City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  Ahmed Ali was there to meet us. He wore severe black-rimmed glasses above which sprouted a pair of thin grey eyebrows. He slurred his consonants and had the slightly limp wrist and effete manner of one who modelled himself on a Bloomsbury original. His hair was the colour of wood-ash. For a man once seen as a champion of Delhi’s culture, a bulwark of eastern civilization against the seepage of western influence, Ahmed Ali now cut an unexpectedly English figure: with his clipped accent and tweed jacket with old leather elbow-patches he could have passed off successfully as a clubland character from a Noel Coward play.

  But despite his comfortable, well-to-do appearance Ahmed Ali was an angry man. Over the hours I spent with him, he spluttered and spat like a well-warmed frying pan. The first occasion was when I inadvertently mentioned that he was now a citizen of Pakistan.

  ‘Poppycock! Balderdashl’ he said. ’I was always against Jinnah. Never had any interest in Pakistan.‘

  ‘Steady on,’ said Shanulhaq.

  ‘The devil!’ said Ali. ‘Pakistan is not a country. Never was. It’s a damn hotchpotch. It’s not your country or my country.’ He was shouting at Shanulhaq now. ‘It’s the country of a damn bunch of feudal lords ... robbers, bloody murderers, kidnappers ...’

  The outburst spluttered out into silence.

  ‘But,’ I ventured. ‘Didn’t you opt for Pakistan? Surely you could have stayed in Delhi had you wanted to.’

  There was another explosion.

  ‘I opted for Pakistan? I did not! I was the Visiting Professor in Nanking when the blasted Partition took place. The bloody swine of Hindus wouldn’t let me go back home so ...’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I went and saw the Indian ambassador in Peking. Bloody ... bloody swine said I couldn’t return. Said it was a question of Hindu against Muslim and that there was nothing he could do. I was caught in China and had nowhere to go.’

  ‘Careful,’ said Shanulhaq, seeing the state his friend had worked himself up into.

  ‘So how did you end up in Karachi?’ I asked.

  ‘When my salary in Nanking was stopped I found my way to some friends in Hong Kong. They put me on an amphibious plane to Karachi. Where else could I have gone if I couldn’t go back to Delhi?’

  Ali had ceased to quiver with rage and was now merely very cross.

  ‘I never opted for Pakistan,’ he said, gradually regaining his poise. ‘The civilization I belong to - the civilization of Delhi - came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim. That civilization flourished for one thousand years undisturbed until certain people came along and denied that that great mingling had taken place.’

  ‘Views like that can hardly have made you popular here.’

  ‘They never accepted me in Pakistan, damn it. I have been weeded out. They don’t publish my books. They have deleted my name. When copies of Twilight in Delhi arrived at the Karachi customs from India, they sent them back: said the book was about the “forbidden” city across the border. They implied the culture was foreign and subversive. Hal’

  ‘In that case can’t you go back to Delhi? Couldn’t you re-apply for Indian citizenship?’

  ‘Now no country is my country,’ said Ali. ‘Delhi is dead; the city that was ... the language ... the culture. Everything I knew is finished.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Shanulhaq. ‘I went back thirteen years after Partition. Already everything was different. I stayed in a new hotel - the Ambassador - which I only later realized had been built on top of a graveyard where several of my friends were buried. In my mohalla everyone used to know me, but suddenly I was a stranger. My haveli was split into ten parts and occupied by Punjabis. My wife’s house had become a temple. Delhi was no longer the abode of the Delhi-wallah. Even the walls had changed. It was very depressing.’

  ‘Before Partition it was a unique city,’ said Ali. ‘Although it was already very poor, still it preserved its high culture. That high culture filtered down even to the streets, everyone was part of it: even the milk-wallahs could quote Mir and Dagh ...’

  ‘The prostitutes would sing Persian songs and recite Hafiz ...’

  ‘They may not have been able to read and write but they could remember the poets ...’

  ‘And the language,’ said Shanulhaq. ‘You cannot conceive how chaste Delhi Urdu was ...’

