City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  ‘It was all great-grandfather Aurangzeb’s fault,’ said Pakeezah Sultan Begum, rearranging her cardigan. ‘If it wasn’t for him we’d still have the empire.’

  The Crown Princess angrily seized a book held out by one of the other staff at the library. ‘Please be stamping this for me, Highness.’

  Pakeezah Begum took the plastic stamp, wetted it on the ink-pad and firmly stamped the return-by date on the leaf at the front.

  ‘Tell the boy to bring this back on the 20th of March or there will be a fine of five rupees.’ The woman took the book and moved away, but the Princess had not finished: ‘Oh, and Mrs Bannerji?’ she said. ‘Please bring me some more tea. These cups are both stone cold.’

  Mrs Bannerji nervously took the cups and muttered an apology: ‘Sorry, Highness.’

  ‘They know who I am, so these people give me respect,’ said Pakeezah when Mrs Bannerji had disappeared. ‘We are colleagues and we are working together. But they know my ancestral chain so they are not trying it on too much.’

  ‘Do many people in Delhi know who you are?’ I asked.

  ‘The old Delhi-wallahs know. Also some other people guess. Last weekend I went to a wedding and one lady came up and said: “You are different from these people.” I was not wearing any special clothes, but this lady - she was from an old Lucknow family — could see by my manners that I was not a common person.’

  Pakeezah nodded her head: ‘I find it is the little things which give you away if you are royalty: how you eat, how you talk, how you welcome people. Small and subtle things. But important. Although we now live with the common people we don’t have their habits.’

  Mrs Bannerji brought two new cups of tea and placed them beside Pakeezah Begum’s big, black bakelite telephone. Pakeezah thanked her: ‘Now that’s what I call a nice cup of tea,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think you would have made a good Empress?’ I asked, nibbling a biscuit.

  ‘If I was Empress I would be a constitutional Empress only,’ said Pakeezah, drawing herself up. ‘I would be like your Queen: not having so much power but maintaining my dignity and status. Probably I would have an elected Prime Minister beneath me,’ she said. ‘Democracy is a good thing for modern times.’

  Pakeezah looked at her watch: it was just after five o‘clock. She said: ’We can’t talk here — library is closing now. Perhaps you would come to my home. Then you could meet my mother. She knows our family history better than I.‘

  The Princess gathered her things together and wrapped a tatty shawl over her sari and cardigan. I followed her as she waddled out of the library.

  ‘Whatever glory my ancestors had,’ she continued, ‘that is gone now. My family should accept that fact. We have no official royal status. We have nothing.’

  We wandered past the Delhi Gate and on through the crumbling streets of Old Delhi; as we went, Pakeezah stared sadly around her. ‘Look what this so-called government has done to my city,’ she muttered. ‘My ancestors built the most beautiful city in the world. They had the finest food, the finest way of living, the most lovely gardens, the finest dress. Everything was perfect in Delhi when they were ruling. Now no one is maintaining anything. These people have become so careless. They are not proud of their past.’

  We turned off the main road at the Faiz Bazaar and wandered through dirty back lanes towards Daryaganj.

  ‘This area used to contain big havelis,’ explained Pakeezah. ‘It was the home of all the great omrahs and poets from my ancestor’s court. So many famous families used to be living here. Now working-class people from all-over have come in. Naturally their way of living is very different from ours.’

  A squatting beggar wailed at us from his place beside an open sewer. Pakeezah Begum frowned. ‘I think we should move to another area, but my mother says the family should stay here. Daryaganj is near the Fort. My mother says if we can’t live inside the Fort at least we should live in its suburbs.’

  The house consisted of a small corner of an old, much-partitioned haveli. It had a little courtyard off which led three simple, whitewashed rooms. In one of these, perched on a bedstead, sat the senior-most descendant of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Babur and Shah Jehan. She had been paralysed for thirty years. For all this time the bedstead had been her throne. Beneath it, two geese were pecking at some grain.

  Sahabzadi Qamar Sultan, born in the first year of the twentieth century, was wrapped up in an all-enveloping white salwar kameez. She chewed paan from an elaborately incised silver box. She was very old and very deaf. Her old-fashioned courtly Urdu was difficult to understand and her daughter translated for me.

