’ I asked.

  ‘We were in Shillong. When we returned we found the house had been ransacked. The cook had run away. The gardener had been killed. Of my relations, the Loharus, only the Nawab [of Pataudi] was left. Everyone else had fled to Pakistan.’

  She shook her head. ‘I loved Delhi. But now Delhi is dead.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Hardly any of the original inhabitants are left. The outsiders have taken over. Even our language is dead.’

  ‘But many people in Delhi still speak Urdu.’

  ‘Urdu is an aristocratic language. It was not the language of the working classes. Those who are left - the artisans - speak Karkhana [factory] Urdu. The Urdu of the poets is dead.’

  An emaciated cat which had been mewing hungrily at the Begum’s feet jumped up on to the table. Flirtatiously it smoothed itself against her bony fingers. The Begum brushed it away.

  ‘Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.’

  Olivia asked whether we could come back and visit her again, and whether she needed anything from New Delhi.

  ‘I do not need anything,’ replied the Begum haughtily. ‘Do not come back.’ She paused; then added huskily, almost in a whisper: ‘I just want to be forgotten.’

  The best impression of the Shahjehanabad of Hamida Sultan — of the city that was destroyed in 1947 - can be found not in photographs or pictures, nor even in the jaded memories of the survivors, but in a slim first novel published to some critical acclaim in 1940.

  Although the brilliance of Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali was immediately recognized by both E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, most copies of the book were lost when the warehouse of the Hogarth Press was destroyed during the Blitz. There was no reprint, and the book was overlooked first during the trauma of the Second World War, then in the holocaust of Partition. Only now with the recent publication of a paperback has the book begun to receive the recognition it deserved. For although (until recently) forgotten even in the city it immortalized, Twilight in Delhi is not only a very fine novel, it is also an irreplaceable record of the vanished life and culture of pre-war Delhi. Written only seven years before the catastrophe of 1947, its gloomy tone and pessimistic title were more visionary than Ahmed Ali could ever have imagined.

  The novel follows the fortunes of a traditional Muslim family living in a haveli very like Ali Manzil. At the opening of the book a cloud is looming over the house: the patriarch, an old Mughal named Mir Nihal, disapproves of his son courting a low-born girl named Bilqeece. As the love of Ashgar and Bilqeece first grows, blossoms, then decays, the whole dying world of Shahjehanabad is evoked: the pigeon-fliers and the poets, the alchemists and the Sufis, the beggars and the tradesmen.

  Beyond Kashmiri Gate the British usurp the mantle of the Mughal emperors, enforcing their authority but rarely deigning to mix with the ordinary Delhi-wallahs. The First World War and the influenza epidemic strike down the young; vultures circle ominously overhead. Yet inside the walls of the havelis and the lattice screens of the zenana, life goes on as it always did. Births follow upon marriages, love affairs decay, middle age gives way to crumbling senility - but all the time the stories and traditions are passed on:

  ‘Cover your head, daughter, or some evil spirit may harm you...’

  ‘If you put a broom under the leg of a bed, the wind-storm abates ...’

  ‘When a dust storm blows it means the djinns are going to celebrate a marriage ...’

  Up on the roof the men discuss the different breeds of racing pigeon: the golays that fly low over the roofs, but in a perfectly straight line; the fast and high flying Kabuli kabooter; or the slow but beautiful fan-tailed nisarays. Elsewhere, the fakirs and alchemists discuss the herbs and rituals which can turn tin into molten gold; and they talk in hushed voices of the alchemist’s vital ingredient, the luminous flower called ‘Lamp of the Night’ which at dusk flickers like a firefly on the parched hillsides of Rajputana.

  Twilight in Delhi survived Partition to represent the life of Old Delhi to a new readership today, but what, I wondered, had happened to its author? My edition of the book gave no clue; and I scanned the bookshops in vain to find other, later works by the same hand. It was a Delhi publisher friend who told me that Ali was in fact still alive, now an old man living in obscurity in Karachi. This only made it more intriguing: why would anyone who so obviously loved Delhi with a passion opt to leave it? And why had he not gone on to write other even better books?

  Karachi seemed to hold the key to many of the unanswered questions of 1947. Not only did the city contain some 200,000 refugees who had fled from Delhi to Pakistan in the upheavals of that year, it also contained their most distinguished chronicler. The moment had come for me to visit Karachi for myself.