  ‘And how rich,’ added Ali. ‘Every mohalla had its own expressions; the language used by our ladies was quite distinct from that used by the men. Now the language has shrunk. So many words are lost.’

  We talked for an hour about the Delhi of their childhood and youth. We talked of the eunuchs and the sufis and the pigeons and the poets; of the monsoon picnics in Mehrauli and the djinn who fell in love with Ahmed Ali’s aunt. We talked of the sweetmeat shops which stayed open until three in the morning, the sorcerers who could cast spells over a whole mohalla, the possessed woman who used to run vertically up the zenana walls, and the miraculous cures effected by Hakim Ajmal Khan. The old men swam together through great oceans of nostalgia before finally coming ashore on a strand of melancholy.

  ‘But all of that is no more,’ said Ali. ‘All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed.’

  ‘Now it is a carcass without a soul,’ said Shanulhaq.

  ‘I am a fossil,’ said Ali. ‘And Shanulhaq is on his way to becoming a fossil.’

  ‘But nevertheless,’ I insisted. ‘If you both loved Delhi so much wouldn’t you like to see it just one more time?’

  ‘I will never see that town again,’ said Ali. ‘Once I was invited to give some lectures in Australia. There was some mechanical fault and the plane was diverted to Delhi. The plane landed but I refused to get out. I said: “I am not getting out. I don’t have to. You call your damned Chairman. But I’m not putting my foot on that soil which was sacred to me and which has been desecrated.”

  ‘They got the entire staff of the airport there to get me out, but I didn’t move. How could I? How could I revisit that which was once mine and which was now no longer mine? When they asked why I was behaving as I was, I simply sat in my seat and quoted Mir Taqi Mir at them:What matters it, O breeze,

  If now has come the spring

  When I have lost them both

  The garden and my nest?‘

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘The swine were all Punjabis,’ said Ali. ‘Tell you the truth, I don’t think they could understand a bloody word I said.’

  FOUR

  MY FIRST ACTION on returning from Karachi was to retrieve from the Delhi Customs Shed my computer, printer, ghetto blaster and precious electric kettle. How they got there is a long and harrowing story.

  Five days before, I had arrived at Delhi International Airport in good time for the Karachi flight. Getting thus far had taken a week of hard work, for in Delhi the simple matter of leaving the country can turn into some sort of mediaeval penitential exercise. For four days I spent my waking hours pacing the corridors of Hans Bhavan, headquarters of the Immigration Authorities, in the quest for exit permits; waited patiently in a queue outside the Pakistani Embassy Visa Section in search of an entry permit; then underwent five long, dull hours sitting in the Air India office while their ticketing computer lay disembowelled on the desk, undergoing emergency surgery at the hands of a computer ‘expert’.

  As I strode through Immigration on the way to Customs, I congratulated myself on having got everything achieved: I had a boarding pass and a seat number; the tickets were in my hand; the appropriate stamps were in my passport. Proudly I handed it to the customs officer:

  OFFICER (leafing through passport) Good day, sahib. I am thinking you are new in our India.

  WD Yes. I’ve just moved here.

  OFFICER But now you are planning to leave?

  WD (cheerily) That’s right. Not for long though!

  OFFICER (suddenly severe) When you arrived in our India, I am thinking you brought in one computer, one printer, one piece casse
tte recorder and one Swan electric kettle.

  WD That’s very clever of you. Oh, I see! (The truth dawns) Your colleagues wrote them in the back of my passport when I arrived.

  OFFICER Sahib, I do not understand. You are planning to leave our India but I am not seeing one computer, one printer (reads out list from passport).

  WD (nervous now) No - but I’m not going for long. I won’t be needing the kettle. I’m going to be staying in a hotel. Ha! Ha!

  OFFICER Ha! Ha! But sahib. You cannot leave India without your computer and other assorted import items.

  WD Why not?

  OFFICER This is regulation.

  WD But this is absurd.

  OFFICER (wobbling head) Yes, sahib. This is regulation.

  WD But I’m only going for five days.

  OFFICER This has no relevance, sahib. One day, one year it is same thing only.

