i owned the book for a good 4 years before i read it… i usually buy books on impulse and that’s in the middle of another book, though with online shopping these days i think the impulse purchase is just killed, i never discover a book, but know the title and then hunt… ok digressing….

so 4 years ago, the city of djinns made me curious. multiple reasons… djinns was a word that i didn’t think i could pronounce, so said it multiple times in my head, but not aloud… called it the book that william dalrymple book about delhi…  did one say the D or was it just jinns? jinns sounded like a word i had used and i was familiar with but i had never seen it written – so wasn’t sure what the spelling was! and to add to that, he wrote his first book at 22. TWENTY TWO!

i was hooked from the first page. i have never read a travel book (yes, shockers of all shockers… and yes again i do aspire to be a travel writer, but that’s because i like traveling more than reading travel writing! i do want you to read my writing… )

city of djinns creeps up on you, from a very innocuous starting point it makes you question so many assumptions about delhi, and also answers them…

i always thought delhites were so showy… he explains that with the punjabi farmers / country folk moving from pakistan to india and the need, desire to show that you had arrived, and you were fine… the inter-weaving of the old-delhi and its urdu speaking elite and the new delhi and today’s hindi… having interacted with ‘delhi’ only in the last 10 years or so, my version of delhi is the punjabi delhi… its showy, its false, its ruthless and that part of delhi has an explanation now…

the monuments from the mughal era to the british era… the origins of ‘new delhi’ and the discarded tombs that lie around like ill-fitting gloves to a past the city no longer knows… it all makes me curious about delhi, and makes me want to walk around with the city of djinns in my hand and map his journey of discovery. it opens up the city to a 20th century person to stand for way more than what meets me at first glance… and the book does so in an easy, simplistic manner, though am sure it was far from that!

the numerous people he has come across cannot have been by chance but a studied pursuit of answers with great determination. and the quest for to questions you have had all your life is one thing, but to come to another country, another culture and search for answers about another country’s past and present is something else.

and all the while, as he unravels and fits in this entire jigsaw puzzle of the city before your eyes, as he lets it grow from a tiny seedling to a big well-defined tree with numerous branches and hidden roots, he never judges, either the city or its people, but just tells… the story… it’s an wide open view of the city; the width is restricted by his perspective, though the actions are not.

a definite must-read. it makes me dream of writing something so monumental about my journey of discovery and self-discovery in mumbai…