City of Djinns
A Year in Delhi
William Dalrymple

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1994

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

Copyright © William Dalrymple 1993

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006375951

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Praise

From the reviews of City of Djinns:

‘Dalrymple has pulled it off again … At a time when the book of travels is beginning to lose its fashionable allure, City of Djinns is not really a travel book at all. It is a kind of memoir recording the response of a single, gentle, merry and learned mind to the presence of an ancient city … Dalrymple is anything but a voyeur. Even his excursions into the world of the eunuchs are conducted with a kind of grave innocence. He is more a pilgrim than an observer, always trying to understand … It is the work of a man who has consciously chosen to commit himself to the profession of letters, and in it we see the first fine rapture of In Xanadu deepening to a profounder dedication … hours and hours of pleasure for his readers.’

JAN MORRIS, Independent

‘As the author of the best travel book of recent years at the intensely irritating age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple has now shown that In Xanadu was no fluke. City of Djinns is an entertaining mix of history and diary informed by a deep curiosity about the ways in which the ghosts of even the most distant past still walk Delhi in the twentieth century.’

CHRISTOPHER LOCKWOOD, Daily Telegraph

‘City of Djinns is a delight. William Dalrymple is in command of his subject, seizes the reader and uses his skill to tempt and tantalize … The city of djinns is Delhi and Dalrymple reveals it like a Dance of the Seven Veils. It is very intricately organized: ostensibly structured around a year which he and his artist wife Olivia spent in Delhi, paced by vivid descriptions of weather change as signal of seasons, and by the formal punctuation of life, learning, loving, and death. These episodes are interspersed in counterpoint with historical sketches, which (as you suddenly realize at the end) are organized in reverse chronology, beginning with the Sikh massacres after Indira Gandhi’s death, back through Partition, the Empire, and the East India Company, back through the Mughal empire into prehistory and archaeology … The book is Dalrymple’s journey into the soul of Delhi.’

CHARLES MCKEAN, Books in Scotland

‘Delhi has more layers of culture, civilisation and history extant in it than any other city in India, arguably, in the world. It is this, the enthralling and enigmatic features of this ancient-modern city, that William Dalrymple sets out to trace in City of Djinns, and he manages to do it with such pleasing success that henceforth defenders of the city can use his book as a club to beat off Delhi-haters … [The book is] a stationary travelogue that moves more through time than space, looping and whorling in circles and parabolas of past and present. Dalrymple performs these acrobatics of storytelling with the ease of a trapeze artist … One great merit of his book is that the author conducts himself without prejudice or bigotry. He explores Delhi without ideological or racial baggage; in fact, wonderfully, he is not in the least cramped by the need for political correctness. He does not feel the need to be nice or nasty to anyone. What he is, constantly, is curious, scholarly, engaging, the scholarship carried by a light touch … the finest labour of love on the capital in recent times.’

TARUN TEJPAL, India Today

‘An expansive and inclusive work, richly peopled … an enlightening and entertaining book.’

IAIN WETHERBY, Literary Review

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

Keep Reading

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

IT WAS in the citadel of Feroz Shah Kotla that I met my first Sufi.

Pir Sadr-ud-Din had weasel eyes and a beard as tangled as a myna’s nest. The mystic sat me down on a carpet, offered me tea, and told me about the djinns.

He said that when the world was new and Allah had created mankind from clay, he also made another race, like us in all things, but fashioned from fire. The djinns were spirits, invisible to the naked eye; to see them you had to fast and pray. For forty-one days, Sadr-ud-Din had sat without eating, half-naked in the foothills of the Himalayas; later, he had spent forty-one days up to his neck in the River Jumna.

One night, asleep in a graveyard, he was visited by the King of the Djinns.

‘He was black, as tall as a tree, and he had one eye in the centre of his forehead,’ said the Pir. ‘The djinn offered me anything I wanted, but every time I refused.’

‘Could you show me a djinn?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ replied the Pir. ‘But you would run away.’

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices.

Moreover the city—so I soon discovered—possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. Friends would moan about the touts on Janpath and head off to the beaches in Goa, but for me Delhi always exerted a stronger spell. I lingered on, and soon found a job in a home for destitutes in the far north of the city.

The nuns gave me a room overlooking a municipal rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking berms of refuse; overhead, under a copper sky, vultures circled the thermals forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.

In summer I preferred the less claustrophobic avenues of Lutyens’s Delhi. Then, under a pulsing sun, I would stroll slowly along the shady rows of neem, tamarind and arjuna, passing the white classical bungalows with their bow fronts and bushes of molten yellow gulmohar.

In both Delhis it was the ruins that fascinated me. However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient Islamic colleges – medresses – would intrude, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens, curving the road network and obscuring the fairways of the golf course. New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties. Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi, and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. All agreed that the crumbling ruins of these towns were without number.

But where Delhi was unique was that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too. Somehow different areas of Delhi seemed to have preserved intact different centuries, even different millennia. The Punjabi immigrants were a touchstone to the present day; with their nippy Maruti cars and fascination with all things new, they formed a lifeline to the 1980s. The old majors you would meet strolling in the Lodhi Gardens were pickled perhaps half a century earlier. Their walrus moustaches and Ealing comedy accents hinted that they had somehow got stuck in about 1946. The eunuchs in the Old City, some speaking courtly Urdu, might not have looked so out of place under the dais of the Great Mogul. The sadhus at Nigambodh Ghat I imagined as stranded citizens of Indraprastha, the legendary first Delhi of the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic.

All the different ages of man were represented in the people of the city. Different millennia co-existed side by side. Minds set in different ages walked the same pavements, drank the same water, returned to the same dust.

But it was not until months later, when I met Pir Sadr-ud-Din, that I learned the secret that kept the city returning to new life. Delhi, said Pir Sadr-ud-Din, was a city of djinns. Though it had been burned by invaders time and time again, millennium after millennium, still the city was rebuilt; each time it rose like a phoenix from the fire. Just as the Hindus believe that a body will be reincarnated over and over again until it becomes perfect, so it seemed Delhi was destined to appear in a new incarnation century after century. The reason for this, said Sadr-ud-Din, was that the djinns loved Delhi so much they could never bear to see it empty or deserted. To this day every house, every street corner was haunted by them. You could not see them, said Sadr-ud-Din, but if you concentrated you would be able to feel them: to hear their whisperings, or even, if you were lucky, to sense their warm breath on your face.

