Читать книгу City of Djinns - William Dalrymple - Страница 9

‘OUR VILLAGE was famous for its sweets,’ said Punjab Singh. ‘People would come for miles to taste the jalebis our sweet-wallahs prepared. There were none better in the whole of the Punjab.’

We were sitting on a charpoy at International Backside Taxi Stand. For weeks I had been begging Balvinder’s father to tell me the story of how he had come to Delhi in 1947. A stern and sombre man, Punjab would always knit his eyebrows and change the subject. It was as if Partition were a closed subject, something embarrassing that shouldn’t be raised in polite conversation.

It was only after a particularly persistent bout of badgering, in which Balvinder took my side, that Punjab had agreed to relent. But once started, he soon got into the swing of his story.

‘Samundra was a small and beautiful village in District Lyallpur,’ he said. ‘It was one of the most lovely parts of the whole of the Punjab. We had a good climate and very fertile land. The village stood within the ruins of an old fort and was surrounded on four sides by high walls. It was like this.’

With his hands, the old man built four castle walls. From the details that he sketched with his fingers you could see he remembered every bastion, every battlement, each loophole.

‘Our village was all Sikh apart from a few Hindu sweepers. Our neighbours were Mahommedan peoples. We owned most of the land but before 1947 we lived like brothers. There were no differences between us …’ Punjab stroked his beard. He smiled as he recalled his childhood.

‘On the 15th of August 1947 the Government announced Partition. We were not afraid. We had heard about the idea of Pakistan, but we thought it would make no difference to us. We realized a Mahommedan government would take over from the Britishers. But in our Punjab governments often come and go. Usually such things make no difference to the poor man in his village.

‘Then, quite suddenly, on the 10th of September, we got a message from the Deputy Commissioner in Lyallpur. It said: "You people cannot stay. You must leave your house and your village and go to India." Everyone was miserable but what could we do? All the villagers began loading their goods into bullock carts. The old men were especially sad: they had lived their whole lives in the village. But we were young and could not understand why our grandfathers were crying.

‘In the villages round about the Mahommedans heard we were being forced to move. Many came and said: "You must stay, do not go," but others were thinking dirty thoughts. They wanted to take our possessions.

‘At about six or seven o’clock on the morning we were due to leave, too many Muslim peoples—perhaps five or six thousand—suddenly appeared outside our fort, waving their swords and calling us dogs and infidels. The watchmen shut the gates. Inside, there were only nine hundred of us, including old women and childrens. We had no weapons. We thought we would be killed.

‘Then the Pradhan [head] of the Sweet-Makers said: "We have no guns but we have our pans and our sugar and our water. Let us make jalebis for our Muslim friends." Some of our people thought that the Sweet-Maker had gone mad, and they shook their heads and tore the bristles from their beards. They said: "This is crazy man. The Mahommedan peoples will not go away when they taste our delicious jalebis. Instead they will come inside and kill us." These old men were very sad and went off to the gurdwara to say their prayers.

‘But the Sweet-Maker took his assistants up on to the battlements and he built a big fire. He boiled the water in a pan and he added the sugar. He stirred the mixture until it was thick and flies were buzzing all around. He told the other mithai-wallahs to take their pans and to make jalebis over the other three gates. His assistants did as he said.

‘Down below, the Mahommedans had a tree trunk and were running with it against the great gates of the fort, but the gates still held. Eventually the mixture was ready, and the Pradhan shouted down: "You like our jalebis?" and he tilted his pan over the parapet. The boiling sugar poured over the wicked Muslims and they were all burned alive.’

Punjab beamed a bright smile: ‘All day and all night these dirty Mahommedans tried to find a way to enter the fort, but whenever they tried to get near the gates the sweet-makers gave them a taste of our celebrated jalebis. Then, some time about two a.m. the second night, our peoples saw headlights coming towards us across the fields. It was the British army. They had seen the fires of the sweet-makers burning on the battlements and had come to investigate. The convoy was led by an English colonel. He fired six shots into the air and the Mahommedan fellows ran off into the night as if their Shaitan [satan] was after them.

‘The next day the English colonel evacuated us in his trucks. We were only able to take one small bag each, and we had to leave all our carts and goats and sheep and buffalo and oxen. This made us very sad, but at least we were alive. The colonel took us to Amritsar and from there we caught the train to Delhi. Ah! To me Delhi was a wonderful town. I was amazed by all the beautiful cars in the streets. All the Mahommedan tonga-wallahs had gone to Pakistan, so I decided to become a taxi-wallah. This is the job I have been doing ever since.

‘After that day, for good luck, my brother Kulwinder began to make jalebis. He still has a shop in Begampur and I have heard some people say that he makes the best jalebis in all of Delhi …’

I had been living in Delhi for some months before I began to realize quite how many of the people I met every day were Partition refugees. Even the most well-established Delhi figures—newspaper editors, successful businessmen, powerful politicians—had tales to tell of childhoods broken in two, of long journeys on foot over the Punjab plains, of houses left behind, of sisters kidnapped or raped: the ghastly but familiar litany of Partition horrors.

