MY YEAR IN DELHI

I finished reading William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns one year ago, cuddled up in a Y.W.C.A hostel room on a late rainy evening in Mumbai. I was in Maximum City – but the charms of the city that Dalrymple described before me took me to places in my imagination. It was mind travel through a city I knew nothing about and had a great deal of misconceptions.

I sit here today typing in front of an office terminal, in Delhi a year after, thinking how would I describe this past year? Have those misconceptions been cleared or have new ones taken their place?

Or maybe some of you who have always lived here may disagree with my romantic views. When I look at this city I think of images, frames, fleeting visuals that come and go. These are my memory postcards - which I’m unable to put in words.

That makes me a bad writer and William D a genius. For nothing puts my feelings into better words than the following excerpt from his book. A year ago it filled me with curiosity while today it’s the metaphor of my life.

“All the different ages of man were represented in the people of the city. Different millennia co-existed side by side. Minds set in different ages walked the same pavements, drank the same water, returned to the same dust.

But it was not until months later, when I met Pir Sadr-ud-Din, that I learned the secret that kept returning to new life. Delhi, said Pir Sadr-ud-Din, was a city of djinns. Though it had been burned by invaders time and time again, millennium after millennium, still the city was rebuilt; each time it rose like a phoenix from the fire.

Just as Hindus believe that a body will be reincarnated over and over again until it becomes perfect, so it seemed Delhi was destined to appear in a new incarnation century after century. The reason for this, said Sadr-ud-Din, was that the djinns loved Delhi so much they could never bear to see it empty or deserted.

To this day every house, every street corner was haunted by them. You could not see them, said Sadr-ud-Din, but if you concentrated you would be able to feel them: to hear their whisperings, or even if you were lucky, to sense their warm breath on your face.”

Feels good to be here.

[Photo Credit: Harmanpreet Kaur]