  WD (losing cool) Do you understand? I AM ONLY GOING AWAY FOR FIVE DAYS. My things are all at home. Of course I won’t bring my bloody kettle with me when I go away for a short trip. Any more than bring my fridge, my pots and pans or my air conditioning unit.

  OFFICER Sahib — you are having imported air conditioning unit?

  WD (backtracking fast) No, no. It was just a figure of speech ... OFFICER Sahib. Point is this. Maybe you have broken number one tip-top most important regulation and have sold your kettle or one piece cassette recorder.

  WD (desperate) I promise you I haven’t sold anything. They are all in my flat. Please, I just want to go to Karachi.

  OFFICER Sahib. I cannot see your items. So I cannot let you go. It took twenty minutes of wrangling, pleading, cajoling and threats before we patched up a compromise. I would rush home and bring my ‘assorted items’ to the airport. I would show them to the officer.

  He would hold them as surety for my return. When I got back they would be returned.

  On my return from Karachi the officer, Mr Prakash Jat, was true to his word. He was waiting for me, items safely secreted in his customs pound. I handed over the receipt.

  ‘You are lucky man,’ said Mr Jat. ‘We are breaking all regulations letting you out of India without your items.’ Then he added: ‘By the way, much am I liking your [reads from label] Discoblast Cassette Recorder with Anti-Woof and Flutter Function.’

  Mr Jat gave my cassette recorder a loving caress, held it in his hands and admired its sleek lines and sturdy build. Then, casting a shady look on either side, he added in a lowered voice: ‘Sahib, you are wanting to sell? I give you good price.’

  Outside, I was both pleased and surprised to see Balvinder Singh waiting for me. I say surprised because during the weeks prior to my departure, Balvinder had been playing truant. It had all begun in the middle of October when Balvinder was thrown out of his house by his wife and he had been forced to take refuge with the whores on G.B. Road. My friend feigned a lack of interest in his domestic drama - ‘No problem, Mr William. Paying forty-fifty rupees, spending whole night. Too much fun, everyone too much happy’ - but despite this bravado, as the month progressed Balvinder Singh began to show distinct signs of wear and tear. Absent from International Backside most of the morning, he would appear still unshaven in the early afternoon. No longer would he point out pretty girls in the street with a cheerful ’You like, Mr William?‘ More ominously, he began to discharge himself from duty promptly at five-thirty and head off at some speed towards the Khan Market Beer Shop.

  Balvinder’s preferred tipple had always been a strong local brand called German Beer, whose large litre bottles were distinguished by the enormous swastika which decorated their labels. Balvinder had always been apt to down a litre or two of German Beer an evening, but through October his intake rose dramatically. Over the month empty beer bottles piled up in the taxi, so that every time we turned a corner a monumental crash of broken glass would be heard in the boot.

  ‘I am having some breakable items in my dickie,’ Balvinder would explain, a touch shamefaced.

  Whether it was his spending on German Beer or Rajasthani whores that landed him in debt, one day towards the end of October Balvinder confronted me and asked whether he could borrow one thousand rupees. His creditors were after him, he said. A month earlier he had borrowed money from a friend, a local gunda; now the gunda was threatening to perform some impromptu surgery unless he could pay up. It all sounded a bit of a tall story, but I lent Balvinder the money. The next day he disappeared to the Punjab.

  Now, a month later, the upsets seemed forgotten and he cheerily handed back all the money he owed. When I asked my friend about his gunda and his debts he just shrugged.

  ‘Big man, big problem,’ he said. ‘Small man, small problem.’

  ‘What do you mean, Balvinder?’

  ‘Rajiv Gandhi has big problem, Balvinder Singh has small problem.’

  What he actually meant, I later discovered, was that his father, Punjab Singh, had bailed him out of trouble in exchange for a promise of future good behaviour. It lasted about a fortnight. In the meantime, for the first couple of weeks of November, Olivia and I enjoyed the new-leaf, clean-shaven, fresh-smelling Balvinder and the novel sensation of riding in a taxi that didn’t reek of brewery.

  Two days after I returned from Karachi, I called Balvinder and asked him to take me up to Coronation Park.