The Puris’ story was fairly typical. Before Partition they had a large town house in Lahore. When the riots came they packed a couple of suitcases, bought their bullock cart and headed off towards Delhi. Their possessions they left locked up in the haveli, guarded by Muslim servants. Like the Palestinians a year later, they expected to come back within a few months when peace had been restored. Like the Palestinians, they never returned.

On arrival in Delhi they found a gutted house in Subzi Mandi, the vegetable bazaar of the Old City. It had belonged to a Muslim family that had fled weeks before. The Puris simply installed a new door and moved in. There were still killings, and occasionally stray bullets ricocheted around the bazaar, but gradually the Puris began to find their feet.

‘We acquired slowly by slowly,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘My husband started a business making and selling small houses. I knitted woollens. At first it was very hard.’

After a year of carrying water in leaky buckets, the house was connected to the water mains; later the Puris got electricity installed. By 1949 they had a fan; by 1956 a fridge. In the late 1960s the Puris moved to a smart new house in South Extension. They had arrived.

We heard the same story repeated over and over again. Even the most innocuous of our neighbours, we discovered, had extraordinary tales of 1947: chartered accountants could tell tales of single-handedly fighting off baying mobs; men from grey government ministries would emerge as the heroes of bloody street battles. Everything these people now possessed was built up by their own hard labour over the last few years.

Mr Seth, our next door neighbour, was a retired official in the Indian Railways. A safari-suited civil servant, he was polite, timid and anonymous. After passing out of Walton Railway Training School, Seth’s first posting came in 1946: he was made Assistant Ticket Inspector at Sheikhapura near Lahore. One year later there came the great divide and Mr Seth, a Hindu, found himself on the wrong side of the border. The killing had started. Sikhs and Hindus stopped trains carrying refugees to Pakistan and killed all the Muslims. Muslims stopped trains going to India and killed all the Sikhs and Hindus.

‘Every train from India that passed our station was totally smashed,’ remembers Mr Seth. ‘Women, children, old, young: all were killed. Blood was pouring from the bogies [carriages].’

Then one day, a refugee train from Rawalpindi under the custody of the Gurkhas passed through Sheikhapura. Nervous of being attacked by Muslims, the Gurkhas—all Hindus—let off a barrage of shots through the train windows. A stray bullet hit the wife of the Muslim station master. The station master, unhinged with grief, tried to shoot the only Hindu in the station—his Assistant Ticket Inspector, Mr Seth. He missed. But Mr Seth realized that the moment had come to flee Pakistan. He jumped off the platform and ran down the line towards India. There, a little later, he was ambushed by a party of Muslims heading in the opposite direction. They took everything he owned, including his shoes, his shirt and his trousers.

‘I travelled barefoot down the lines having only a knicker,’ said Mr Seth. ‘Four times I escaped death. Four times! I arrived at Amritsar station at midnight, and got a new uniform from the station master. The next day I reported for duty at nine a.m. exactly.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Promotion!’ said Mr Seth, beaming a red betel-nut smile. ‘I became Commercial Accountant bracket Parcel Clerk, Booking Clerk, Goods Clerk etcetera unbracket. Later I was transferred to Delhi and was given a temporary house in Lodhi Colony. It was previously owned by a Muslim. I was told he had been shot dead on the veranda.’

The violence totally gutted many of the poorer parts of Delhi, but even the very richest districts were affected. While shoppers looked on, Hindu mobs looted the smart Muslim tailors and boutiques in Connaught Place; passers-by then stepped over the murdered shopkeepers and helped themselves to the unguarded stocks of lipstick, handbags and bottles of face cream. In Lodhi Colony, Sikh bands burst into the white Lutyens bungalows belonging to senior Muslim civil servants and slaughtered anyone they found at home.

In some areas of the Old City, particularly around Turkman Gate and the Jama Masjid, the Muslims armed themselves with mortars and heavy machine guns. From their strongpoints in the narrow alleyways they defied not only the rioters but also the Indian Army. Many of the Muslim families who remain in Delhi today survived by barricading themselves into these heavily defended warrens.

Meanwhile, refugees poured into India: ‘300,000 Sikh and Hindu refugees are currently moving into the country,’ stated one small page three report in a 1947 edition of the Hindustan Times. ‘Near Amritsar 150,000 people are spread 60 miles along the road. It is perhaps the greatest caravan in human history.’ It was this steady stream of Punjabi refugees who, despite the great exodus of Muslims, still managed to swell the capital’s population from 918,000 in 1941 to 1,800,000 in 1951. The newspaper stories were illustrated with pictures showing the dead lying like a thick carpet on New Delhi Railway Station. Other photographs 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 winding a new white turban around Mr Puri’s head and winching the cantankerous old man down the stairs. He then had to push Mr Puri around the square—the old man all the time raving or propositioning passers-by—before pushing him back up again. There was no doubt, however, that Mr Puri clearly enjoyed the whole thing enormously. His spirits rose in anticipation of his daily treat, and if crossed while on tour he could be positively frisky.