  In Delhi I had been given an introduction to Shanulhaq Haqqee, a pipe-smoking Urdu poet and the direct descendant of Abdul Haq, a famous literary figure at the court of Shah Jehan. Shanulhaq fled from Delhi in 1947. He left to escape the rioting and meant to return as soon as order was re-established. He was never allowed to except much later, for a week, as a tourist from a foreign country. It was almost exactly seven hundred years since the first of his line arrived in Delhi from Turkestan to fight in the Deccani wars of the thirteenth-century Sultan, Ala-ud-Din Khalji.

  Shanulhaq was the only person I had been able to find who was actually a friend of Ahmed Ali. ‘Ali doesn’t mix much,’ a Pakistani friend had told me. ‘He never really fitted in in Karachi.’ ‘He’s a bit abrupt,’ said someone else. ‘You know ... rather bitter.’

  Shanulhaq Haqqee offered to drive me over to see Ahmed Ali the evening of my arrival. But first, he said, I should come and meet some other Delhi exiles. He would expect me at his house in time for tea.

  The exiles - now elderly and respectable figures - sat sipping jasmine tea from porcelain cups while they nibbled pakoras and cucumber sandwiches. On the wall hung a faded sepia photograph of Shanulhaq’s family in their haveli near the Ajmeri Gate around 1912; beside it hung another of a very small boy dressed in late Mughal court dress: a brocaded sherwani, baggy white pyjamas, and on his head, a tiny red fez. It was Shanulhaq as an infant.

  ‘Of course Karachi Urdu is really pure Delhi Urdu,’ explained a judge, biting a pakora. ‘Now that they have Sanskritized all the dialects in India, this is the last place you can hear it spoken.’

  Outside, you could hear the dull drone of the Karachi traffic. The city kept reminding me of the Gulf: the new motorways, the glossy high-rise buildings, the Japanese cars. But when you talked to the exiles it was the Palestinians who came to mind. Each one treasured his childhood memories like a title-deed. Each one knew by heart the stories of the catastrophe, the massacres and the exodus; the forty-year-old tales of exile flowed from everyone’s lips like new gossip. Each one talked about the old city as if it remained unchanged since the day they had departed.

  ‘Have you ever been to Gulli Churiwallan?’ asked the judge, referring to a dirty ghetto now
full of decaying warehouses. ‘The havelis there are the most magnificent in all Delhi. The stonework, the fountains ...’

  It reminded me of a conversation I had had two years before in a camp near Ramallah on the West Bank. Did I know the orange groves at Biddya near Jaffa, Usamah had asked me. They grew the best oranges in Palestine at Biddya, he said. As a boy he could remember creeping in and shinning up the trees and the juice running down his face afterwards ... How could I tell him that his orange groves now lay under one of the ugliest suburbs of Tel Aviv?

  ‘Have you been to Burns Road?’ asked a civil servant’s wife, breaking into my thoughts. ‘It’s just around the corner from your hotel. All the sweetmeat vendors from the Delhi Jama Masjid set up their stalls there. Sometimes I just go there to listen. I sit in a dhaba and close my eyes and then there is a whiff of shammi kebab and I think: Ah! The smell of my childhood.’

  ‘Do they still teach Ghalib in the schools?’ asked the newsreader, referring to the great Urdu poet. ‘Or is it just Kalidasa and the Ramayana?’

  ‘I bet no one even knows who Ghalib is in Delhi these days,’ said the judge. ‘They probably think he’s a cricketer.’

  Later, Shanulhaq drove me slowly through the streets of Karachi. As we went, he pointed out the shops which had once filled the streets of Delhi: the English Boot House, once of Connaught Place; Abdul Khaliq, the famous sweet-seller of Chandni Chowk; Nihari‘s, the kebab-wallah from the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid. He pointed out how such and such an area still preserved the distinctive idiom or the distinctive cut of kurta pyjamas unique to such and such an area of Delhi.

  Even the streets were like a Delhi Dictionary of Biography. While the roads of modern Delhi are named after a dubious collection of twentieth-century politicians - Archbishop Makarios Marg, Tito Marg and so on - the streets of Karachi are named after the great Delhi-wallahs of history: to get to Ahmed Ali we passed through a litany of Delhi sufis and sultans, poets and philosophers, before turning left into Amir Khusroe Drive.