City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  At the rear of the mansion, where once the Residency gardens sloped down to a terrace overlooking the Jumna waterfront, a new concrete block, an engineering college, had been erected. Discarded stoves, an old lawnmower and piles of kitchen rubbish lay scattered around the old orchards. Monkeys scampered about the debris. Saddened by the decay and neglect, we began to turn away from the building when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something which made me stop. At the back of the Residency, the plaster-covered British masonry rested on a plinth not of brick, as elsewhere in the building, but of mottled pink Agra sandstone. The stonework was broken by a line of cusped Mughal blind-arches. The work was unmistakably from the period of Shah Jehan.

  Although the building was locked and deserted, it was still possible to peer in through the old Residency windows. What lay within confirmed the hint given by the plinth. Behind the classical façade lay the earlier frontage of a Mughal pavilion: a double row of blind arches leading up to a central portal. The entire building was erected on the foundations of a much earlier mansion. It all made sense: when the Emperor gave the British the ruins of the library of Dara Shukoh, Shah Jehan’s eldest son, they saw no need to knock down the existing work and start afresh; instead they merely erected a classical façade over a Mughal substructure. It was just like Ochterlony : in public establishing the British presence; but inside, in private, living the life of a Nawab.

  I remembered the famous miniature of Ochterlony hosting an evening’s entertainment at the Residency. He is dressed in full Indian costume, and reclines on a carpet, leaning back against a spread of pillows and bolsters. To one side stands a servant with a fly-whisk; on the other stands Ochterlony’s elaborate glass hubble-bubble. Above, from the picture rail, the Resident’s Scottish ancestors — kilted and plumed colonels from Highland regiments, grimacing ladies in stiff white taffeta dresses — peer down disapprovingly at the group of nautch girls swirling immodestly below them. Ochterlony, however, looks delighted. The picture summed up the period, to my mind perhaps the most attractive interlude in the whole long story of the British in India. There is a quality of the naughty schoolboy about Ochterlony and his contemporaries in Delhi: away from the disapproving gaze of the Calcutta memsahibs they gather their harems and smoke their hookahs; there is none of the depressing arrogance or self-righteousness that infects the tone of so much of Raj history.

  In the background of the Ochterlony miniature you can see a double doorway topped by a half-moon fan window; outside, the branches of a large tree announce the Residency gardens. The doorway, the window and the tree remain, but inside, everything has changed. Dusty filing cabinets stand where the nautch girls once danced. Doors hang loose on their hinges. Everywhere paint and plaster is peeling. So total is the transformation that it is difficult now, even with the aid of the miniature, to people the empty corridors with the bustling Company servants, glittering Mughal omrahs (noblemen) and celebrated courtesans. To aid the imagination, I got out my copies of the Fraser letters and diaries that I had brought with me.

  By the time William’s elder brother James came to Delhi in 1815, the Residency had come to form the centre of the city’s society. James was particularly intrigued by the endless round of nautches that the Resident hosted, and he frequently wrote about them in his diary: ‘ [The nautch girls] were very fair — and their dresses very rich. Some sang extremely well ... This morning,’ he adds, ‘[I] am lying late from the effects of the nautch ...’

  Occasionally guests would bring their own musicians to dinner with them. The most accomplished band in Delhi belonged to the Begum Sumroe, a Kashmiri dancing girl who converted to Christianity, married two European mercenary-adventurers in succession and inherited from one of them a small principality at Sardhana near Meerut, to the north of Delhi.

  ‘The Begum today dined at the residency,’ wrote James in his diary on 24 August, ‘and we had her band to play to us — this consisting of four or five singing men who play on different instruments - the sitar, the tambour - and sing well. They sang God save The King, taught them by an English officer, and the Marseillaise hymn [taught] by a French officer. The words were kept so well that I could hardly have known that they were foreigners had I kept from looking at them. They also sang many fine Persian and Hindoostanee airs.’

  There were other diversions too. There was a table for ‘billyards’, and at one stage the Residency dining-room was enlivened by the presence of a pair of Asian lion cubs. Soon after their arrival, Aleck wrote home about them in a state of great excitement: ‘These animals have only been known to us since our conquest of Hurriana in 1809 ... [The cubs are] as large as a common spaniel, and yet quite tame. They played about Seton’s dining room with perfect good humour, and were not surly unless much teazed.’

  As the British tightened their grip on North India, the Residency staff grew quickly to keep pace with the work. Moreover, numbers at Residency entertainments could increasingly be supplemented by the small but curious European community which had settled in the Civil Lines, the European suburb which was beginning to take shape immediately north of Shahjehanabad.

  This community consisted of men like Dr Ross (‘short and corpulent and very ugly ... a shocking bad doctor’), whose three standard prescriptions were leeches, senna packed in dirty ‘black beer bottles and huge pills sent in a rough wooden box’; or Dr Sprengler, the Principal of the new Delhi College, whose wife (‘worthy but common’) used to hide her husband’s trousers to prevent him going out in the evening and leaving her alone. Most of the new residents, however, were Scots. ‘Would you suppose it?’ wrote Aleck at this time. ‘We usually sit down 16 or 18 at the Residency table, of whom near a half, sometimes more, are always Scotsmen — about a quarter Irish, the rest English. The Irish do not always maintain their proportion - the Scotch seldom fail.’