In Delhi I knew I had found a theme for a book: a portrait of a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic, a city of djinns.

Five years after I first lived in Delhi I returned, now newly married. Olivia and I arrived in September. We found a small top-floor flat near the Sufi village of Nizamuddin and there set up home.

Our landlady was Mrs Puri.

ONE

THE FLAT PERCHED at the top of the house, little more than a lean-to riveted to Mrs Puri’s ceiling. The stairwell exuded sticky, airless September heat; the roof was as thin as corrugated iron.

Inside we were greeted by a scene from Great Expectations: a thick pall of dust on every surface, a family of sparrows nesting in the blinds and a fleece of old cobwebs—great arbours of spider silk—arching the corner walls. Mrs Puri stood at the doorway, a small, bent figure in a salwar kameez.

‘The last tenant did not go out much,’ she said, prodding the cobwebs with her walking stick. She added: ‘He was not a tidy gentleman.’ Olivia blew on a cupboard; the dust was so thick you could sign your name in it.

Our landlady, though a grandmother, soon proved herself to be a formidable woman. A Sikh from Lahore, Mrs Puri was expelled from her old home during Partition and in the upheavals of 1947 lost everything. She arrived in Delhi on a bullock cart. Forty-two years later she had made the transition from refugee pauper to Punjabi princess. She was now very rich indeed. She owned houses all over Delhi and had swapped her bullock for a fleet of new Maruti cars, the much coveted replacement for the old Hindustan Ambassador. Mrs Puri also controlled a variety of business interests. These included the Gloriana Finishing School, India’s first etiquette college, a unique institution which taught village girls how to use knives and forks, apply lipstick and make polite conversation about the weather.

Mrs Puri had achieved all this through a combination of hard work and good old-fashioned thrift. In the heat of summer she rarely put on the air conditioning. In winter she allowed herself the electric fire for only an hour a day. She recycled the newspapers we threw out; and returning from parties late at night we could see her still sitting up, silhouetted against the window, knitting sweaters for export. ‘Sleep is silver,’ she would say in explanation, ‘but money is gold.’

This was all very admirable, but the hitch, we soon learned, was that she expected her tenants to emulate the disciplines she imposed upon herself. One morning, after only a week in the flat, I turned on the tap to discover that our water had been cut off, so went downstairs to sort out the problem. Mrs Puri had already been up and about for several hours; she had been to the gurdwara, said her prayers and was now busy drinking her morning glass of rice water.

‘There is no water in our flat this morning, Mrs Puri.’

‘No, Mr William, and I am telling you why.’

‘Why, Mrs Puri?’

‘You are having guests, Mr William. And always they are going to the lavatory.’

‘But why should that affect the water supply?’

‘Last night I counted seven flushes,’ said Mrs Puri, rapping her stick on the floor. ‘So I have cut off the water as protest.’

She paused to let the enormity of our crime sink in.

‘Is there any wonder that there is water shortage in our India when you people are making seven flushes in one night?’

Old Mr Puri, her husband, was a magnificent-looking Sikh gentleman with a long white beard and a tin zimmer frame with wheels on the bottom. He always seemed friendly enough—as we passed he would nod politely from his armchair. But when we first took the flat Mrs Puri drew us aside and warned us that her husband had never been, well, quite the same since the riots that followed Mrs Gandhi’s death in 1984.

It was a rather heroic story. When some hooligans began to break down the front door, Mr Puri got Ladoo (the name means Sweety), his bearer, to place him directly behind the splintering wood. Uttering a blood-curdling cry, he whipped out his old service revolver and fired the entire magazine through the door. The marauders ran off to attack the taxi rank around the corner and the Puris were saved.

From that day on, however, the old man had become a fervent Sikh nationalist. ‘Everyone should have their own home,’ he would snort. ‘The Muslims have Pakistan. The Hindus have Hindustan. The Punjab is our home. If I was a young man I would join Bhindranwale and fight these Hindu dogs.’

‘It is talk only,’ Mrs Puri would reply.

‘Before I die I will see a free Khalistan.’

‘You are daydreaming only. How many years are left?’

‘The Punjab is my home.’

‘He may have been born in the Punjab,’ Mrs Puri would say, turning to me, ‘but now he could not go back to village life. He likes flush toilet and Star TV. Everybody likes flush toilet and Star TV. How can you leave these things once you have tasted such luxury?’

Since the riots, Mr Puri had also become intermittently senile. One day he could be perfectly lucid; the next he might suffer from the strangest hallucinations. On these occasions conversations with him took on a somewhat surreal quality:

MR PURI (up the stairs to my flat) Mr William! Get your bloody mules out of my room this minute!

WD But Mr Puri, I don’t have any mules.

MR PURI Nonsense! How else could you get your trunks up the stairs?

During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.

It had been a bad monsoon. Normally in Delhi, September is a month of almost equatorial fertility and the land seems refreshed and newly-washed. But in the year of our arrival, after a parching summer, the rains had lasted for only three weeks. As a result dust was everywhere and the city’s trees and flowers all looked as if they had been lightly sprinkled with talcum powder.

Nevertheless the air was still sticky with damp-heat, and it was in a cloud of perspiration that we began to unpack and to take in the eccentricities of our flat: the chiming doorbell that played both the Indian national anthem and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; the geyser, which if left on too long, would shoot a fountain of boiling water from an outlet on the roof and bathe the terrace in a scalding shower; the pretty round building just below the garden which we at first took to be a temple, and only later discovered to be the local sewage works.

But perhaps the strangest novelty of coming to live in India—stranger even than Mrs Puri—was getting used to life with a sudden glut of domestic help. Before coming out to Delhi we had lived impecuniously in a tiny student dive in Oxford. Now we had to make the transition to a life where we still had only two rooms, but suddenly found ourselves with more than twice that number of servants. It wasn’t that we particularly wanted or needed servants; but, as Mrs Puri soon made quite clear, employing staff was a painful necessity on which the prestige of her household depended.