‘Good morning, Mr Puri,’ Olivia once ventured on meeting him and Nickoo half-way around the square.

‘My darling, my sweetheart,’ replied Mr Puri, somewhat unexpectedly. ‘Be my wife.’

‘You’ve picked the wrong girl, Mr Puri,’ replied Olivia, marching off, brushes in hand.

This put-down, like the others before it, failed to put Mr Puri off the scent, although he did initiate enquiries, through Nickoo, as to whether Olivia and I really were married. In the meantime he continued to shoot around the flat on his zimmer, chasing Olivia if ever she ventured downstairs to borrow some milk. Finally he got caught.

One day Olivia was standing in the doorway chatting to Mrs Puri when Mr Puri appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He had just returned from his morning walk and did not realize his wife was the other side of the door.

‘My sweetheart: are you damsel or madam?’ he asked.

Olivia turned round to see Mr Puri advancing towards her.

‘This man,’ he said pointing to Nickoo, ‘says you are madam. I say you are damsel.’

Mrs Puri flung open the door and fired a burst of rapid-shot Punjabi at her husband. Then she turned to Olivia.

‘He means you are married now so you are "madam",’ she said, glowering at her husband, ‘while before you were "damsel".’

‘Are you damsel or madam?’ repeated Mr Puri, undaunted, grabbing hold of Nickoo and propelling himself upwards towards Olivia.

Olivia held up her wedding ring like garlic to a vampire. ‘Mr Puri,’ she said. ‘I am madam.’

That October I often accompanied Olivia on her expeditions into the alleys of Old Delhi, once Shahjehanabad, the capital of the Empire of the Great Mogul. It was an area I had always loved, but there was no denying that it had fallen on hard times. The Old City had been built at the very apex of Delhi’s fortunes and had been in slow decline virtually from the moment of its completion. The final and most dramatic wrecking of its fortunes had, however, taken place in 1947.

Just as Partition resulted in prosperity and growth for the new Delhi, it led to impoverishment and stagnation for the old. The fabulous city which hypnotized the world travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the home of the great poets Mir, Zauq and Ghalib; the city of nautch girls and courtesans; the seat of the Emperor, the Shadow of God, the Refuge of the World, became a ghetto, a poor relation embarrassingly tacked on to the metropolis to its south. Since 1947 the Old City has survived only by becoming one enormous storehouse for North India’s wholesale goods; one by one the old palaces and mansions have been converted into godowns (warehouses) and stores. It has become more remarkable for its junk markets and car parts bazaars than for any fraying beauty or last lingering hints of sophistication. The crafts and skills developed over the centuries for the tastes of the old Urdu-speaking Delhi élite either adjusted to the less sophisticated Punjabi market, or simply died out.

Near the Ajmeri Gate lies the old Cobblers’ Bazaar. Most of the Muslim shoemakers who worked here fled to Karachi in 1947, and today the Punjabis who replaced them sell mostly locks and chains and hardware. But a few of the old shopkeepers remain, and among them is the shop of Shamim and Ali Akbar Khan. Despite the position of their workshop, the father of Shamim and Ali was no cobbler; he was one of the most famous calligraphers in Delhi. Shamim continues his father’s trade and still lives by producing beautifully inscribed title deeds, wills and marriage documents.

I met Shamim in a chai shop outside the Ajmeri Gate mosque. He was a tall and elegant man in his early fifties, dressed in an immaculate sherwani frock coat and a tall lambskin cap. He had high cheekbones, fair skin, and narrow, almond-shaped eyes that hinted at a Central Asian ancestry. On his chin he sported a neat goatee beard. He sat down beside me at a table in the rear of the shop and over a glass of masala tea we began to talk.

‘My forebears were writers at the Mughal court,’ said Shamim. ‘And before that we were calligraphers in Samarkand. My family have always been in this business.’

‘And you illuminate your documents in exactly the way your father taught you?’

‘My father was a very accomplished man. He knew the shikastah script as well as the nastaliq; he could write both Persian and Urdu. I learned only the nastaliq. Slowly the skills are dying. Today there are only two other calligraphers in Delhi and they are of inferior quality.’

Shamim called the chai-boy over and asked for the bill. When it finally came he totted it up, checking all the figures in a slightly pedantic manner.

‘Today most of the work is in Hindi,’ he said. ‘Because of this there is little demand for our skills.’

‘Can you not learn the Hindi script?’ I asked.

‘I know it. But with the change from Urdu has come a loss of prestige. Earlier it was a highly respected job that few people were qualified to perform: you had to be familiar with Islamic law, had to know the old Delhi customs, and most of all you had to be a talented calligrapher. Now I am just a clerk; most of the work is done quickly on typewriters.’

