City of Djinns. William Dalrymple
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.