I had a particular weakness for the author's more prosaic Delhites, perhaps because I felt I knew them myself. The book comes to life when we encounter Delhi's eunuchs, the ancestors of the Moghuls and the dotty remnants of the British Raj. I found myself impatient for him to get out of the Nehru Library and back to the characters and circus of the streets. Today they still haunt every house and street corner, or so says a Muslim mystic.ĭalrymple, also the author of In Xanadu, is a stylish writer and a good host and guide, but at times his history is a little desultory and arcane. The people have a kind of gauzy, myth-like quality themselves, so the tone of the book is both romantic and ironic, just like the title, which refers to the djinns, the supernatural spirits of Islamic legend (and relatives of the genie), who loved Delhi so much they could not bear to see it deserted. He collapses time and writes about the myths as if they are real.

The charm of City of Djinns lies in the mingling of these legends of old with the characters that Dalrymple finds in Delhi today.

By the end of the book, he arrives at the legends of the very first city of Delhi as described in The Mahabharata, the great Indian epic. He takes the reader from storyteller to monument to historical text and then back to the streets, all the while driving further and further into history. Dalrymple uses this rising and falling of Delhi as the theme of his year-long journey of organized serendipity. Most people who visit India's capital learn that some sort of city has existed on the spot for millennia, and that it was destroyed and built up again and again, perhaps as many as 21 times, by successive waves of invaders. Dalrymple, a 29-year-old Scottish writer with a dry wit and an unquenchable appetite for history and architecture, brings the characters, mosques, temples and stories of New Delhi to life in a new and refreshing way. I was wrong, as William Dalrymple's City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi makes clear.

Although I lived happily in New Delhi for three and a half years in the mid-1980s, to me the capital's present and past could never compare to the passions and histories of India's other great, troubled cities - Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. There is also the Delhi of the old city, a teeming cacophony of hawkers, beggars, chickens, goats and blaring Hindi music. Polluted, overcrowded and in perpetual, rubble-strewn expansion and decay, India's capital is both a bureaucrat's town of broad avenues lined with crumbling government bungalows and an expensive playground of hotel restaurants and fashion boutiques for a newly rich Punjabi merchant class. $23 NEW DELHI at first encounter does not present itself as one of the glorious cities of the world. CITY OF DJINNS A Year in Delhi By William Dalrymple HarperCollins.

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