He downed the rest of the tea in a single swallow and swirled the dregs around in his glass: ‘It is because of the newcomers. They have a very different culture; they have no interest in fine calligraphy.’

We walked together through the jostling crowds to his office; and while we walked he told me about Ali. With his share of the inheritance, the raffish younger brother had, it seemed, started some sort of shady photography studio at the front of the shop.

‘My brother cannot write in Urdu,’ said Shamim. ‘Like many of the young men he has no knowledge of his own culture. Only he is interested in photography.’ The calligrapher’s face set in a deep frown. ‘Ali got involved with men of very bad character,’ he whispered. ‘Photography was the only way we could divert his attention from even worse occupations. Still I am very ashamed. How can you explain these pictures?’

We had arrived at the shop—little more than a small cavity in the street-frontage—and Shamim was pointing to a frieze of pin-ups cut from Indian magazines. It was quite a collection: voluptuous actresses lying scantily-clad on tiger-skins, topless white girls posing on the beaches of Goa, a selection of portly Egyptian belly-dancers covered with earrings and bracelets; diamonds flashed from the folds around their belly-buttons. Beyond the counter in the studio I could see Ali taking passport photographs with a new Japanese camera. He was dressed in cream-coloured slacks and a polyester shirt.

‘These pictures are the concern of my brother,’ whispered Shamim, still grimacing at the pin-ups. ‘They are not my business. But because of them I cannot invite to this office any of my religious-minded relatives. Because of these pictures no good Muslim will come near this shop. It is all most unIslamic.’

‘Maybe in time Ali will take them down,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ agreed Shamim. ‘When men are young they are getting involved in photography, beer-drinking and nudity. But,’ he continued, ‘when they are older they return to Islam.’

‘When people get older they decide to wear the long beard and to look very pious,’ said Ali. He had come over to the counter and overheard the end of our conversation. ‘But people do not change. I know several men who look like Shamim—with beards and sherwani— yet they run brothels in G.B. Road.’

Shamim frowned, but Ali had not finished.

‘The problem with people around here is narrow thinking,’ he said airily. ‘They are not broadminded. They are not reading magazines from Bombay. They do not know what is happening in the world.’

‘You obviously read a lot of Bombay magazines,’ I replied, pointing at the pin-ups.

‘You like them?’

‘I’m not sure about the Egyptian ladies.’

‘I put them up to attract the customers,’ replied Ali. ‘My brother is unhappy with me only because I am doing much better business than he. Today no one wants a calligrapher. Even in a town like Delhi.’

Ali stepped out on to the pavement and made a disdainful gesture out over the street: ‘Look! This city is now so dirty. Everything is old and falling down. Why should I stay in a place like this? One day I will leave and go to Bombay. Delhi is finished.’

A black silk bundle walked into the shop accompanied by her heavily bearded husband. The man talked to Ali and all three headed off into the curtained booth reserved for taking passport pictures of women in chador.

‘This family were clients of my father’s,’ said Shamim, trying to explain why any decent Muslim families would dream of using his brother’s services.

‘Don’t your father’s old customers support you too?’ I asked.

‘There was much bloodshed in this area in 1947,’ replied Shamim. ‘Most of my father’s customers are either dead or living in Karachi. The old Delhi-wallahs continue to come here, but now they are so few.’

‘So your skill will die?’

‘My son does not want to learn the trade. He wants to become a businessman or to join some modern profession.’

‘But you will carry on?’

Shamim’s face fell. ‘Inshallah I will continue,’ he replied. ‘There is no money in it—but this is my craft, the craft of my fathers.’

He said: ‘I must be loyal to it.’

Since I had first explored the labyrinths of Shahjehanabad five years previously, I had read some of the descriptions of the area penned by the seventeenth-century writers and poets: ‘Its towers are the resting place of the sun,’ wrote Chandar Bhan Brahman in 1648. ‘Its avenues are so full of pleasure that its lanes are like the roads of paradise.’ ‘It is like a Garden of Eden that is populated,’ echoed Ghulam Mohammed Khan. ‘It is the foundation of the eighth heaven.’ ‘It is the seat of Empire … the centre of the great circle of Islam …’

For all the Old City’s considerable charm, it was impossible to reconcile the earthly paradise praised by the poets with the melancholy slum that today squatted within the crumbling Mughal walls. Even allowing for the conventions of Persian hyperbole (and for the fact that most of the writers were professional flatterers—sycophancy being throughout history the pervasive vice of the ambitious Delhi-wallah), the chasm between the two visions seemed unbridgeable.

The greatest disappointment was Chandni Chowk. In the poems and travelogues, the Moonlight Bazaar is praised as a kind of Oriental Faubourg St Honoré, renowned for its wide avenues, its elegant caravanserais and its fabulous Mughal gardens. Having read the descriptions of this great boulevard, once the finest in all Islam, as you sit on your rickshaw and head on into the labyrinth you still half-expect to find its shops full of jasper and sardonynx for the Mughal builders, mother-of-pearl inlay for the pietra dura craftsmen; you expect to see strings of Bactrian camels from Kashgar and logs of cinnamon from Madagascar, merchants from Ferghana, and Khemer girl concubines from beyond the Irrawady; perhaps even a rare breed of turkey from the New World or a zebra to fill the Imperial menagerie and amuse the Emperor.