The night we moved in, we spent our first hours dusting and cleaning before sinking, exhausted, into bed at around 2 a.m. The following morning we were woken at 7.30 sharp by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Half asleep, I shuffled to the door to find Ladoo, Mr Puri’s bearer, waiting outside. He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai.

‘Chota hazari, sahib,’ said Ladoo. Bed tea.

‘What a nice gesture,’ I said returning to Olivia. ‘Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.’

‘I wish she had sent it up two hours later,’ said Olivia from beneath her sheets.

I finished the tea and sank down beneath the covers. Ten seconds later the Indian national anthem chimed out. I scrambled out of bed and again opened the door. Outside was a thin man with purple, betel-stained lips. He had a muffler wrapped around his head and, despite the heat, a thick donkey-jacket was buttoned tightly over his torso. I had never seen him before.

‘Mali,’ he said. The gardener.

He bowed, walked past me and made for the kitchen. From the bedroom I could hear him fiddling around, filling a bucket with water then splashing it over the plants on the roof terrace. He knocked discreetly on the bedroom door to indicate he had finished, then disappeared down the stairs. The mali was followed first by Murti, the sweeper, then by Prasad, the dhobi, and finally by Bahadur, Mrs Puri’s Nepali cook. I gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs.

‘Mrs Puri,’ I said. ‘There has been a stream of strange people pouring in and out of my flat since seven-thirty.’

‘I know, Mr William,’ replied Mrs Puri. ‘These people are your servants.’

‘But I don’t want any servants.’

‘Everyone has servants,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘You must have servants too. This is what these people are for.’

I frowned. ‘But must we have so many?’

‘Well, you must have a cook and a bearer.’

‘We don’t need a bearer. And both of us enjoy cooking.’

‘In that case you could have one cook-bearer. One man, two jobs. Very modern. Then there is the mali, the sweeper, and a dhobi for your washing. Also you must be having one driver.’ Mrs Puri furrowed her brow. ‘It is very important to have good chauffeur,’ she said gravely. ‘Some pukka fellow with a smart uniform.’

‘I haven’t got a car. So it’s pointless having a driver.’

‘But if you have no car and no driver,’ said Mrs Puri, ‘how will you be getting from place to place?’

Balvinder Singh, son of Punjab Singh, Prince of Taxi Drivers, may your moustache never grow grey! Nor your liver cave in with cirrhosis. Nor your precious Hindustan Ambassador ever again crumple in a collision—like the one we had with the van carrying Mango Frooty Drink.

Although during my first year in Delhi I remember thinking that the traffic had seemed both anarchic and alarming, by my second visit I had come to realize that it was in fact governed by very strict rules. Right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle. Buses give way to heavy trucks, Ambassadors give way to buses, and bicyclists give way to everything except pedestrians. On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

Yet Mr Balvinder Singh is an individualist who believes in the importance of asserting himself. While circumstances may force him to defer to buses and lorries, he has never seen the necessity of giving way to the tinny new Maruti vans which, though taller than his Ambassador, are not so heavily built. After all, Mr Singh is a kshatriya by caste, a warrior, and like his ancestors he is keen to show that he is afraid of nothing. He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing ‘chicken’ with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.

Or rather was. One month after our arrival in Delhi, Mr Singh and I had an accident. Taking a road junction with more phlegm than usual, we careered into the Maruti van, impaling it on its bows, so that it bled Mango Frooty Drink all over Mr Singh’s bonnet. No one was hurt, and Mr Singh—strangely elated by his ‘kill’—took it stoically. ‘Mr William,’ he said. ‘In my life six times have I crashed. And on not one occasion have I ever been killed.’

Although I am devoted to him, Olivia is quick to point out that Mr Singh is in many ways an unattractive character. A Punjabi Sikh, he is the Essex Man of the East. He chews paan and spits the betel juice out of the window, leaving a red ‘go-fast’ stripe along the car’s right flank. He utters incoherent whoops of joy as he drives rickshaws on to the pavement or sends a herd of paper boys flying into a ditch. He leaps out of his taxi to urinate at traffic lights, and scratches his groin as he talks. Like Essex Man, he is a lecher. His eyes follow the saris up and down the Delhi avenues; plump Sikh girls riding side-saddle on motorbikes are a particular distraction. Twice a week, when Olivia is not in the car, he offers to drive me to G.B. Road, the Delhi red light district: ‘Just looking,’ he suggests. ‘Delhi ladies very good. Having breasts like mangoes.’

Yet he has his principles. Like his English counterpart, he is a believer in hard work. He finds it hard to understand the beggars who congregate at the lights. ‘Why these peoples not working?’ he asks. ‘They have two arms and two legs. They not handicrafted.’

‘Handicrafted?’

‘Missing leg perhaps, or only one ear.’

‘You mean handicapped?’

‘Yes. Handicrafted. Sikh peoples not like this. Sikh peoples working hard, earning money, buying car.’

Ignoring the bus hurtling towards us, he turns around and winks an enormous wink. ‘Afterwards Sikh peoples drinking whisky, looking television, eating tandoori chicken and going G.B. Road.’

The house stood looking on to a small square of hot, tropical green: a springy lawn fenced in by a windbreak of champa and ashok trees. The square was the scene for a daily routine of almost Vedic inflexibility.

Early in the morning, under a bald blue sky, the servants would walk plump dachshunds over the grass, or, duties completed, would stand about on the pavements exchanging gossip or playing cards. Then, at about nine o’clock, the morning peace would be broken by a procession of bicycle-powered vendors, each with his own distinctive street-cry: the used-newspaper collector (‘Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah!’) would be followed by the fruit seller (‘Mangoes! Lychees! Bananas! Papaya!’), the bread boy and the man with the vegetable barrow. My favourite, the cotton-fluffer, whose life revolved around the puffing up of old mattresses, would twang a Jew’s harp. On Sunday mornings an acrobat would come with his dancing bear; he had a pair of drums and when he beat them the whole square would miraculously fill with children. Early that afternoon would follow a blind man with an accordion. He would sing hymns and sacred qawwalis and sometimes the rich people would send down a servant with a handful of change.

