City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.

Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan ... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.

On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.

Dr Jaffery said that very few people in Delhi now wanted to study classical Persian, the language which, like French in Imperial Russia, had for centuries been the first tongue of every educated Delhi-wallah. 'No one has any interest in the classics today,' he said. 'If they read at all, they read trash from America. They have no idea what they are missing. The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.

For all its faults we love this city.’ Then, after a pause, she added: ‘After all, we built it.

The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.

He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators.

To the sick man sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth.

What matters it, O breeze, If now has come the spring When I have lost them both The garden and my nest?

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.

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.

His diaries had begun to assume something of the knowingness of incipient middle age; at times, indeed, he was in danger of becoming priggish and opinionated. As with many later European voyagers, travel in this part of the world, far from broadening the mind, seemed instead to lead to a blanket distrust of anyone of a different creed, colour or class.

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.

Urdu is an aristocratic language. It was not the language of the working classes. Those who are left—the artisans—speak Karkhana [factory] Urdu. The Urdu of the poets is dead.

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.

When a dust storm blows it means the djinns are going to celebrate a marriage …

the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones.

There was that all-pervasive evening scent of cut grass and jasmine.

Delhi was starting to unbutton. After the long Victorian twilight

Tughluk was far too free in shedding blood,’ writes Battuta. ‘Every day hundreds of people—chained, pinioned and fettered—were brought to [the sultan’s hall] and those who were for execution were executed, those for torture tortured, and those for beating beaten. It was but seldom that the entrance to his palace was without a corpse. One day as I arrived at the palace my horse shied at the sight of a white fragment on the ground. I asked what it was and one of my companions said: "It is the torso of a man who was [this morning] cut into three pieces.

Later, when Aurangzeb ordered the decapitation of the naked fakir Sarmad, an Armenian Jew who had converted to Islam, the sage allegedly picked up his head and walked up the steps of the Jama Masjid. There he said a final set of prayers before departing to the heavens.

As Sa’di said: "If a diamond falls in the dirt it is still a diamond, yet even if dust ascends all the way to heaven it remains without value.

Travels in the Mogul Empire and Manucci’s Mogul India.