  ‘He’s writing a book about our Delhi,’ Pakeezah shouted into her mother’s ear.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ whispered the old woman.

  Pakeezah repeated what she had said. This time the old Princess smiled and said something to her daughter.

  ‘She says welcome. May God bless you and may you have a long life.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘May your mother also have a long life.’

  ‘She’s already ninety-one,’ said Pakeezah.

  I asked exactly how they were related to the Great Moguls. I had expected the women to be fairly distant cousins of the Emperors. I was quite wrong.

  According to the old Princess, she was the granddaughter of Fateh-ul-Mulk, the heir apparent of the last Mogul Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafur II. Fateh-ul-Mulk had been poisoned in a court intrigue well before 1857, but his six-year-old son, the Princess’s father, had survived both this and the Mutiny.

  When the British took the Old City after the Seige of Delhi, the child had been smuggled out of the fort and hidden in the jungle around Mehrauli. Later, when tempers had cooled, her father, Mirza Farkunda Zamal, had been awarded a pension by the penitent British authorities; he was even given a seat of honour at the first Delhi Durbar in 1877. According to my scribbled sums, the old Princess would have been conceived when her father was forty-nine.

  ‘Neither my brothers or sister or I have any children,’ said Pakeezah when her mother had finished telling the story. ‘Our only nephew died of typhoid thirty years ago. He was just fourteen. When we pass away the direct line will end.’

  ‘Does your mother not have any brothers or sisters?’ I asked.

  ‘She had a younger sister. She was extremely beautiful, but she had no children because she was married to a djinn.’

  ‘You’re being serious?’

  ‘Of course. My aunt was satisfied with her djinn and refused to marry. They lived together in their own apartment. The djinn used to support her — to give her money and so on.’

  ‘Could anyone else see this djinn?’

  ‘No, but my mother could see the presents the djinn brought her.’

  ‘You really believe this?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not?’ said Pakeezah Begum.

  We talked of Partition and the how the old princess had thrown the last family heirlooms - a series of beautiful inlaid jade daggers - down the haveli well, in case the police arrested them for possessing offensive weapons. We talked of the old Princess’s meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru when he whispered into her ear: ‘Sister, if ever you need anything, just let me know.’ We talked of the hard times after Independence, of how the old princess had refused to take the charity of the government. After this, Pakeezah’s brothers went to Pakistan while her younger sister emigrated to England: she now lived in Wembley where her husband worked in a biscuit factory making shortbread. And we talked of the Red Fort and how Pakeezah had cried the first time she went around it as a schoolgirl.

  Humayun’s Tomb

  ‘In the fort I saw the finest set of buildings in the world - but no one was caring for them. They were all falling apart. My ancestors brought such sophisticated culture to India — but they have just let it disintegrate. In time it will just disappear and no one will ever know.’

  It was getting late and the old Princess was visibly tiring. It was time for me to go. I said my goodbyes to the head
of the House of Timur; Pakeezah offered to lead me back through the labyrinth of Daryaganj to the Faiz Bazaar. As we walked she told me how she had always resisted her brother’s attempts to persuade her to emigrate to Pakistan.

  ‘I always felt Pakistan would be a very unstable country,’ said Pakeezah. ‘And anyway. My sixth sense told me to stay here. Delhi is our home.’ She shrugged: ‘For all its faults we love this city.’

  Then, after a pause, she added: ‘After all, we built it.’

  EIGHT

  AS SOON AS YOU AWOKE you knew it was going to be hot.

  The sun had just appeared over the treeline, as blond as clarified butter but powerful none the less, hinting at the furnace-heat to come. Soon the kites were circling the thermals, a great helix of wide-winged birds sailing the vectors in sweeping corkscrew spirals. By late morning the air was on fire; to open the door on to the roof terrace was to feel in your face a blast of heat as strong as that from a blazing kiln. Noon came like a white midnight: the streets were deserted, the windows closed, the doors locked. There was no noise but for the sullen and persistent whirr of the ceiling fans.