In the late afternoon, a herd of cattle twenty or thirty strong could be seen wandering along the lane at the back of the house. There was never any herder in sight, but they would always rumble slowly past, throwing up clouds of dust. Occasionally they would collide with the household servants wobbling along the back lane on their bicycles, returning from buying groceries in Khan Market. Then followed the brief Indian dusk: a pale Camembert sun sinking down to the treeline; the smell of woodsmoke and dung cooking fires; the last raucous outbursts from the parakeets and the brahminy mynas; the first whirring, humming cicadas.

Later on, lying in bed, you could hear the chowkidars stomping around outside, banging their sticks and blowing their whistles. There were never any robberies in our part of New Delhi, and the chowkidars were an entirely redundant luxury.

But, as Mrs Puri said, you had to keep up appearances. Mr Singh also had strong views about appearances.

‘You are Britisher,’ he said, the very first time I hailed him. ‘I know you are a Britisher.’

It was late afternoon at the end of our first week in Delhi. We had just moved in and were beginning the gruelling pilgrimage through Indian government departments that all new arrivals must perform. We were late for an appointment at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, yet Mr Singh’s assertion could not go unquestioned.

‘How do you know I’m a Britisher?’

‘Because,’ said Mr Singh, ‘you are not sporting.’

‘Actually I am quite sporting,’ I replied. ‘I go for a run every day, swim in the summer …’

‘No Britisher is sporting,’ said Mr Singh, undaunted.

‘Lots of my countrymen are very keen on sport,’ I retorted.

‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘You are not catching me.’

‘We are still a force to be reckoned with in the fifteen hundred metres, and sometimes our cricket team …’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘Still you are not catching me. You Britishers are not sporting.’ He twirled the waxed curlicues of his moustache. ‘All men should be sporting a moustache, because all ladies are liking too much.’

He indicated that I should get in.

‘It is the fashion of our days,’ he said, roaring off and narrowly missing a pedestrian.

Mr Singh’s taxi stand lay behind the India International Centre, after which it took its name: International Backside Taxis. The stand was run by Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s stern and patriarchal father, and manned by Balvinder and his two plump brothers, Gurmuck and Bulwan. There was also a rota of cousins who would fill in during the weekends and at nights. Over the following months we got to know them all well, but it was Balvinder who remained our special friend.

That first week, and the week following it, Balvinder drove Olivia and myself through a merry-go-round of government departments. Together we paid daily visits to the rotting concrete hulk known as Shastri Bhavan, nerve centre of the Orwellian Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Here, in the course of nine visits, I deposited four faxes, three telexes, two envelopes of passport photographs (black and white only) and a sheaf of letters from my editor in London, all in an effort to get accredited as a foreign correspondent.

In due course, as the slow wheels of bureaucracy turned, my application did get processed—but not until about a year after the newspaper I represented had ceased publication. Undaunted, to this day Shastri Bhavan still refuses to acknowledge the downfall of the Sunday Correspondent, and continues to send its India representative daily press releases detailing the reasons for the decline in the production of Indian pig iron, or celebrating the success of the Fifth International Conference on the Goat (theme: The Goat in Rural Prosperity).

More depressing even than Shastri Bhavan is the headquarters of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited. The Telephone Nigam is India’s sole supplier of telecommunications to the outside world. Without the help of the Telephone Nigam one is stranded. This is something every person who works for the organization knows; and around this certainty has been built an empire dedicated to bureaucratic obfuscation, the perpetration of difficulty, the collection of bribes and, perhaps more than anything else, the spinning of great glistening cocoons of red tape.

It was a hot, dusty late September morning when I first entered room 311, home to Mr Ram Lal. Mr Lal was sitting beneath a poster of Mahatma Gandhi on which was written: ‘A customer is the most important visitor to our premises. He is not dependent on us, we are dependent on him.’

As if in deliberate subversion of the Mahatma’s message, Mr Lal held in his hands the Times of India, open at its sports page. The paper formed a barrier between Mr Lal and the asylumful of supplicants who were bobbing up and down in front of him, holding out chits of paper, arching their hands in a gesture of namaste or wobbling their turbans from side to side in mute frustration. A Punjabi lady sat weeping in a corner, repeating over and over again: ‘But I have a letter from the Minister of State for Communications … but I have a letter … a letter …’ Menials passed silently to and fro through the door, carrying files and sheaves of xeroxes. Behind Mr Lal, placed there for apparently purely decorative purposes, sat a dead computer.

When Mr Lal eventually deigned to lower his paper—which he did with infinite slowness, folding it into perfect quarters—he rang a bell and ordered one of his peons to bring him a cup of tea.

‘Right,’ he said, looking up for the first time. ‘Who’s first?’

A hundred hands were raised, but one voice stood out: ‘I am.’

The speaker pushed himself forward, holding together his bulging dhoti with one hand. He was an enormously fat man, perhaps seventy years old, with heavy plastic glasses and grey stubble on his chin.

‘My name is Sunil Gupta—please call me Sunny.’ He strode forward and grabbed Mr Lal by the hand, shaking it with great verve.

‘I am a nationalist,’ said Mr Gupta. ‘A nationalist and a freedom fighter. I am also an independent candidate in the forthcoming municipal elections. My election office will be opposite Western Court, adjacent to the paan shop. I want a temporary telephone connection, and would be most grateful if you could expedite.’ He stroked his belly. ‘Early action would be highly appreciated.’

‘Have you already applied for a connection?’ asked Mr Lal.

‘No, gentleman,’ said Sunny Gupta. ‘This is what I am doing now.’

‘First applications Room 101. Next, please.’

‘But,’ said Mr Gupta. ‘I have to maintain contact with my constituents. I need a phone immediately. I would be very grateful if you would expedite a VVIP connection without delay.’

‘Are you a member of the Lok Sabha?’

‘No. I …’

‘In that case you must contact Mr Dharam Vir …’

‘Gentleman, please listen …’

‘… in Room 101.’

With a great flourish, Mr Gupta pulled a much-pawed piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Gentleman,’ he said. ‘Please be looking here. This is my manifesto.’