But instead, as you sit stranded in a traffic jam, half-choked by rickshaw fumes and the ammonia-stink of the municipal urinals, you see around you a sad vista of collapsing shop fronts and broken balustrades, tatty warehouses roofed with corrugated iron and patched with rusting duckboards. The canal which ran down the centre of the bazaar has been filled in; the trees have been uprooted. All is tarnished, fraying at the edges. On the pavement, a Brahminy cow illicitly munches vegetables from the sack of a vendor; a Muslim ear-cleaner squats outside the Sis Ganj gurdwara and peers down the orifices of a Sikh nihang (gurdwara guard). A man grabs your arm and stage-whispers: ‘Sahib, you want carpets hashish smack brown sugar change money blue film sexy ladies no problem!’

Another vendor waves some cheap plastic trinkets in your face. ‘Hello, my dear,’ he says. ‘You want?’

His brother joins the scrum, his arms full of posters: ‘Whatyouwant? I have everything! Guru Gobind Singh, Alpine meadow scene, Arnold Swartznegger, two little kittens, Saddam Hussein, Lord Shiva, Charlie Chaplin …’

A crowd gathers.

‘Your mother country?’

‘This lady your wife?’

‘How many childrens?’

The gridlock tightens; it is time to jettison the stationary rickshaw and beat a retreat.

Turkman Gate on the south of the Old City is less crowded, but even more depressing. The area is named after an eleventh-century Turkoman nomad who turned Sufi and built his hermitage here; but the Punjabis who moved here in 1947 have confused the name, and it is now known as Truckman Gate after the lorry drivers who come to eat in the roadside restaurants.

The streets here are narrow and full of goats being fattened for Bakri Id. Pack-donkeys trot past carrying saddlebags full of rubble. As you pass into the Sita Ram bazaar and take in the grand old gateways tumbling down on either side of you, you begin to realize what has happened here. The same walls that now form the rickety paan shops and dirty godowns once supported sprawling mansions and the lovely Delhi courtyard houses known as havelis. You can see it for yourself: the slum was once a city of palaces.

In Shahjehanabad the town houses were so planned that a plain façade, decorated only with an elaborate gatehouse, would pass into a courtyard; off this courtyard would lead small pleasure gardens, the zenanas (harems), a guardhouse or a miniature mosque, the haveli library and the customary shish mahal or glass palace. The haveli was a world within a world, self-contained and totally hidden from the view of the casual passer-by. Now, however, while many of the great gatehouses survive, they are hollow fanfares announcing nothing. You pass through a great arch and find yourself in a rubble-filled car-park where once irrigation runnels bubbled. The shish mahals are unrecognizable, partitioned up into small factories and workshops; metal shutters turn zenana screens into locked store rooms; the gardens have disappeared under concrete. Only the odd arcade of pillars or a half-buried fragment of finely-carved late Mughal ornament indicates what once existed here.

The desolation is even sadder when a haveli is associated with a known piece of history. At the end of the Sita Ram Bazaar stands the Haksar Haveli. Here, little more than seventy years ago, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, married his wife Kamla. The house belonged to one of the most distinguished of the Kashmiri Pandit families in Delhi, the Haksars, and was famed for its size and magnificence. The gatehouse survives still as a witness to this grandeur: with its Dholpur sandstone façade, its delicate jharokha balconies and its fine fish-tail mouldings it is still a magnificent sight. But the interior is a gutted ruin. Through the locked grille you can see the desolation: collapsed rafters now act as a sort of walkway for the cook who squats in the rubble frying his samosas; the cellars are gradually overflowing with his kitchen refuse and old potato peelings. Cusped sandstone arches are buried up to their capitals in rubble; vaults hang suspended in a litter of disintegrating brickwork. No one seems to care. It is as if the people of Delhi had washed their hands of the fine old mansions of the Old City in their enthusiasm to move into the concrete bunkers of the New.

There is still continuity here, a few surviving traditions, some lingering beauty, but you have to look quite hard to find it.

One day in late October, Olivia and I stumbled across Ali Manzil, the home of Begum Hamida Sultan. It was one of the last havelis still occupied in the old style. A narrow passageway led from the gatehouse into a shady courtyard planted with neem and mulberries; the open space was flanked by a pair of wooden balconies latticed as intricately as a lace ruff. Ahead lay an arcade of cusped Shahjehani arches. This was recently the house of the former Indian President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and so was saved from the rapid eclipse that had blacked out many similar households. Yet even here, the inevitable decay had set in. The outer courtyard had recently been destroyed and its space given over for shops. The balconies were collapsing, the paint was flaking. The veranda lay unswept.

