Kitabı oku: «City of Djinns», sayfa 2
As if in deliberate subversion of the Mahatma’s message, Mr Lal held in his hands the Times of India, open at its sports page. The paper formed a barrier between Mr Lal and the asylumful of supplicants who were bobbing up and down in front of him, holding out chits of paper, arching their hands in a gesture of namaste or wobbling their turbans from side to side in mute frustration. A Punjabi lady sat weeping in a corner, repeating over and over again: ‘But I have a letter from the Minister of State for Communications … but I have a letter … a letter …’ Menials passed silently to and fro through the door, carrying files and sheaves of xeroxes. Behind Mr Lal, placed there for apparently purely decorative purposes, sat a dead computer.
When Mr Lal eventually deigned to lower his paper—which he did with infinite slowness, folding it into perfect quarters—he rang a bell and ordered one of his peons to bring him a cup of tea.
‘Right,’ he said, looking up for the first time. ‘Who’s first?’
A hundred hands were raised, but one voice stood out: ‘I am.’
The speaker pushed himself forward, holding together his bulging dhoti with one hand. He was an enormously fat man, perhaps seventy years old, with heavy plastic glasses and grey stubble on his chin.
‘My name is Sunil Gupta—please call me Sunny.’ He strode forward and grabbed Mr Lal by the hand, shaking it with great verve.
‘I am a nationalist,’ said Mr Gupta. ‘A nationalist and a freedom fighter. I am also an independent candidate in the forthcoming municipal elections. My election office will be opposite Western Court, adjacent to the paan shop. I want a temporary telephone connection, and would be most grateful if you could expedite.’ He stroked his belly. ‘Early action would be highly appreciated.’
‘Have you already applied for a connection?’ asked Mr Lal.
‘No, gentleman,’ said Sunny Gupta. ‘This is what I am doing now.’
‘First applications Room 101. Next, please.’
‘But,’ said Mr Gupta. ‘I have to maintain contact with my constituents. I need a phone immediately. I would be very grateful if you would expedite a VVIP connection without delay.’
‘Are you a member of the Lok Sabha?’
‘No. I …’
‘In that case you must contact Mr Dharam Vir …’
‘Gentleman, please listen …’
‘… in Room 101.’
With a great flourish, Mr Gupta pulled a much-pawed piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Gentleman,’ he said. ‘Please be looking here. This is my manifesto.’
Across the top of the piece of paper, in huge red letters, was blazoned the slogan: A NATIONALIST TO THE CORE AND A FREEDOM FIGHTER. Mr Gupta straightened his glasses and read from the charter:
‘I was a Founder Member cum Chairman of the Religious and Social Institute of India, Patna Branch …’
Mr Lal was meanwhile studying the application of the weeping Punjabi lady. He read it twice and, frowning, initialled it at the top right-hand corner: ‘See Mr Sharma for countersignature. Room 407.’
The woman broke down in a convulsion of grateful sobs. Beside her Mr Gupta was still in full flood:
‘… I am ex-member of the Publicity Committee of the All-India Congress I, Bhagalpur division. Ex-Joint Secretary of the Youth Congress Committee, Chote Nagpur, Bihar. I am a poet and a journalist. A war hero from the 1965 Indo-Pak war, Jaisalmer sector …’
‘Madam,’ continued Mr Lal. ‘Please make payment with Mr Surwinder Singh, accounts, Room 521.’
‘… I was the founder editor of Sari, the Hindi monthly for women and Kalidasa, the biannual literary journal of Patna. I have donated five acres of land for the Chote Nagpur Cow Hospital. Four times I have been jailed by the Britishers for services to Mother Bharat.’
‘If you think it is bad now,’ said Mr Lal, taking my application. ‘You should see this office on Fridays. That’s the busiest time.’
I left Mr Lal’s office at noon. By four-thirty I had queued inside a total of nine different offices, waiting in each for the magic letter, seal, signature, counter-signature, demand note, restoration order or receipt which would, at some stage in the far distant future, lead to my being granted a telephone.
‘Phone will be connected within two months,’ said Mr Lal as he shook my hand, the obstacle course completed. ‘Two months no problem. Or maybe little longer. Backlog is there.’
Mr Gupta was still sitting at the back of Mr Lal’s office. He was quiet now, though still tightly clutching at his election manifesto. I gave him a sympathetic wave as I left.
‘To think,’ he said, ‘that I was in British prison seven times with Gandhiji for this.’
At his desk, Mr Lal had returned to the sports page of the Times of India.
Although parts of the city still preserved the ways of the Mughal period or even the early Middle Ages, Delhi was nevertheless changing, and changing fast.
Mr Gupta’s world—the cosy world of the Freedom Struggle, of homespun Congress Socialism and the Non-aligned Movement—all of it was going down; driving around New Delhi you could almost feel the old order crumbling as you watched, disappearing under a deluge of Japanese-designed Maruti cars, concrete shopping plazas and high-rise buildings. Satellite dishes now outnumber the domes of the mosques and the spires of the temples. There was suddenly a lot of money about: no longer did the rich go up to Simla for the summer; they closed their apartments and headed off to London or New York.