Across the top of the piece of paper, in huge red letters, was blazoned the slogan: A NATIONALIST TO THE CORE AND A FREEDOM FIGHTER. Mr Gupta straightened his glasses and read from the charter:

‘I was a Founder Member cum Chairman of the Religious and Social Institute of India, Patna Branch …’

Mr Lal was meanwhile studying the application of the weeping Punjabi lady. He read it twice and, frowning, initialled it at the top right-hand corner: ‘See Mr Sharma for countersignature. Room 407.’

The woman broke down in a convulsion of grateful sobs. Beside her Mr Gupta was still in full flood:

‘… I am ex-member of the Publicity Committee of the All-India Congress I, Bhagalpur division. Ex-Joint Secretary of the Youth Congress Committee, Chote Nagpur, Bihar. I am a poet and a journalist. A war hero from the 1965 Indo-Pak war, Jaisalmer sector …’

‘Madam,’ continued Mr Lal. ‘Please make payment with Mr Surwinder Singh, accounts, Room 521.’

‘… I was the founder editor of Sari, the Hindi monthly for women and Kalidasa, the biannual literary journal of Patna. I have donated five acres of land for the Chote Nagpur Cow Hospital. Four times I have been jailed by the Britishers for services to Mother Bharat.’

‘If you think it is bad now,’ said Mr Lal, taking my application. ‘You should see this office on Fridays. That’s the busiest time.’

I left Mr Lal’s office at noon. By four-thirty I had queued inside a total of nine different offices, waiting in each for the magic letter, seal, signature, counter-signature, demand note, restoration order or receipt which would, at some stage in the far distant future, lead to my being granted a telephone.

‘Phone will be connected within two months,’ said Mr Lal as he shook my hand, the obstacle course completed. ‘Two months no problem. Or maybe little longer. Backlog is there.’

Mr Gupta was still sitting at the back of Mr Lal’s office. He was quiet now, though still tightly clutching at his election manifesto. I gave him a sympathetic wave as I left.

‘To think,’ he said, ‘that I was in British prison seven times with Gandhiji for this.’

At his desk, Mr Lal had returned to the sports page of the Times of India.

Although parts of the city still preserved the ways of the Mughal period or even the early Middle Ages, Delhi was nevertheless changing, and changing fast.

Mr Gupta’s world—the cosy world of the Freedom Struggle, of homespun Congress Socialism and the Non-aligned Movement—all of it was going down; driving around New Delhi you could almost feel the old order crumbling as you watched, disappearing under a deluge of Japanese-designed Maruti cars, concrete shopping plazas and high-rise buildings. Satellite dishes now outnumber the domes of the mosques and the spires of the temples. There was suddenly a lot of money about: no longer did the rich go up to Simla for the summer; they closed their apartments and headed off to London or New York.

The most visible change was in the buildings. When I first saw Delhi it was still a low-rise colonial capital, dominated by long avenues of white plaster Lutyens bungalows. The bungalows gave New Delhi its character: shady avenues of jamun and ashupal trees, low red-brick walls gave on to hundreds of rambling white colonial houses with their broken pediments and tall Ionic pillars.

One of my strongest memories from my first visit was sitting in the garden of one of the bungalows, a glass to hand, with my legs raised up on a Bombay Fornicator (one of those wickerwork planter’s chairs with extended arms, essential to every colonial veranda). In front lay a lawn dotted with croquet hoops; behind, the white bow-front of one of this century’s most inspired residential designs. Over the rooftops there was not a skyscraper to be seen. Yet I was not in some leafy suburb, but in the very centre of New Delhi. Its low-rise townscape was then unique among modern capitals, a last surviving reminder of the town planning of a more elegant age.

Now, perhaps inevitably, it was gradually being destroyed: new structures were fast replacing the bungalows; huge Legoland blocks were going up on all the arterial roads radiating from Connaught Circus. The seventeenth-century salmon-pink observatory of Rajah Man Singh—the Jantar Mantar—lay dwarfed by the surrounding high-rise towers that seemed purpose-built to obscure its view of the heavens. Over the great ceremonial way which led from Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House to India Gate now towered a hideous glass and plastic greenhouse called the Meridien Hotel.

Other, still more unsympathetic blocks were already planned. On Kasturba Gandhi Marg (originally Curzon Road) only two of the old Italianate villas still survived, and one of these was in severe disrepair. Its plaster was peeling and its garden lay untended and overgrown. In front of its gate stood a huge sign:

A PROJECT FROM THE HOUSE OF EROS

ULTRAMODERN DELUXE MULTISTOREYED

RESIDENCE APTS.

COMPLETION DATE 1994.

It was said that not one private Lutyens bungalow would survive undemolished by the turn of the century.

There were other changes, too. The damburst of western goods and ideas that were now pouring into India had brought with them an undertow of western morality. Adulterous couples now filled the public gardens; condom advertisements dominated the Delhi skyline. The Indian capital, once the last bastion of the chaperoned virgin, the double-locked bedroom and the arranged marriage, was slowly filling with lovers: whispering, blushing, occasionally holding hands, they loitered beneath flowering trees like figures from a miniature. Delhi was starting to unbutton. After the long Victorian twilight, the sari was beginning to slip.

Other changes in the city were less promising. The roads were becoming clogged; pollution was terrible. Every day the sluggish waters of the Jumna were spiced with some 350 million gallons of raw sewage.

Alongside the rapidly growing wealth of the middle class, there was also a great increase in poverty. Every week, it was said, six thousand penniless migrants poured into Delhi looking for work. You could see them at the traffic lights along Lodhi Road, hands outreached for alms. The jhuggis— the vast sackcloth cities in which these people lived—had quadrupled in size since 1984. New jhuggi outposts were spreading along the dry drainage ditches, filling the flyovers, sending tentacles up the pavements and the hard shoulders. At night, cooking fires could be seen flickering inside the old Lodhi tombs.

Attitudes were changing too. A subtle hardening seemed to have taken place. In the smart drawing-rooms of Delhi, from where the fate of India’s 880 million people was controlled, the middle class seemed to be growing less tolerant; the great Hindu qualities of assimilation and acceptance were no longer highly prized. A mild form of fascism was in fashion: educated people would tell you that it was about time those bloody Muslims were disciplined—that they had been pampered and appeased by the Congress Party for too long, that they were filthy and fanatical, that they bred like rabbits. They should all be put behind bars, hostesses would tell you as they poured you a glass of imported whisky; expulsion was too good for them.

