City of Djinns

It had been a bad monsoon. Normally in Delhi, September is a month of almost equatorial fertility and the land seems refreshed and newly-washed. But in the year of our arrival, after a parching summer, the rains had lasted for only three weeks. As a result dust was everywhere and the city’s trees and flowers all looked as if they had been lightly sprinkled with talcum powder.

Nevertheless the air was still sticky with damp-heat, and it was in a cloud of perspiration that we began to unpack and to take in the eccentricities of our flat: the chiming doorbell that played both the Indian national anthem and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; the geyser, which if left on too long, would shoot a fountain of boiling water from an outlet on the roof and bathe the terrace in a scalding shower; the pretty round building just below the garden which we at first took to be a temple, and only later discovered to be the local sewage works.

But perhaps the strangest novelty of coming to live in India—stranger even than Mrs Puri—was getting used to life with a sudden glut of domestic help. Before coming out to Delhi we had lived impecuniously in a tiny student dive in Oxford. Now we had to make the transition to a life where we still had only two rooms, but suddenly found ourselves with more than twice that number of servants. It wasn’t that we particularly wanted or needed servants; but, as Mrs Puri soon made quite clear, employing staff was a painful necessity on which the prestige of her household depended.

The night we moved in, we spent our first hours dusting and cleaning before sinking, exhausted, into bed at around 2 a.m. The following morning we were woken at 7.30 sharp by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Half asleep, I shuffled to the door to find Ladoo, Mr Puri’s bearer, waiting outside. He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai.

‘Chota hazari, sahib,’ said Ladoo. Bed tea.

‘What a nice gesture,’ I said returning to Olivia. ‘Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.’

‘I wish she had sent it up two hours later,’ said Olivia from beneath her sheets.

I finished the tea and sank down beneath the covers. Ten seconds later the Indian national anthem chimed out. I scrambled out of bed and again opened the door. Outside was a thin man with purple, betel-stained lips. He had a muffler wrapped around his head and, despite the heat, a thick donkey-jacket was buttoned tightly over his torso. I had never seen him before.

‘Mali,’ he said. The gardener.

He bowed, walked past me and made for the kitchen. From the bedroom I could hear him fiddling around, filling a bucket with water then splashing it over the plants on the roof terrace. He knocked discreetly on the bedroom door to indicate he had finished, then disappeared down the stairs. The mali was followed first by Murti, the sweeper, then by Prasad, the dhobi, and finally by Bahadur, Mrs Puri’s Nepali cook. I gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs.

‘Mrs Puri,’ I said. ‘There has been a stream of strange people pouring in and out of my flat since seven-thirty.’

‘I know, Mr William,’ replied Mrs Puri. ‘These people are your servants.’

‘But I don’t want any servants.’

‘Everyone has servants,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘You must have servants too. This is what these people are for.’

I frowned. ‘But must we have so many?’

‘Well, you must have a cook and a bearer.’

‘We don’t need a bearer. And both of us enjoy cooking.’

‘In that case you could have one cook-bearer. One man, two jobs. Very modern. Then there is the mali, the sweeper, and a dhobi for your washing. Also you must be having one driver.’ Mrs Puri furrowed her brow. ‘It is very important to have good chauffeur,’ she said gravely. ‘Some pukka fellow with a smart uniform.’

‘I haven’t got a car. So it’s pointless having a driver.’

‘But if you have no car and no driver,’ said Mrs Puri, ‘how will you be getting from place to place?’

Balvinder Singh, son of Punjab Singh, Prince of Taxi Drivers, may your moustache never grow grey! Nor your liver cave in with cirrhosis. Nor your precious Hindustan Ambassador ever again crumple in a collision—like the one we had with the van carrying Mango Frooty Drink.

Although during my first year in Delhi I remember thinking that the traffic had seemed both anarchic and alarming, by my second visit I had come to realize that it was in fact governed by very strict rules. Right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle. Buses give way to heavy trucks, Ambassadors give way to buses, and bicyclists give way to everything except pedestrians. On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

Yet Mr Balvinder Singh is an individualist who believes in the importance of asserting himself. While circumstances may force him to defer to buses and lorries, he has never seen the necessity of giving way to the tinny new Maruti vans which, though taller than his Ambassador, are not so heavily built. After all, Mr Singh is a kshatriya by caste, a warrior, and like his ancestors he is keen to show that he is afraid of nothing. He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing ‘chicken’ with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.

Or rather was. One month after our arrival in Delhi, Mr Singh and I had an accident. Taking a road junction with more phlegm than usual, we careered into the Maruti van, impaling it on its bows, so that it bled Mango Frooty Drink all over Mr Singh’s bonnet. No one was hurt, and Mr Singh—strangely elated by his ‘kill’—took it stoically. ‘Mr William,’ he said. ‘In my life six times have I crashed. And on not one occasion have I ever been killed.’