  When I first came to Delhi I had expected to find much that was familiar. I knew that India had been influenced by England since the Elizabethan period, and that the country had been forcibly shackled to Britain, first in the form of the East India Company, then the British Crown, for nearly two hundred years.

  Moreover, in the mid-1980s, Britain was in the grip of a Raj revival. The British public wallowed in a nostalgic vision of the Raj as some sort of extended colonial soap opera - Upstairs, Downstairs writ large over the plains of Asia. The Jewel in the Crown was being shown on television, and the correspondence columns of The Times were full of complaints from old India hands about the alleged inaccuracies in Attenborough’s Gandhi. Academic presses were churning out books on the buildings of the Empire while the Booker shortlist could be counted on to include at least two books whose plot revolved around the Raj: The Siege of Krishnapur, Heat and Dust, Staying On and Midnight’s Children had all been winners in recent years.

  Such was the enthusiasm at home for things Imperial Indian that I had assumed that India would be similarly obsessed with things Imperial British. Nothing, of course, could have been further from the truth. Instead, visiting the subcontinent less than forty years after the last sahib set sail back to Britain, I was intrigued by the degree to which India had managed to shed its colonial baggage. True, people spoke English, played cricket and voted in Westminster-style elections. Nevertheless, far from encountering the familiar, I was astonished how little evidence remained of two centuries of colonial rule. In the conversation of my Indian contemporaries, the British Empire was referred to in much the same way as I referred to the Roman Empire. For all the fond imaginings of the British, as far as the modern Delhi-wallah was concerned, the Empire was ancient history, an age impossibly remote from our own.

  Nowhere was this distance clearer than at Coronation Park. The park stands on the site of the three great Delhi Durbars, the ceremonial climaxes of the entire Imperial pageant. Today, as Balvinder and I discovered after a long search, the site lies far north of the northernmost suburb of Old Delhi, stranded now amid a great flooded wilderness. As the eye sweeps over the plain, it seems a flat and uninteresting expanse, so level that a single bullock cart inching its way across the land appears as tall as some towering temple chariot. Then, to one side of the horizon, erupting suddenly from the marshy flatlands, there appears a vast marble image, an Indian Ozymandias.

  The statue is sixty feet tall, a king enthroned with orb and sceptre; around him stands a crescent of stone acolytes, an ossified court marooned in an Arthurian wasteland of swamp, mud and camel-thorn. Creepers tangle through the folds in the robes; grass greens the Crown Imperial. At fi
rst it is possible to mistake the Ozymandias-image for a displaced Egyptian Pharaoh or a lost Roman Emperor. Only on closer examination does it become clear that it is George V, the King Emperor, surrounded by his viceroys.

  The statue originally surmounted the central roundabout of New Delhi, the climax of the Kingsway (now Rajpath). It was hauled into retirement soon after Independence and now stands forgotten and unloved, an unwanted reminder of a period few Indians look back to with any nostalgia. Although the statue is only sixty years old, the world it came from seems as distant as that of Rameses II.

  Perhaps it is language, the spoken word, which is the greatest indication of the distance travelled since 1947.

  The English spoken by Indians - Hinglish - has of course followed its own idiosyncratic journey since the guardians of its purity returned home. Like American English, likewise emancipated by Britain’s colonial retreat, it has developed its own grammatical rules, its own syntax and its own vocabulary.

  One of the great pleasures of our life in India has always been being woken on the dot of 7.30 every morning by Ladoo bearing ‘bed tea’ and the Times of India. The news is inevitably depressing stuff (’400 Killed in Tamil Train Crash‘, ’150 Garrotted by Assam Separatists’ and so on), yet somehow the jaunty Times of India prose always manages to raise the tone from one of grim tragedy. There may have been a train crash, but at least the Chief Minister has air-dashed to the scene. Ten convented (convent-educated) girls may have been gang-raped in the Punjab, but thousands of students have staged a bandh (strike) and a dharna (protest) against such eve-teasing (much nicer than the bland Americanese ‘sexual harassment’). And so what if the protesters were then lathi (truncheon) charged by police jawans (constables)? In the Times of India such miscreants are always charge-sheeted in the end.