Strangely, in these drawing-rooms, you never heard anyone complain about the Sikhs. But of course it was they and not the Muslims who had most recently suffered the backlash of this hardening, this new intolerance which, like an unstable lump of phosphorus, could quite suddenly burst into flames.

TWO

AS WAS HER HABIT, Indira Gandhi had toast and fruit for breakfast. It was 31 October 1984 and the bougainvillaea was in flower.

At 9.15 she stepped out of the portico of her white bungalow, crossed the lawns by the lotus pond, then passed into the dim green shade of the peepul avenue. There she smiled at her Sikh security guard, Sub-Inspector Beant Singh. Singh did not smile back. Instead he pulled out his revolver and shot her in the stomach. His friend, Constable Satwant Singh, then emptied the clip of his sten gun into her.

Today, Mrs Gandhi’s house is a shrine dedicated to the former Prime Minister’s memory. Busloads of school children trail through, licking ice creams and staring at Mrs Gandhi’s rooms, now permanently frozen as they were on the day she died. Her Scrabble set, a signed photograph from Ho Chi Minh (‘loving greetings to Indira’), a pair of her knitting needles and her books—an unlikely selection, including Marx, Malraux and The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh— all lie behind glass, numbered and catalogued. Outside, in the middle of the avenue, a strangely tasteless memorial stands on the spot where she fell: a bouquet of red glass roses on a frosted crystal plinth, a gift from the people of Czechoslovakia. It is as if it marked the place of her death. But in fact as she lay there, pouring with blood from some twenty bullet wounds, Indira Gandhi was still alive.

An ambulance was waiting outside the gate of her house, as regulations demanded, but, this being Delhi, the driver had disappeared for a tea break. So Indira’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, bundled the Prime Minister into the back of a decrepit Hindustan Ambassador, and together they drove the three miles to the All-India Medical Institute.

Indira was probably dead on arrival, but it was not until one o’clock that the news was broken to the waiting world. The effect was immediate. When the crowds learned that their leader had been assassinated, and that a Sikh was responsible, the thin ice of Delhi’s tenuous peace was shattered. The mourners wanted blood. Grabbing sticks and stones and whatever else came to hand, they set off looking for Sikhs.

In those days Mr and Mrs Puri had a house beside the Medical Institute. They were thus the very first Sikh family to receive the attentions of the mob. Mrs Puri had just finished her lunch—as usual, dal, two vegetables and one hot aloo paratha—and was deep in her customary post-prandial knit, when she looked up from her woollies, peered out of her window and noticed three hundred emotional thugs massing around her garden gate and chanting: ‘Khoon ka badla khoon’- blood for blood, blood for blood, blood for blood.

‘They were very jungli peoples—not from good castes. So I told Ladoo to lock the door and stop them from coming in,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘We could hear them talking about us. They said: "These people are Sikhs. Let us kill them." Then they began to throw some stones and broke all the glasses. We switched off the lights and pretended no one was at home. We thought we would be killed. But first we wanted to kill some of them. You see actually we are kshatriyas, from the warrior caste. My blood was boiling and I very much wanted to give them good. But they were standing outside only. What could I do?’

The mob smashed every window in the house, burned the Puris’ car and incinerated their son’s motorbike. Then they attacked the front door. Luckily, Mr Puri was on the other side, leaning forward on his zimmer frame, armed to the teeth. He fired three times through the door with his old revolver and the mob fled. As they did so, old Mr Puri got Ladoo to kick open the door, then fired the rest of the round after them.

Three hours later, cruising in his taxi, Balvinder Singh passed Green Park, an area not far from the Medical Institute, when he encountered another mob. They surrounded the taxi and pelted it with stones. Balvinder was unhurt, but his front windscreen was shattered. He swore a few choice Punjabi obscenities, then returned quickly to his taxi stand. The next day, despite growing unrest, Balvinder and his brothers decided to return to work. For an hour they sat on their charpoys looking nervously out on to the empty streets before agreeing the moment had come to hide the cars and shut up the stand. At five past eleven they received a phone call. It warned them that the nearby Sujan Singh Park gurdwara was burning and that a large lynch mob was closing in on them. Leaving everything, they hastily set off to their house across the Jumna, twelve cousins in a convoy of three taxis.

They were nearing one of the bridges over the river when they were flagged down by a police patrol. The policemen told them that there were riots on the far side and that it was not safe to proceed. Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s father, said that there were riots on the near side too, and that it was impossible to go back. Moreover, they could not leave their wives and children without protection. The police let them through. For five minutes they drove without difficulty. Then, as they neared Laxmi Nagar, they ran into a road block. A crowd had placed a burning truck across part of the road and were massing behind it with an armoury of clubs and iron bars. The first two cars, containing Punjab, Balvinder and two of his brothers, swerved around the truck and made it through. The third taxi, containing three of Punjab’s young nephews, was attacked and stopped. The boys were pulled out of the cars, beaten with the rods, doused with kerosene and set alight.

That night, from their roof, Balvinder and his family could see fires burning all over Delhi. To save themselves from the fate of their cousins the brothers decided to cut their hair and shave off their beards; the first time they had ever done so. Punjab reminded them of their religion and tried to stop them; afterwards, in atonement, he refused to eat for a whole week.

In the meantime, the Singhs also took more concrete steps to protect themselves. The family lived in an entirely Sikh area—a taxi drivers’ colony—and the residents quickly armed themselves with kirpans (Sikh ceremonial swords) and formed makeshift vigilante forces to defend their narrow alleys. Preferring to concentrate on less resolutely guarded areas, the mobs left them in peace. For four days they lived under siege. Then the army was deployed; and as quickly as they had appeared, the rioters vanished.

