City of Djinns. William Dalrymple
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