One thing about City of Djinns, which is about a year that William Dalrymple spent in Delhi with his wife in his twenties, is that it suffers for me a bit by comparison to Tamara Shopsin’s wonderful Mumbai New York Scranton, which I read in February and loved. It’s not a fair comparison, really: both books include travel in India, and both feature art by the author’s spouse, but Shopsin’s book is more personal, while Dalrymple’s book has more history in it. I found Dalyrmple’s mix of travel/memoir and history sometimes appealing, and sometimes not: I sometimes wanted to be reading just a memoir, or just a history book.
Dalrymple tells the story of Delhi, or rather, of many Delhis, in two strands: he writes about his time there chronologically, but writes about the city’s history in reverse chronological order, from Partition back through the mythic past of the Mahabharata. He writes about Delhi as “a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic” (9). And the Delhi of the present (this book was published in the early 1990s) is multiple, complex: “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” (7-8).
I liked the humor of Dalrymple’s Delhi experiences: his landlady who turns off the water because of too many toilet flushes, the customs officer who won’t let him leave the country on a five-day trip without bringing the electric kettle, printer, computer, and boom box he brought to India to the airport, the cab driver who always points out pretty women.
And I like the nostalgic or lyrical bits, like this conversation with an author born in Delhi but living in Pakistan:
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. (64)
Or like this passage about Delhi after the winter rains:
That February, Delhi seemed like a paradise. Olivia and I filled the garden on our roof terraces with palms and lilies and hollyhocks and we wove bougainvillaea through the trellising. The plants which seemed to have died during the winter’s cold – the snapdragon, the hibiscus and the frangipani – miraculously sprang back to life and back into bloom. The smells began to change. The woodsmoke and the sweet smell of the dung fires gave way to the heady scent of Indian champa and the first bittersweet whiffs of China orange blossom. (200)
Olivia Fraser’s watercolors of people and buildings, which illustrate the book, are sometimes really satisfying: I especially love a pair of turbaned Sikhs reading (p 26) and a pair of boys on a roof with their pigeons (p 226).
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