City of Djinns. William Dalrymple
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depicted the refugee camps on the ridge, the white tent cities in which Punjab Singh had stayed on his arrival. There were also shots of some fire-blackened and gutted houses standing in the rubble of the Subzi Mandi. It was in a house such as this that Mr and Mrs Puri had taken shelter for their first months in their new city.
The more I read, the more it became clear that the events of 1947 were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city’s central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture.
This paradox also exposed the principal tensions in the city. The old Urdu-speaking élite who had inhabited Delhi for centuries—both Hindu and Muslim—had traditionally looked down on the Punjabis as boorish yeoman farmers. With their folk memories of the mushairas (levees) of the old Mughal court and the mehfils (literary evenings) of the great Delhi poets, with their pride in the subtlety and perfection of Delhi Urdu and Delhi cooking, they could never reconcile themselves to the hardworking but (in their eyes) essentially uncivilized Punjabi colonizers. It was as if Bloomsbury were made to absorb a deluge of mud-booted Yorkshire farmers. To these people, of course, Mrs Puri’s finishing school was the ultimate presumption: a Punjabi immigrant using western textbooks to teach etiquette to Delhi-wallahs—and this in a city which for centuries had regarded itself as the last word in refinement and courtly behaviour.
In their turn, the Punjabis despised the old Delhi-wallahs as effeminate, slothful and degenerate: ‘Maybe these Delhi people are not always lazy,’ Punjab Singh once said to me. ‘But they are not too active either. Punjabi people are good at earning money and also at spending it. They enjoy life. Delhi peoples are greedy and mean. They expect to live well, but never they are working for it.’
Today the two worlds, Mughal Old Delhi and Punjabi New Delhi, mix but rarely. Each keeps to itself, each absolutely certain of its superiority over the other. Even on common festivals such as Dusshera, in Delhi traditionally celebrated by the Hindu and Muslim communities without distinction, entirely separate ceremonies are now held, one set around the Red Fort and the Ram Lila Grounds of Old Delhi, the other in the parks and gardens of Punjabi residential colonies south of Lutyens’s city.
Despite all that politicians of both faiths have done to create a division between Hindu and Muslim, from the early days of the Muslim League to the recent sudden rise of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, in Delhi that communal chasm is still far less marked than the gap separating the Old Delhi-wallah from the Punjabi immigrant.
Dusshera is the Hindu feast celebrating the victory of Lord Ram over the demon Ravanna; the feast also marks the incipient victory of the cool season over summer’s heat.
According to the legend, Ravanna kidnapped Sita, Ram’s bride, and carried her off to Lanka, his island fortress. There he tried a number of strategies to enrol her into his splendid harem. But with the help of Hanuman, the Monkey God, Ram leaped across the straits to Lanka, rescued Sita, and after an epic struggle lopped off all ten of the demon’s heads.
For the last two weeks of September, in the Delhi parks and maidans, huge wickerwork effigies of Ravanna and his two monstrous brothers, Meghnath and Kumbhakaran, were being erected: workmen clung like sparrows to rickety bamboo scaffolding, busily hammering noses and ears into place. On the feast day, amid a flurry of celebrations, all the effigies were to be burned.
The day of Dusshera—hot, dusty and humid—burned out into a fine warm evening. A Delhi journalist friend had invited Olivia and me to celebrate the festival with him in South Extension. Together we walked to a park near his house. Ravanna was a giant corn dolly 120 feet high, dressed in bright pink pyjamas. He was held upright by six straining guy-ropes. In some of the big gardens in Old Delhi whole circles of hell had been erected—ten or eleven demons, Ravanna’s whole family, all lined up in menacing rows, black moustaches curled—but our friend was very proud of his single pink devil, and there was no denying that he was a very fine demon indeed.
Beside Ravanna’s ankles a marquee had been erected, and in it a band of Goan boys were playing songs from recent Hindi movies. We took a seat and listened to a number called ‘Ding Dong’—apparently a great hit a few months before. A plump man in a dhoti passed a collection plate around.
Then, to the great excitement of the two hundred children present, the sun set and the pyrotechnics began. Some Roman candles spluttered between Ravanna’s legs. A volley of rockets arched above his shoulders. With a small pirouette, the plump man in the dhoti took a burning torch and touched both Ravanna’s feet. A slow blue flame licked up his legs and hovered around his waist. Suddenly his pink pyjama top took light; and in a trice the whole effigy was in flames. We could feel the heat like a furnace in our faces. Then a canister of Chinese crackers secreted in Ravanna’s chest blew up with a deafening roar. The crowds cheered; and a full moon rose over the demon’s smouldering carcass.
That October was a season of strange and fiery sunsets: great twilight infernos blazing in the heavens. Sometimes, just as the sun was going down, the evening fumes would mingle with the dung fires of the jhuggi-dwellers to form a perfectly straight sheet of mist along Lodhi Road. Beyond, the thick and dusty air would turn weird, unnatural colours in the gloaming: vivid, luminous mauves; dark, dingy crimsons; deep, bloody reds. Once I saw the great onion dome of Safdarjang’s Tomb illuminated by a beam from the doomed sun. The light remained constant for less than a minute, but it picked out the great Mughal tomb with an unearthly brightness, spot-lit against an abattoir sky.
Compared with the months before the temperature was suddenly quite bearable. Up in the high Himalayas the first snows had begun to fall and cool winds were blowing down, quenching the fires of the plains. Though it was still very warm, the bottled-up irritations, suppressed during the previous six months of white heat, came bubbling out in a burst of righteous indignation. Delhi suddenly blossomed with little encampments: every traffic island had someone fasting to death; every day a new pressure group would march on Parliament. You could see them trotting along in a great crocodile, banners held aloft, or else sitting sweating under canopies in Rajpath: there were the teachers and the Tibetans, the blood donors and the dog owners; once, to Balvinder Singh’s delight, there was even a delegation of prostitutes from G.B. Road. All the sit-ins, walk-outs and protest marches were remarkably good-humoured; even the hunger strikers seemed strangely to be enjoying themselves.
It was now cool enough for Olivia to go out painting in the mornings. Every day she would get up at eight and disappear with her brushes and her watercolours. She had given up her place at art school to come out to Delhi and she was determined to make the most of the opportunity. For the rest of the cold season she toured Old Delhi’s kuchas and mohallas sketching the people, the buildings and the ruins. Some days she would not return until dusk.
The new season also brought about changes downstairs in the Puri household. From the middle of October, Mr Puri embarked on his winter routine of taking a morning walk around the square below the house. Though the square was only half the size of a football pitch, getting Mr Puri around it was quite an operation, and a new servant was contracted to oversee the business of his daily perambulation. He was a tiny Nepali boy, clearly not a day older than eight. I said as much to Mrs Puri.
‘He is nineteen,’ she replied.
‘But he is only three and a half feet tall.’
‘He is Nepali,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘Nepali people are small.’
‘But he has no beard. His voice hasn’t broken. He should be at primary school.’
Mrs Puri considered this. ‘They have bad food in Nepal,’ she explained. She wobbled her head: ‘In a year, when he has eaten our nutritious dal and rice, he will double in size. Then he will have a moustache and maybe a beard also.’
Every day the boy, Nickoo, performed the tricky task of