Begum Hamida Sultan sat with her silent younger sister at a large teak table. She was dressed in tatty cotton pyjamas. She was old and frail, with white hair and narrow wrists, but she sat bolt upright, as if still animated by some lingering, defiant pride of her Mughal blood. She had fair skin, but her fine aristocratic face—obviously once very beautiful—was now lined with frown-marks.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, indicating the litter on the floor and the unswept dust. ‘We have no servants. The last one died two years ago.’

As girls, she said, she and her sister used to be driven from Ali Manzil to Queen Mary’s School in a horse-drawn landau. In those days the house was full of writers, musicians, politicians and poets; you needed to have an appointment to be let into even the outer courtyard.

‘We had fifty visitors a day. Now …’ Her voice tailed off. ‘It was Partition that destroyed our Delhi.’

‘Can you remember it?’ I asked.

‘We were in Shillong. When we returned we found the house had been ransacked. The cook had run away. The gardener had been killed. Of my relations, the Loharus, only the Nawab [of Pataudi] was left. Everyone else had fled to Pakistan.’

She shook her head. ‘I loved Delhi. But now Delhi is dead.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Hardly any of the original inhabitants are left. The outsiders have taken over. Even our language is dead.’

‘But many people in Delhi still speak Urdu.’

‘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.’

An emaciated cat which had been mewing hungrily at the Begum’s feet jumped up on to the table. Flirtatiously it smoothed itself against her bony fingers. The Begum brushed it away.

‘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.’

Olivia asked whether we could come back and visit her again, and whether she needed anything from New Delhi.

‘I do not need anything,’ replied the Begum haughtily. ‘Do not come back.’ She paused; then added huskily, almost in a whisper: ‘I just want to be forgotten.’

The best impression of the Shahjehanabad of Hamida Sultan—of the city that was destroyed in 1947—can be found not in photographs or pictures, nor even in the jaded memories of the survivors, but in a slim first novel published to some critical acclaim in 1940.

Although the brilliance of Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali was immediately recognized by both E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, most copies of the book were lost when the warehouse of the Hogarth Press was destroyed during the Blitz. There was no reprint, and the book was overlooked first during the trauma of the Second World War, then in the holocaust of Partition. Only now with the recent publication of a paperback has the book begun to receive the recognition it deserved. For although (until recently) forgotten even in the city it immortalized, Twilight in Delhi is not only a very fine novel, it is also an irreplaceable record of the vanished life and culture of pre-war Delhi. Written only seven years before the catastrophe of 1947, its gloomy tone and pessimistic title were more visionary than Ahmed Ali could ever have imagined.

The novel follows the fortunes of a traditional Muslim family living in a haveli very like Ali Manzil. At the opening of the book a cloud is looming over the house: the patriarch, an old Mughal named Mir Nihal, disapproves of his son courting a low-born girl named Bilqeece. As the love of Ashgar and Bilqeece first grows, blossoms, then decays, the whole dying world of Shahjehanabad is evoked: the pigeon-fliers and the poets, the alchemists and the Sufis, the beggars and the tradesmen.

Beyond Kashmiri Gate the British usurp the mantle of the Mughal emperors, enforcing their authority but rarely deigning to mix with the ordinary Delhi-wallahs. The First World War and the influenza epidemic strike down the young; vultures circle ominously overhead. Yet inside the walls of the havelis and the lattice screens of the zenana, life goes on as it always did. Births follow upon marriages, love affairs decay, middle age gives way to crumbling senility—but all the time the stories and traditions are passed on:

‘Cover your head, daughter, or some evil spirit may harm you …’

‘If you put a broom under the leg of a bed, the wind-storm abates …’

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

Up on the roof the men discuss the different breeds of racing pigeon: the golays that fly low over the roofs, but in a perfectly straight line; the fast and high flying Kabuli kabooter; or the slow but beautiful fan-tailed nisarays. Elsewhere, the fakirs and alchemists discuss the herbs and rituals which can turn tin into molten gold; and they talk in hushed voices of the alchemist’s vital ingredient, the luminous flower called ‘Lamp of the Night’ which at dusk flickers like a firefly on the parched hillsides of Rajputana.

Twilight in Delhi survived Partition to represent the life of Old Delhi to a new readership today, but what, I wondered, had happened to its author? My edition of the book gave no clue; and I scanned the bookshops in vain to find other, later works by the same hand. It was a Delhi publisher friend who told me that Ali was in fact still alive, now an old man living in obscurity in Karachi. This only made it more intriguing: why would anyone who so obviously loved Delhi with a passion opt to leave it? And why had he not gone on to write other even better books?

Karachi seemed to hold the key to many of the unanswered questions of 1947. Not only did the city contain some 200,000 refugees who had fled from Delhi to Pakistan in the upheavals of that year, it also contained their most distinguished chronicler. The moment had come for me to visit Karachi for myself.

