City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi by William Dalrymple

Author:William Dalrymple
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Delhi (India), Delhi (India) - Social life and customs, Social Science, Travel, India, Asia, General, Anthropology, Cultural, India & South Asia, Delhi (India) - Description and travel, India - History, History
ISBN: 9780142001004
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2003-03-25T07:29:54.105356+00:00

Dr Jaffery

SEVEN

THE WINTER RAINS arrived promptly at the end of January.

During the last week of the month Olivia and I had gone to stay outside Delhi, in a fort just over the Rajasthani border. The day before our return, as we looked out over the battlements, we saw a succession of thick black clouds driving slowly in over the sand flats and camel grass. By the end of the afternoon the clouds had thickened into solid curtain walls of charcoal cumulus. They blotted out the sun and cast a dark shadow over the land.

The next day we returned to Delhi to find that the storm had broken. The clouds were scudding low over the rooftops; it was pouring with rain and the streets were flooded. In the Old City, Muslim women were dragging their chadors like wet black crows. Gusts of rain lashed down the narrow alleys; rickshaws sluiced through the water, more like boats than bicycles. It was no day to be out, but I had an appointment to keep. I had arranged to see Dr Yunus Jaffery, a historian and an archetypal Old Delhi-wallah. His ancestors had been Persian tutors at the Red Fort; today, Dr Jaffery pursued exactly the same career in Zakir Hussain College on the margins of Old Delhi. His rooms were in the original college, the Ghazi-ud-Din Medresse, a seventeenth-century Mughal building just outside the Ajmeri Gate.

Balvinder Singh dropped me outside during a brief pause in the rain. A low Mughal gateway led on into a wet and glistening flag-stone courtyard; it was deserted but for a solitary pupil running late towards his class. The flagstones were slippery and so hollowed-out by three centuries of passing feet that along some of the walkways the puddles had coalesced into shallow canals. The courtyard was bounded by a range of cloisters two storeys high. Classrooms filled the ground-floor rooms. On the first floor, leading off a covered balcony, were the chambers of the fellows and scholars. The arcades were broken on three sides by vaulted gateways, and on the fourth, the principal axis, by a red sandstone mosque. Before the mosque, filling both sides of the cloister garth, was a garden of healing herbs and shrubs.

I climbed a narrow staircase leading to the first floor balcony. Outside the scholars’ rooms sat a line of bearded old men busily correcting specimens of Arabic calligraphy. Dr Jaffery’s room was the last on the corridor.

The door opened to reveal a gaunt, clean-shaven man. He wore white Mughal pyjamas whose trouser-bottoms, wide and slightly flared, were cut in the style once favoured by eighteenth-century Delhi gallants. On his head he sported a thin white mosque-cap. Heavy black glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, but the effect was not severe. Something in Dr Jaffery’s big bare feet and the awkward way he held himself gave the impression of a slightly shambolic, absent-minded individual: ‘Asalam alekum,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’ Then, looking behind me, he added: ‘Ah! The rains ... Spring has arrived.

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