City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

by William Dalrymple

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 an...