Although I am devoted to him, Olivia is quick to point out that Mr Singh is in many ways an unattractive character. A Punjabi Sikh, he is the Essex Man of the East. He chews paan and spits the betel juice out of the window, leaving a red ‘go-fast’ stripe along the car’s right flank. He utters incoherent whoops of joy as he drives rickshaws on to the pavement or sends a herd of paper boys flying into a ditch. He leaps out of his taxi to urinate at traffic lights, and scratches his groin as he talks. Like Essex Man, he is a lecher. His eyes follow the saris up and down the Delhi avenues; plump Sikh girls riding side-saddle on motorbikes are a particular distraction. Twice a week, when Olivia is not in the car, he offers to drive me to G.B. Road, the Delhi red light district: ‘Just looking,’ he suggests. ‘Delhi ladies very good. Having breasts like mangoes.’

Yet he has his principles. Like his English counterpart, he is a believer in hard work. He finds it hard to understand the beggars who congregate at the lights. ‘Why these peoples not working?’ he asks. ‘They have two arms and two legs. They not handicrafted.’

‘Handicrafted?’

‘Missing leg perhaps, or only one ear.’

‘You mean handicapped?’

‘Yes. Handicrafted. Sikh peoples not like this. Sikh peoples working hard, earning money, buying car.’

Ignoring the bus hurtling towards us, he turns around and winks an enormous wink. ‘Afterwards Sikh peoples drinking whisky, looking television, eating tandoori chicken and going G.B. Road.’

The house stood looking on to a small square of hot, tropical green: a springy lawn fenced in by a windbreak of champa and ashok trees. The square was the scene for a daily routine of almost Vedic inflexibility.

Early in the morning, under a bald blue sky, the servants would walk plump dachshunds over the grass, or, duties completed, would stand about on the pavements exchanging gossip or playing cards. Then, at about nine o’clock, the morning peace would be broken by a procession of bicycle-powered vendors, each with his own distinctive street-cry: the used-newspaper collector (‘Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah!’) would be followed by the fruit seller (‘Mangoes! Lychees! Bananas! Papaya!’), the bread boy and the man with the vegetable barrow. My favourite, the cotton-fluffer, whose life revolved around the puffing up of old mattresses, would twang a Jew’s harp. On Sunday mornings an acrobat would come with his dancing bear; he had a pair of drums and when he beat them the whole square would miraculously fill with children. Early that afternoon would follow a blind man with an accordion. He would sing hymns and sacred qawwalis and sometimes the rich people would send down a servant with a handful of change.

In the late afternoon, a herd of cattle twenty or thirty strong could be seen wandering along the lane at the back of the house. There was never any herder in sight, but they would always rumble slowly past, throwing up clouds of dust. Occasionally they would collide with the household servants wobbling along the back lane on their bicycles, returning from buying groceries in Khan Market. Then followed the brief Indian dusk: a pale Camembert sun sinking down to the treeline; the smell of woodsmoke and dung cooking fires; the last raucous outbursts from the parakeets and the brahminy mynas; the first whirring, humming cicadas.

Later on, lying in bed, you could hear the chowkidars stomping around outside, banging their sticks and blowing their whistles. There were never any robberies in our part of New Delhi, and the chowkidars were an entirely redundant luxury.

But, as Mrs Puri said, you had to keep up appearances. Mr Singh also had strong views about appearances.

‘You are Britisher,’ he said, the very first time I hailed him. ‘I know you are a Britisher.’

It was late afternoon at the end of our first week in Delhi. We had just moved in and were beginning the gruelling pilgrimage through Indian government departments that all new arrivals must perform. We were late for an appointment at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, yet Mr Singh’s assertion could not go unquestioned.

‘How do you know I’m a Britisher?’

‘Because,’ said Mr Singh, ‘you are not sporting.’

‘Actually I am quite sporting,’ I replied. ‘I go for a run every day, swim in the summer …’

‘No Britisher is sporting,’ said Mr Singh, undaunted.

‘Lots of my countrymen are very keen on sport,’ I retorted.

‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘You are not catching me.’

‘We are still a force to be reckoned with in the fifteen hundred metres, and sometimes our cricket team …’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘Still you are not catching me. You Britishers are not sporting.’ He twirled the waxed curlicues of his moustache. ‘All men should be sporting a moustache, because all ladies are liking too much.’

He indicated that I should get in.

‘It is the fashion of our days,’ he said, roaring off and narrowly missing a pedestrian.

Mr Singh’s taxi stand lay behind the India International Centre, after which it took its name: International Backside Taxis. The stand was run by Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s stern and patriarchal father, and manned by Balvinder and his two plump brothers, Gurmuck and Bulwan. There was also a rota of cousins who would fill in during the weekends and at nights. Over the following months we got to know them all well, but it was Balvinder who remained our special friend.

That first week, and the week following it, Balvinder drove Olivia and myself through a merry-go-round of government departments. Together we paid daily visits to the rotting concrete hulk known as Shastri Bhavan, nerve centre of the Orwellian Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Here, in the course of nine visits, I deposited four faxes, three telexes, two envelopes of passport photographs (black and white only) and a sheaf of letters from my editor in London, all in an effort to get accredited as a foreign correspondent.