William Dalrymple – City of Djinns (страница 1)
City of Djinns
A Year in Delhi
William Dalrymple
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollins
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1994
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Copyright © William Dalrymple 1993
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780006375951
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 9780007378784
Version: 2017-03-10
From the reviews of
‘Dalrymple has pulled it off again … At a time when the book of travels is beginning to lose its fashionable allure,
JAN MORRIS,
‘As the author of the best travel book of recent years at the intensely irritating age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple has now shown that
CHRISTOPHER LOCKWOOD,
CHARLES MCKEAN,
‘Delhi has more layers of culture, civilisation and history extant in it than any other city in India, arguably, in the world. It is this, the enthralling and enigmatic features of this ancient-modern city, that William Dalrymple sets out to trace in
TARUN TEJPAL,
‘An expansive and inclusive work, richly peopled … an enlightening and entertaining book.’
IAIN WETHERBY,
Table of Contents
IT WAS in the citadel of Feroz Shah Kotla that I met my first Sufi.
Pir Sadr-ud-Din had weasel eyes and a beard as tangled as a myna’s nest. The mystic sat me down on a carpet, offered me tea, and told me about the djinns.
He said that when the world was new and Allah had created mankind from clay, he also made another race, like us in all things, but fashioned from fire. The djinns were spirits, invisible to the naked eye; to see them you had to fast and pray. For forty-one days, Sadr-ud-Din had sat without eating, half-naked in the foothills of the Himalayas; later, he had spent forty-one days up to his neck in the River Jumna.
One night, asleep in a graveyard, he was visited by the King of the Djinns.
‘He was black, as tall as a tree, and he had one eye in the centre of his forehead,’ said the Pir. ‘The djinn offered me anything I wanted, but every time I refused.’
‘Could you show me a djinn?’ I asked.
‘Certainly,’ replied the Pir. ‘But you would run away.’
I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices.
Moreover the city—so I soon discovered—possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. Friends would moan about the touts on Janpath and head off to the beaches in Goa, but for me Delhi always exerted a stronger spell. I lingered on, and soon found a job in a home for destitutes in the far north of the city.
The nuns gave me a room overlooking a municipal rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking berms of refuse; overhead, under a copper sky, vultures circled the thermals forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.
In summer I preferred the less claustrophobic avenues of Lutyens’s Delhi. Then, under a pulsing sun, I would stroll slowly along the shady rows of neem, tamarind and arjuna, passing the white classical bungalows with their bow fronts and bushes of molten yellow gulmohar.
In both Delhis it was the ruins that fascinated me. However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient Islamic colleges –
But where Delhi was unique was that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too. Somehow different areas of Delhi seemed to have preserved intact different centuries, even different millennia. The Punjabi immigrants were a touchstone to the present day; with their nippy Maruti cars and fascination with all things new, they formed a lifeline to the 1980s. The old majors you would meet strolling in the Lodhi Gardens were pickled perhaps half a century earlier. Their walrus moustaches and Ealing comedy accents hinted that they had somehow got stuck in about 1946. The eunuchs in the Old City, some speaking courtly Urdu, might not have looked so out of place under the dais of the Great Mogul. The