Balvinder had lost three cousins in the riots. There were other, smaller losses too: Bulwan, Balvinder’s elder brother who lived slightly apart from the others, had his house burned to the ground; he had left it and taken shelter with his brothers. Everything he owned was destroyed. Over at the International Backside, the taxi stand’s shack was broken into; its primus, telephone and three rope-strung charpoys were all stolen. Someone had also discovered Balvinder’s hidden taxi and ran off with the back seat, the battery and the taxi meter. Yet compared to many other families of Sikhs in the capital, Balvinder Singh’s family were extremely lucky.

Trilokpuri is the dumping ground for Delhi’s poor.

It was constructed on a piece of waste land on the far side of the Jumna during the Emergency of 1975. It was intended to house the squatters whom Sanjay Gandhi evicted from their makeshift shelters on the pavements of Central Delhi; the area remains probably the most desperately poor neighbourhood in the whole city. During 1984 it was here, well away from the spying eyes of the journalists, the diplomats and the middle classes, that the worst massacres took place: of the 2150 Sikhs murdered in the capital during the three days of rioting, the great majority were killed here.

It was a warm, early October afternoon when I set off to see Trilokpuri. I had never been across the Jumna before and did not know what to expect. Balvinder Singh drove past the battlements of the Old Fort of Humayun, over the Ring Road and headed on across the lower Jumna bridge—exactly the route that he and his cousins had taken in October 1984.

Across the bridge, quite suddenly everything changed. If you took Lutyens’s city to be the eighth city of Delhi, we had crossed zones into a ninth, a sort of counter-Delhi: a Metropolis of the Poor. Here there were no tree-lined avenues, few advertising hoardings, still fewer cars. We passed alongside a rubbish dump crawling with rag-pickers. Thin chickens pecked around a litter of sagging roadside shacks. Women palmed buffalo-dung into chapattis of cooking fuel. Over everything hung a choking grey smog: fly-ash from a nearby power station. Here for the first time you got an impression of a fact which Delhi seemed almost purpose-built to hide: that the city is the capital not just of a resurgent regional power, formerly the jewel in Britain’s Imperial crown, but that it is also the chief metropolis of a desperately poor Third World country; a country whose affluent middle class is still outnumbered four or five to one by the impoverished rural masses.

When the outside world first discovered the Trilokpuri massacres, long after the rioters had disappeared, it was Block 32 that dominated the headlines. Dogs were found fighting over piles of purple human entrails. Charred and roasted bodies lay in great heaps in the gullies; kerosene fumes still hung heavy in the air. Piles of hair, cut from the Sikhs before they were burned alive, lay on the verandas. Hacked-off limbs clogged the gutters.

Yet, as the journalists soon discovered, it was difficult to find anyone who admitted to being present during the madness. Everyone was vague and noncommittal: the killers were men from outside; we were asleep; we saw nothing. Trying to find witnesses or survivors proved no easier five years later. I passed from block to block. What had once been a largely Sikh area was now entirely Hindu. The Sikhs had all moved, I was told. No, none of us were there at the time. We were visiting our villages when it happened. No, no one had seen anything. And the men sat cross-legged on their charpoys, gravely shaking their heads from side to side.

It was Balvinder who, while chatting in a chai shop, discovered that there was one solitary Sikh family left, in Block 30. They had been there at the time, he said, and had survived by hiding in a hole. Moreover, they were also witnesses; through a small chink they had seen everything.

Sohan Singh Sandhu was an old man in a cream-coloured salwar kameez. He had the bushiest eyebrows I have ever seen: they seemed to join with his mutton-chop whiskers and full, Babylonian beard so as to give the impression of a face peeping out through thick undergrowth. He sat cross-legged on a rope bed, backed by a frieze of Sikh holy pictures: icons of beards and swords and haloes filled the wall. Sohan Singh Sandhu was the granthi (reader) of the local gurdwara. He gave us his card, and while we settled ourselves down on his charpoy he shouted through to the kitchen, telling his wife—whom we had not yet seen—to bring us some tea.

His family had originally lived in a pukka house in Shastri Nagar, on the rich bank of the Jumna. But in 1975, during the Emergency, bulldozers flattened their home; they were given half an hour to move their valuables. According to the police, the demolitions were necessary to make way for a line of new electricity pylons, but the last time he had visited the site of his old house the land was still lying vacant. Much later they had received a plot in Trilokpuri, along with a government loan to cover building materials. His three sons and he had built the house with their own hands. It wasn’t a bad area, he said. A little out of the way, but quite tolerable. And their neighbours, who had suffered the same evictions as they, had always been friendly.

The troubles began quite suddenly on 1 November 1984. They had been anxiously listening to the news on the radio when a Sikh boy came running down the gully shouting that a mob, four or five thousand strong, was massing nearby.

‘About 150 of us assembled on the waste land at the edge of the block,’ said Sandhu. ‘The mob stoned us and we stoned them back. It was during the stoning that my son was hit.’

He pointed to a charpoy in a dark corner of the room. There, so silent that we had failed to notice him, lay a boy of about my own age. Like his father he had a full, uncut beard and a powerful physique. But he was behaving oddly. Although he could obviously hear that we were talking about him he still lay on his back on the rope bed, admiring himself in a rickshaw wing-mirror that he held in his hand.

‘He had bad head injuries,’ said his father quietly. ‘Now he has some mental problem.’

The boy ignored us and continued to stare at the mirror. As we watched, his face suddenly suffused with child-like happiness, and still looking at the mirror he burst into a fit of high-pitched giggles. His father frowned and looked away.

‘After the stone throwing had been going on for two hours the police suddenly intervened. They escorted the mob away, then returned and collected all our weapons: they took all our lathis (sticks) and kirpans (swords); they even took away the stones and the bricks that were lying around our houses. They said: "There is a curfew. Lock yourselves up." When we had followed their instructions and retreated inside our houses, they let the mob loose.’

Groups of forty or fifty thugs descended on a single gully, flailing around them with their iron bars: ‘They would knock on a door. If it wasn’t opened they’d beat it down. Sometimes, when people had managed to barricade themselves in, they would climb up on the roof, break open the ceiling and pour in kerosene. Then they would burn everyone inside alive.’

‘They used our own kerosene,’ said Sandhu’s wife, appearing now with the tray of tea. She gave us each a glass and sat down on the bed beside her husband. ‘They stole it from us then used it to murder us.’