  Increasingly, however, William was not among the diners. Not only did he prefer to be on the move with his troops in the wilds of Haryana or fighting the Gurkhas in the hills above Gangotri, he also found Metcalfe and the bores of the European community intolerable. When in Delhi, he was happy to mix freely with his friends from the Mughal aristocracy, but the likes of Dr Sprengler’s wife were not for him.

  ‘He is a thinker,’ wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, ‘who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.’

  I met Norah Nicholson in 1984, the first time I lived in Delhi.

  Norah was an old lady with white hair and narrow wrists and she lived in an old shack. On my way to and from the Mother Teresa Home I would sometimes look in and have a cup of tea with her. Even then I remember thinking she was like a survivor from a different age. But it was only later that I was able to place her definitively in my mind as a sort of living fossil of the Twilight, a Civil Lines eccentric who really should have shared a bungalow with Dr Ross or Mrs Sprengler, rather than spend her old age in a tatty shack behind the Old Secretariat.

  ‘But you see there was nothing I could do,’ she would say. ‘They cut off my pension and I found I couldn’t afford to rent even quite basic chambers. So I ended up here, with my books, furniture, two packing cases and a grand piano - all under this tree.’

  Not, of course, that she ever complained. ‘It would be a perfectly nice place to live,’ she would insist, ‘if it weren’t for the cobra. He’s taken to having his afternoon snooze under my bed. Every day I spray his hole with Flit [insecticide] but it never seems to bother him. Then there are those damned pigs which come and nose around my larder. They belong to the Anglo-Indians over the road.’ There was an enormous crash behind us.

  ‘And it would be nice if the roof was a bit stronger. Then the peacocks wouldn’t keep falling through. I don’t mind during the day, but I hate waking up at night to find a peacock in bed with me.’

  It was always slightly difficult to establish the truth about Norah Nicholson. She claimed to be a great-niece of Brigadier Ge
neral John Nicholson, ‘the Lion of the Punjab’, who was killed in the storming of Delhi in 1857 but who was still worshipped long afterwards as a hero by the British and as a god by a Punjabi sect called the Nikalsini.

  Although 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 once a great friend of Lady Mountbatten, and that she had briefly been the nanny of Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi. What was absolutely certain was that she had never been to Britain, had no living relations there, and that in her old age she had fallen on hard times in a quite spectacular manner.

  In 1960 some bureaucratic tangle had led to her being thrown out of her government lodgings and, as she would proudly tell you, she had refused to pull any strings to save herself.

  ‘I am an Englishwoman with a little pride,’ she would say. ‘I’m not one of these people to take advantage and I never like to force myself on anyone.’

  She would gather herself up, and with a slight nod of her head give you one of her knowing looks: ‘Nevertheless all my friends did help. They clubbed together and bought me some tin sheets, while dear Sir Robert, the High Commissioner, contributed some plywood. Darling Indira [Gandhi] gave me a new tarpaulin. I had such a lovely time putting it all together.’

  Norah was very independent, and hated above all to be patronized. If ever you sounded over-concerned about her in the cold or during a monsoon, she would quickly bring you up short.

  ‘Young man, I’ll have you know that actually I have a very nice life here. It may get a little bit wet during the rains, but normally it’s lovely to live out with my Creator and his creatures.’ She would point to the menagerie around her: ‘I have four dogs to look after me and a fluctuating number of cats. I think there are twelve at the moment. Then I’ve got my peahens, partridges and babbler-birds

  Only if you pressed her about the future would she eventually admit to some anxieties.

  ‘My only fear is that they will throw me off my little plot. I’ve been here twenty-four years and have applied for the land, but they ignore me because I refuse to give them a bribe. The boy wants my camera, but I’m damned if I’m going to pander to their corruption. There is no law and order and still less justice since the British left.’

  ‘Have they ever tried to evict you?’

  ‘They have a go every so often. In 1968 they came around and I set the dogs on them. Then the following year they tried to make me pay dog tax. They didn’t know that I spoke Hindustani and this fellow - thought he was being so clever - said to his friend: “If she doesn’t pay tomorrow we’ll come along and shoot the dogs.”

  ‘I waited until they had finished and then said, in Hindustani: “If you try to shoot my dogs, you’ll have to shoot me first and before you do that I’ll have your throats cut and your bodies in the Jumna ...” That was 1969 and no one has bothered me about dog tax since.’

  ‘So you don’t have any bother with the authorities any more?’

  ‘Well there was one incident. In 1975, during the Emergency, they were trying to clear up Delhi. All the dirty work was being done by this nasty young Indian police captain. He was beating people up and burning down their houses. Well, one day I was in the queue for milk when the young officer came up and broke the queue. I was jolly well not going to put up with this. So I told him that he should go to the back and that he had no right to queue-barge.

