City of Djinns. William Dalrymple
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