In Delhi I had been given an introduction to Shanulhaq Haqqee, a pipe-smoking Urdu poet and the direct descendant of Abdul Haq, a famous literary figure at the court of Shah Jehan. Shanulhaq fled from Delhi in 1947. He left to escape the rioting and meant to return as soon as order was re-established. He was never allowed to except much later, for a week, as a tourist from a foreign country. It was almost exactly seven hundred years since the first of his line arrived in Delhi from Turkestan to fight in the Deccani wars of the thirteenth-century Sultan, Ala-ud-Din Khalji.

Shanulhaq was the only person I had been able to find who was actually a friend of Ahmed Ali. ‘Ali doesn’t mix much,’ a Pakistani friend had told me. ‘He never really fitted in in Karachi.’ ‘He’s a bit abrupt,’ said someone else. ‘You know … rather bitter.’

Shanulhaq Haqqee offered to drive me over to see Ahmed Ali the evening of my arrival. But first, he said, I should come and meet some other Delhi exiles. He would expect me at his house in time for tea.

The exiles—now elderly and respectable figures—sat sipping jasmine tea from porcelain cups while they nibbled pakoras and cucumber sandwiches. On the wall hung a faded sepia photograph of Shanulhaq’s family in their haveli near the Ajmeri Gate around 1912; beside it hung another of a very small boy dressed in late Mughal court dress: a brocaded sherwani, baggy white pyjamas, and on his head, a tiny red fez. It was Shanulhaq as an infant.

‘Of course Karachi Urdu is really pure Delhi Urdu,’ explained a judge, biting a pakora. ‘Now that they have Sanskritized all the dialects in India, this is the last place you can hear it spoken.’

Outside, you could hear the dull drone of the Karachi traffic. The city kept reminding me of the Gulf: the new motorways, the glossy high-rise buildings, the Japanese cars. But when you talked to the exiles it was the Palestinians who came to mind. Each one treasured his childhood memories like a title-deed. Each one knew by heart the stories of the catastrophe, the massacres and the exodus; the forty-year-old tales of exile flowed from everyone’s lips like new gossip. Each one talked about the old city as if it remained unchanged since the day they had departed.

‘Have you ever been to Gulli Churiwallan?’ asked the judge, referring to a dirty ghetto now full of decaying warehouses. ‘The havelis there are the most magnificent in all Delhi. The stonework, the fountains …’

It reminded me of a conversation I had had two years before in a camp near Ramallah on the West Bank. Did I know the orange groves at Biddya near Jaffa, Usamah had asked me. They grew the best oranges in Palestine at Biddya, he said. As a boy he could remember creeping in and shinning up the trees and the juice running down his face afterwards … How could I tell him that his orange groves now lay under one of the ugliest suburbs of Tel Aviv?

‘Have you been to Burns Road?’ asked a civil servant’s wife, breaking into my thoughts. ‘It’s just around the corner from your hotel. All the sweetmeat vendors from the Delhi Jama Masjid set up their stalls there. Sometimes I just go there to listen. I sit in a dhaba and close my eyes and then there is a whiff of shammi kebab and I think: Ah! The smell of my childhood.’

‘Do they still teach Ghalib in the schools?’ asked the newsreader, referring to the great Urdu poet. ‘Or is it just Kalidasa and the Ramayana?’

‘I bet no one even knows who Ghalib is in Delhi these days,’ said the judge. ‘They probably think he’s a cricketer.’

Later, Shanulhaq drove me slowly through the streets of Karachi. As we went, he pointed out the shops which had once filled the streets of Delhi: the English Boot House, once of Connaught Place; Abdul Khaliq, the famous sweet-seller of Chandni Chowk; Nihari’s, the kebab-wallah from the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid. He pointed out how such and such an area still preserved the distinctive idiom or the distinctive cut of kurta pyjamas unique to such and such an area of Delhi.

Even the streets were like a Delhi Dictionary of Biography. While the roads of modern Delhi are named after a dubious collection of twentieth-century politicians—Archbishop Makarios Marg, Tito Marg and so on—the streets of Karachi are named after the great Delhi-wallahs of history: to get to Ahmed Ali we passed through a litany of Delhi sufis and sultans, poets and philosophers, before turning left into Amir Khusroe Drive.

Ahmed Ali was there to meet us. He wore severe black-rimmed glasses above which sprouted a pair of thin grey eyebrows. He slurred his consonants and had the slightly limp wrist and effete manner of one who modelled himself on a Bloomsbury original. His hair was the colour of wood-ash. For a man once seen as a champion of Delhi’s culture, a bulwark of eastern civilization against the seepage of western influence, Ahmed Ali now cut an unexpectedly English figure: with his clipped accent and tweed jacket with old leather elbow-patches he could have passed off successfully as a clubland character from a Noël Coward play.

But despite his comfortable, well-to-do appearance Ahmed Ali was an angry man. Over the hours I spent with him, he spluttered and spat like a well-warmed frying pan. The first occasion was when I inadvertently mentioned that he was now a citizen of Pakistan.