  ‘All my neighbours were terrified. They said: “This man will do you in.” Anyway, the next day, just as they said, he came around here. Those Anglo-Indians next door barricaded themselves into their houses and turned off the lights. But I said: “How are you?” and gave him a cup of tea and some Patience Strong tracts. They were on Christianity and how to love people. After that he was very nice to me and came back the following month for more books. You see, William, it’s all in the way you approach people ...’

  I had this conversation with Norah in June 1984. When I returned to Delhi five years later, I went straight up to her little plot of land to look for her. But there was no sign of her and her shack had been dismantled.

  ‘Are you looking for Norah?’ asked a voice from behind me.

  I turned round. It was Norah’s Anglo-Indian neighbour.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s dead, I’m afraid,’ he replied. ‘She’s been dead and buried a while now. The monsoon before last.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘It was her cobra,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘He finally got her. She’d given up trying to gas him out and had begun feeding him bowls of milk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We all tried to reason with her, but she wouldn’t listen. She kept repeating that cobras were God’s creatures too.’ The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘We found her the next day. My wife went over straight away because we knew something was up.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘It was her dogs,’ said the man. ‘They were howling like the end of the world had come.’

  Norah was dead, but that month as I explored the area around the Residency, I found many other characters who seemed, like her, to be bits of stranded flotsam left over from the Delhi of William Fraser.

  A little to the south of the Residency compound lay the old Magazine, the British arsenal blown up in the Mutiny. Beside that, tucked away off the main road, lay the original British cemetery. I had expected the graveyard to be as dirty and neglected as the Residency, but was surprised to find it spotlessly clean. It did not take long to work out why. The graveyard had become a rather smart housing estate. The marble grave slabs were kept scrubbed until they shone; the Palladian chamber tombs had been restored and rebuilt. Washing was strung up between obelisks and television aerials were attached to the higher crosses.

  Many of the pavement-wallahs andjhuggi-dwellers in Delhi complain of police protection rackets, so I asked one of the men in the graveyard whether they had had any trouble.

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ he replied in a clipped Anglo-Indian accent. ‘They can’t harm us. We’re all Christians here.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, seeing that I had caused offence.

  ‘It’s our churchyard,’ continued the man, straightening his tie. ‘The Andrews family has been here for three generations. These Hindus don’t like Christian monuments so we are guarding it. You will have tea?’

  Tea was brought and we settled down on the grave of a British auditor-general. A plate of Indian sweets and a wedding album was brought out from beneath a slab.

  ‘Since I retired from the railways in 1985 I’ve turned my hand to a little gardening,’ continued Mr Andrews. ‘Now we try to grow most of our own vegetables here. And that was my poultry farm.’

  He pointed at the marble cot at my feet, once the tomb of a Colonel Nixon from County Tyrone. A makeshift wire mesh had been strung from the corners, but the grave was empty of all chickens.

  ‘We’ve eaten all the hens,’ he explained, seeing my glance. ‘Now I plan to keep fishes in there.’

  Mr Andrews told us about his visit to Scotland with the 1948 All-India hockey team. He liked Inverness, he said, though he thought it a little cold. Then he asked Olivia what we were doing in Old Delhi. She explained about our trip to the Residency and he tut-tutted when she mentioned about the neglect of the building.

  ‘The trouble with these people,’ he said, ‘is that they have no sense of history.’

  As we were talking, an amazingly chic woman stepped out of one of the larger tombs and strutted past us, swinging her leather shoulder bag.

  ‘That’s my niece,’ said Mr Andrews proudly. ‘She’s an estate agent.’

  We returned to our flat to find Mr Puri, wrapped up as if for the Antarctic, berating Nickoo, his unfortunate Nepali servant. The two of them were standing in the middle of the road near the house, surrounded by a crowd of curious passers-by. Nickoo, it emerged, had
been taking Mr Puri on his daily constitutional when the old man had suddenly begun raving:

  MR PURI (waving his stick) This man’s a bloody scoundrel.

  NICKOO I am good boy.

  WD He’s a good boy, Mr Puri.

  MR PURI Nonsense! He’s from the sweeper caste.

  OLIVIA He’s still a good boy.

  MR PURI Madam. We are kshatriyas. We are warriors. We fought the British. We fought the Pathans. Now we fight the Hindus.

  WD I’m sure there’s no need to fight Nickoo.

  MR PURI No need! This sweeper is a bloody scoundrel! Take him back to Britain with you! Let him look after your bloody mulesl

  WD But Mr Puri. I’ve told you before. I don’t have any mules. Here or in England.

  MR PURI Nonsense! All Britishers have mules. How else did you Britishers defeat our great Sikh armies? How else did you come to rule our India?

  As December progressed, the mercury continued to sink. It was as if a grey shadow had fallen over the town.

  Although the winter temperatures were much warmer than those at home in Scotland, the cold seemed every bit as severe because the Delhi houses were so ill-equipped to deal with it. Designed to fight the heat, they proved spectacularly useless at fending off the cold. They never had central heating or open fires. In our barsati, in the absence of radiators or a fireplace, we were forced to go out and buy a great battery of bar heaters to keep ourselves warm. We kept them burning most of the day, and took it in turns to replace the fuses when, as happened with exciting frequency, Mrs Puri’s antiquated electrics blew up with a fantastic blue flash.