  The heat had sprung up quite suddenly: the change from late winter to high summer - six months of European weather — was compressed into little more than a Delhi fortnight. The previous autumn, the muggy monsoon heat had begun to diminish on the very day following the festival of Dusshera. In the same way the change of season and the onset of the sledgehammer-heat of summer was exactly marked by another Hindu holiday - the spring festival of Holi. One day everyone was laughing and singing in the Delhi gardens, covering each other with pink powder and coloured Holi-water; the next they had imprisoned themselves in the silent air-conditioned purdah of their bedrooms and offices, waiting patiently for the reprieve of evening.

  The rising mercury changed everything. In the gardens the annuals shrivelled and died. The earth cracked; the lawns became bald and bleached. The tar on the roads glistened like liquid quick-silver.

  People became tired and listless. Fruit decayed: an uneaten mango, firm at breakfast, could be covered with a thin lint of mould by evening. Water shot boiling from the cold taps. There was no relief except to shower with bottles of cold water from Mrs Puri’s fridge.

  Added to the morning procession of salesmen were melon sellers and juice boys, cool water vendors (50 paise a glass) and great caravans of ice cream wallahs. In the Old City men set up small roadside stalls around big red earthenware pots containing jal jeera, a dark, spicy, green liquid which burns the mouth but cools the body: a more primitive yet more effective coolant than anything on offer in the new town.

  Unconsciously, we adapted our routine to suit the new conditions. We rose at five-thirty and breakfasted outside on fresh mangoes. After a light lunch we would siesta in our bedroom, and not emerge until sunset. The balmy evenings were the compensation for the unpleasantness of the day. At six p.m. we would call Mr Singh to take us to swim in one of the hotel pools or maybe to wander among the old tombs in the Lodhi Gardens; as we passed, black bats would flit through the ruins like departed spirits.

  Later we would sit outside on the terrace reading and drinking cold beer by candlelight; translucent green geckos would hoover up the mosquitoes from around the flames as we read. Sometimes, on the nights when there were power cuts and the ceiling fans ceased to whirr, we would drag our mattresses outside and sleep under the stars.

  As the sun grew more fierce, our complexions darkened and Olivia’s freckles sprang into prominence. I thought them beautiful, but they clearly alarmed Mr Singh who was not used to my wife’s Celtic colouring. One morning, while driving through the Old City, he turned quite suddenly into the Meena Bazaar near the Jama Masjid. Without any explanation, he jumped out and approached one of the Ayurvedic healers who for centuries have sat on the roadside here, surrounded by the ingredients of their trade: live iguanas whose fried juices are said to cure impotence; ginseng for philtres used to spread or extinguish the fires of love; tree bark to ward off a woman’s menopause; the bringraj herb from the high Himalayas said to conquer baldness or thicken the beard of the most effete Sikh.

  As I sat in the hot taxi I could see Balvinder Singh haggling with one of the healers. Eventually Balvinder handed over a pocketful of change and the healer gave him a small pot of white powder. On returning to the car, to my surprise Balvinder solemnly handed the pot to me.

  ‘For madam,’ he said earnestly.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But what is it?’

  ‘Medicine,’ said Balvinder. ‘To cure Mrs William.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Her face,’ said Balvinder, drumming his fingers on his cheekbones. ‘This powder will cure Madam’s pox.’ He pointed to the sky: ‘Indian sun. Very bad for Britisher ladies.’

  I looked baffled; my friend looked embarrassed.

  ‘Sahib,’ he whispered. ‘This powder will make Mrs William’s skin white again.’

  One evening in mid-April, Dr Jaffery and I were walking down the Chandni Chowk heading towards the doctor’s rooms in the Ghazi-ud-Din Medresse. It was the end of Ramadan and the Old City, funereal for the last month, had sprung back to life with a vengeance. Fairy lights were hung over many of the mosques and houses. As we walked we had to negotiate our way through thick crowds clustering around the sweet shops and the sewing machines of the derzis (tailors):

  ‘This is the day we call al-vida,’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘It means “the goodbye”. It is the last Friday of our fast.’