‘Once they shouted: "Send out the men and we won’t harm them." A couple of doors opened and some of our neighbours gave themselves up. They took them away. It was only later that we discovered they had taken them to the edge of the block, made them drink kerosene then set them alight.’

‘How did you manage to escape?’ I asked.

‘Look,’ said Sandhu. And getting up from the charpoy he pulled back a drape which covered the top of one wall. Behind lay a tiny cubby-hole filled with a metal trunk and two packing-cases laid end to end. ‘Ranjit,’ he indicated the son still lying in the corner, ‘Ranjit and I hid in there for three days.’

‘But you couldn’t possibly have fitted,’ I said.

‘We managed,’ replied Sandhu. ‘There was no other choice.’

‘Did they never think of looking behind the drapes?’ I asked.

‘We scattered all our jewellery and valuables at the front of the house. Most of the mob were interested only in looting. They took the jewellery and forgot about us.’ Sandhu smiled: ‘Once one of their leaders—a local Congress politician—came inside and rebuked them: "You are just looting," he said. "You should be killing." He flicked back the drape and saw our attic but we had placed the cases and mattresses in front of us. He said: "It is too small. Nobody can hide there."

‘That was the worst moment. I whispered to Ranjit: "Do not be afraid. It will be a quick pain, then it will be over." And I told him that he was a Sikh and that he must be brave. I said: "They have to kill you. When the moment comes do not beg them for your life."’

‘You were very lucky,’ I said.

‘I was,’ replied Sandhu. ‘But my other two sons were less fortunate. On the second day they were discovered hiding in the shop of some Hindu friends. The mob burned the shop. Then they put rubber tyres around the necks of my sons, doused them with petrol and burned them too.’

The old man was sitting cross-legged beside his wife. His voice was lowered yet he spoke almost matter-of-factly. Up to that point he had hardly mentioned his other two sons at all.

‘God is behind every act,’ he said. ‘There must have been something wrong that we did in the past.’

‘Yet you were spared.’

‘It was not our turn,’ he replied. ‘That was why we were saved.’ He shrugged and pointed to the ceiling: ‘He is the one who saves.’

There was a halt in the conversation. There was nothing more to say.

Sandhu brought out an album of old photographs: the two dead boys—formal black and white studio photographs, two youths in turbans staring straight at the camera, one with heavy plastic glasses, the other with a slight squint; a shot of the wreckage in the house after the looting—clothes strewn everywhere, smashed crockery, a half-burned charpoy; a snap of a smashed-up autorickshaw, a lump of buckled metal with a frosted windscreen.

‘That was Ranjit’s,’ said his father. ‘He used to be a driver.’

For a few seconds no one spoke. Then I asked: ‘Aren’t you frightened it might happen again?’

‘No: now we are no longer worried. I am still the granthi of the gurdwara. I give langoor (food) to the poor Hindus; the rich Hindus give us offerings. These wounds are healed now.’

‘But isn’t it upsetting to stay on in the same street? To live where your children were murdered?’

‘Personally I would like to leave. To return to the Punjab. It is my wife who wishes to stay. She says: "This is where my children used to eat, to sleep, to play, to laugh …"’

‘I feel they are still here,’ said Mrs Sandhu. ‘They built this house with their hands. They fitted the bricks and the mud.’ She shook her head. ‘Since they died not for one day have I left this place. I will die here.’

On the bed in the corner, her one surviving son suddenly broke out laughing again. We all turned towards him. He was still staring at himself in the wing-mirror of his old rickshaw.

Delhi had many failings, but I had never felt it was a violent city. In all the time I had spent in the dark mohallas (quarters) of the old walled city I had never once felt threatened. There were no areas that I felt uneasy to visit after sunset. Instead I had always found Delhi-wallahs, particularly the poor, remarkable for their gentleness and elaborate courtesy. Wherever we went, complete strangers would invite Olivia and me to sit and talk and share a glass of tea with them. To one brought up on a diet of starchy English reserve this habitual kindness of the Delhi-wallah was as touching as it was strange.

Yet as Balvinder and Sandhu could witness, when provoked the inhabitants of this mild town could rise up and commit acts of extreme brutality. Men would avert their eyes as next door neighbours were burned alive or disembowelled. The same people who would invite you to share their last plate of food could, with equal spontaneity, lose control and run amok. Then, with equal ease they could return to their bazaars and shops, factories and offices and carry on as if nothing had happened. It was difficult to understand.

Moreover, despite Delhi’s historic reputation as the most cultured town in India, the city’s history was punctuated with many such flashes of terrible, orgiastic violence. It was not just invaders who put the people of Delhi to the sword. During the Middle Ages and throughout the long Mughal twilight the town was continually rent with bloody riots, even small civil wars. Out of the first twelve Sultans, only two died peacefully in their beds; the rest were killed, usually in a horrible manner and almost always by their courtiers or subjects. Invaders like Timur the Lame were able to storm the high walls of the city only because the inhabitants were already busy cutting each others’ throats. The death toll from bazaar disputes such as the eighteenth-century Shoe Sellers’ Riot could run into tens of thousands.

The last great conflagration was Partition. In the dying days of the British Raj, when the subcontinent was split into Muslim-only Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, twelve million people were made refugees. Hordes of non-Muslims—Sikhs and Hindus—fled their ancestral villages in Pakistan; India’s displaced Muslims struck out in the opposite direction. It was the greatest migration the modern world had ever seen. Yet again Delhi was consigned to the flames. Following some of the worst rioting in its history, nearly half of its ancient Muslim population—the descendants of the people who had erected the Qutab Minar and lined the streets to cheer the Great Mogul—packed their bags and headed off to a new country. Their place was taken by refugees from the Western Punjab, among them Mr and Mrs Puri and Punjab Singh. Delhi was transformed from a small administrative capital of 900,000 people to a Punjabi-speaking metropolis half the size of London.

Of the two peoples who had ruled Delhi during the previous thousand years, the British disappeared completely while the Indian Muslims were reduced to an impoverished minority. In the space of a few months, the face of the city was probably changed more radically than at any other time since the Muslims first came to India, a millennium before.

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