‘Poppycock! Balderdash!’ he said. ‘I was always against Jinnah. Never had any interest in Pakistan.’

‘Steady on,’ said Shanulhaq.

‘The devil!’ said Ali. ‘Pakistan is not a country. Never was. It’s a damn hotchpotch. It’s not your country or my country.’ He was shouting at Shanulhaq now. ‘It’s the country of a damn bunch of feudal lords … robbers, bloody murderers, kidnappers …’

The outburst spluttered out into silence.

‘But,’ I ventured. ‘Didn’t you opt for Pakistan? Surely you could have stayed in Delhi had you wanted to.’

There was another explosion.

‘I opted for Pakistan? I did not! I was the Visiting Professor in Nanking when the blasted Partition took place. The bloody swine of Hindus wouldn’t let me go back home so …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I went and saw the Indian ambassador in Peking. Bloody … bloody swine said I couldn’t return. Said it was a question of Hindu against Muslim and that there was nothing he could do. I was caught in China and had nowhere to go.’

‘Careful,’ said Shanulhaq, seeing the state his friend had worked himself up into.

‘So how did you end up in Karachi?’ I asked.

‘When my salary in Nanking was stopped I found my way to some friends in Hong Kong. They put me on an amphibious plane to Karachi. Where else could I have gone if I couldn’t go back to Delhi?’

Ali had ceased to quiver with rage and was now merely very cross.

‘I never opted for Pakistan,’ he said, gradually regaining his poise. ‘The civilization I belong to—the civilization of Delhi—came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim. That civilization flourished for one thousand years undisturbed until certain people came along and denied that that great mingling had taken place.’

‘Views like that can hardly have made you popular here.’

‘They never accepted me in Pakistan, damn it. I have been weeded out. They don’t publish my books. They have deleted my name. When copies of Twilight in Delhi arrived at the Karachi customs from India, they sent them back: said the book was about the "forbidden" city across the border. They implied the culture was foreign and subversive. Ha!’

‘In that case can’t you go back to Delhi? Couldn’t you re-apply for Indian citizenship?’

‘Now no country is my country,’ said Ali. ‘Delhi is dead; the city that was … the language … the culture. Everything I knew is finished.’

‘It’s true,’ said Shanulhaq. ‘I went back thirteen years after Partition. Already everything was different. I stayed in a new hotel—the Ambassador—which I only later realized had been built on top of a graveyard where several of my friends were buried. In my mohalla everyone used to know me, but suddenly I was a stranger. My haveli was split into ten parts and occupied by Punjabis. My wife’s house had become a temple. Delhi was no longer the abode of the Delhi-wallah. Even the walls had changed. It was very depressing.’

‘Before Partition it was a unique city,’ said Ali. ‘Although it was already very poor, still it preserved its high culture. That high culture filtered down even to the streets, everyone was part of it: even the milk-wallahs could quote Mir and Dagh …’

‘The prostitutes would sing Persian songs and recite Hafiz …’

‘They may not have been able to read and write but they could remember the poets …’

‘And the language,’ said Shanulhaq. ‘You cannot conceive how chaste Delhi Urdu was …’

‘And how rich,’ added Ali. ‘Every mohalla had its own expressions; the language used by our ladies was quite distinct from that used by the men. Now the language has shrunk. So many words are lost.’

We talked for an hour about the Delhi of their childhood and youth. We talked of the eunuchs and the sufis and the pigeons and the poets; of the monsoon picnics in Mehrauli and the djinn who fell in love with Ahmed Ali’s aunt. We talked of the sweetmeat shops which stayed open until three in the morning, the sorcerers who could cast spells over a whole mohalla, the possessed woman who used to run vertically up the zenana walls, and the miraculous cures effected by Hakim Ajmal Khan. The old men swam together through great oceans of nostalgia before finally coming ashore on a strand of melancholy.

‘But all of that is no more,’ said Ali. ‘All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed.’

‘Now it is a carcass without a soul,’ said Shanulhaq.

‘I am a fossil,’ said Ali. ‘And Shanulhaq is on his way to becoming a fossil.’

‘But nevertheless,’ I insisted. ‘If you both loved Delhi so much wouldn’t you like to see it just one more time?’

‘I will never see that town again,’ said Ali. ‘Once I was invited to give some lectures in Australia. There was some mechanical fault and the plane was diverted to Delhi. The plane landed but I refused to get out. I said: "I am not getting out. I don’t have to. You call your damned Chairman. But I’m not putting my foot on that soil which was sacred to me and which has been desecrated.’

‘They got the entire staff of the airport there to get me out, but I didn’t move. How could I? How could I revisit that which was once mine and which was now no longer mine? When they asked why I was behaving as I was, I simply sat in my seat and quoted Mir Taqi Mir at them:

What matters it, O breeze,

If now has come the spring

When I have lost them both

The garden and my nest?’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘The swine were all Punjabis,’ said Ali. ‘Tell you the truth, I don’t think they could understand a bloody word I said.’