  We passed Gunthe Wallah‘s, the old Mughal sweet shop, once - so legend has it - patronized by Shah Jehan’s chief elephant. The elephant had been leading a procession down the Chandni Chowk but had halted outside Gunthe Wallah’s and had refused to move on towards the Red Fort, despite the frantic proddings of its mahout, until it was first allowed to consume a box of Gunthe Wallah’s best mithai. Now, although there were no signs of any elephants, the shop was besieged by crowds of equally persistent villagers competing with each other to be served. To help cope with the demand, the shop assistants had arranged a line of trestles outside the shop, each one piled high with the Gunthe Wallah’s stickiest and most sickly sweets.

  Nearby other shops had set up trestles loaded with silk saris and embroidered salwars, high-heeled shoes and embroidered mosque hats, trinkets and bracelets, jewellery and decorations. The owners of the roadside dhabas had placed steaming cauldrons full of saffron-coloured biryani rice outside their doors; from inside came wafts of grilling kebabs. To one side, a Sikh was doing a roaring trade in posters of Saddam Hussein. Despite the Iraqi president’s failure to win the Gulf War, Saddam was still regarded as something of a hero by the Delhi Muslims, although this failed to explain why the pin-up most popular in the city was that which showed Saddam dressed in full Austrian costume: lederhosen, braces, Tyrolean hat, knobbly knees and all.

  Dr Jaffery and I passed by a cluster of black-chadored ladies spooning ice cream under their veils.

  ‘Today all the village people come into Delhi to buy presents for Id,’ said the doctor. ‘For us it is like your Christmas Eve. The feast will probably be held tomorrow.’

  ‘Why only probably?’ I asked.

  ‘It depends on the moon,’ replied the doctor. ‘Tonight the Moon Committee will meet in the Jama Masjid. If they judge that the New Moon can be clearly seen, then it will be Id. If not - if there is too much cloud cover - we will have to fast for one more day.’

  After the hot, dusty bustle of the Chandni Chowk, Dr Jaffery’s simple white cell was marvellously cool and welcoming. The thick stone walls, the domed ceiling and the bamboo blinds on the arched windows controlled the temperature as efficiently as any air conditioning system. After Dr Jaffery had finished his evening prayers we ate a simple iftar together: dates, grapes and a plate of curried lamb. As we ate, Dr Jaffery promised to give me a ring the following morning to confirm that the festival was going to be celebrated.

  ‘And if it is cancelled?’

  ‘The
n I will not ring,’ said the doctor, raising his eyebrows. ‘Do you not know the story of the Persian warrior who was marching to battle?’

  ‘I don’t,‘ I said. ’Tell me.‘

  ‘The warrior was carrying a bow but no arrows. On the road he met a friend who asked why he had not brought any ammunition. “How will you fight?” asked his friend. “I will use the arrows sent by the enemy,” he replied. “But what if no arrow comes?” “Then,” replied the bowman, “there will be no war.” In the same way, if there is no call from me there will be no Id prayers.’

  While we were talking, from outside in the courtyard there came the sudden sound of excited shouting. We left our food and went to the door. On the opposite side of the quadrangle, silhouetted figures were standing on the roofs, whooping and jumping about. One figure was letting off a Roman candle.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

  ‘Look!’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘Over there! The new moon.’

  I looked in the direction Dr Jaffery was pointing. There, suspended just above the domes and minarets of the old city, a perfect silver crescent could be seen shining out over the rooftops.

  ‘The fast is over,’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘Everyone will be relieved. Although -’ and here he lowered his voice ‘- a few of the more pious mullahs will pretend to weep and to be unhappy. They will say “Ramadan is the month of blessings. Now the angels will not bless us for another year.” But secretly these people will be happy, too. No one likes to fast.’

  The following morning there was a cool breeze blowing down from the hills; the sky was the colour of attar of roses. Woken by Dr Jaffery’s dawn call, I went to see the Id prayers at the Jama Masjid.

  Mr Singh and I drove through the wide streets of New Delhi, empty now but for a few pilgrims washing under the public pumps near the shrine of Nizamuddin. We headed up the Ring Road towards Old Delhi, and as we drove the avenues began to fill with bicycle rickshaws, all heading in the same direction. By the time we reached the Red Fort we had hit a traffic jam. It was barely six in the morning. Leaving Mr Singh near the Fort, I jumped out and joined the throng of figures, all dressed in new white homespun.