The most visible change was in the buildings. When I first saw Delhi it was still a low-rise colonial capital, dominated by long avenues of white plaster Lutyens bungalows. The bungalows gave New Delhi its character: shady avenues of jamun and ashupal trees, low red-brick walls gave on to hundreds of rambling white colonial houses with their broken pediments and tall Ionic pillars.
One of my strongest memories from my first visit was sitting in the garden of one of the bungalows, a glass to hand, with my legs raised up on a Bombay Fornicator (one of those wickerwork planter’s chairs with extended arms, essential to every colonial veranda). In front lay a lawn dotted with croquet hoops; behind, the white bow-front of one of this century’s most inspired residential designs. Over the rooftops there was not a skyscraper to be seen. Yet I was not in some leafy suburb, but in the very centre of New Delhi. Its low-rise townscape was then unique among modern capitals, a last surviving reminder of the town planning of a more elegant age.
Now, perhaps inevitably, it was gradually being destroyed: new structures were fast replacing the bungalows; huge Legoland blocks were going up on all the arterial roads radiating from Connaught Circus. The seventeenth-century salmon-pink observatory of Rajah Man Singh—the Jantar Mantar—lay dwarfed by the surrounding high-rise towers that seemed purpose-built to obscure its view of the heavens. Over the great ceremonial way which led from Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House to India Gate now towered a hideous glass and plastic greenhouse called the Meridien Hotel.
Other, still more unsympathetic blocks were already planned. On Kasturba Gandhi Marg (originally Curzon Road) only two of the old Italianate villas still survived, and one of these was in severe disrepair. Its plaster was peeling and its garden lay untended and overgrown. In front of its gate stood a huge sign:
A PROJECT FROM THE HOUSE OF EROS
ULTRAMODERN DELUXE MULTISTOREYED
RESIDENCE APTS.
COMPLETION DATE 1994.
It was said that not one private Lutyens bungalow would survive undemolished by the turn of the century.
There were other changes, too. The damburst of western goods and ideas that were now pouring into India had brought with them an undertow of western morality. Adulterous couples now filled the public gardens; condom advertisements dominated the Delhi skyline. The Indian capital, once the last bastion of the chaperoned virgin, the double-locked bedroom and the arranged marriage, was slowly filling with lovers: whispering, blushing, occasionally holding hands, they loitered beneath flowering trees like figures from a miniature. Delhi was starting to unbutton. After the long Victorian twilight, the sari was beginning to slip.
Other changes in the city were less promising. The roads were becoming clogged; pollution was terrible. Every day the sluggish waters of the Jumna were spiced with some 350 million gallons of raw sewage.
Alongside the rapidly growing wealth of the middle class, there was also a great increase in poverty. Every week, it was said, six thousand penniless migrants poured into Delhi looking for work. You could see them at the traffic lights along Lodhi Road, hands outreached for alms. The jhuggis— the vast sackcloth cities in which these people lived—had quadrupled in size since 1984. New jhuggi outposts were spreading along the dry drainage ditches, filling the flyovers, sending tentacles up the pavements and the hard shoulders. At night, cooking fires could be seen flickering inside the old Lodhi tombs.
Attitudes were changing too. A subtle hardening seemed to have taken place. In the smart drawing-rooms of Delhi, from where the fate of India’s 880 million people was controlled, the middle class seemed to be growing less tolerant; the great Hindu qualities of assimilation and acceptance were no longer highly prized. A mild form of fascism was in fashion: educated people would tell you that it was about time those bloody Muslims were disciplined—that they had been pampered and appeased by the Congress Party for too long, that they were filthy and fanatical, that they bred like rabbits. They should all be put behind bars, hostesses would tell you as they poured you a glass of imported whisky; expulsion was too good for them.
Strangely, in these drawing-rooms, you never heard anyone complain about the Sikhs. But of course it was they and not the Muslims who had most recently suffered the backlash of this hardening, this new intolerance which, like an unstable lump of phosphorus, could quite suddenly burst into flames.
TWO
AS WAS HER HABIT, Indira Gandhi had toast and fruit for breakfast. It was 31 October 1984 and the bougainvillaea was in flower.
At 9.15 she stepped out of the portico of her white bungalow, crossed the lawns by the lotus pond, then passed into the dim green shade of the peepul avenue. There she smiled at her Sikh security guard, Sub-Inspector Beant Singh. Singh did not smile back. Instead he pulled out his revolver and shot her in the stomach. His friend, Constable Satwant Singh, then emptied the clip of his sten gun into her.
Today, Mrs Gandhi’s house is a shrine dedicated to the former Prime Minister’s memory. Busloads of school children trail through, licking ice creams and staring at Mrs Gandhi’s rooms, now permanently frozen as they were on the day she died. Her Scrabble set, a signed photograph from Ho Chi Minh (‘loving greetings to Indira’), a pair of her knitting needles and her books—an unlikely selection, including Marx, Malraux and The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh— all lie behind glass, numbered and catalogued. Outside, in the middle of the avenue, a strangely tasteless memorial stands on the spot where she fell: a bouquet of red glass roses on a frosted crystal plinth, a gift from the people of Czechoslovakia. It is as if it marked the place of her death. But in fact as she lay there, pouring with blood from some twenty bullet wounds, Indira Gandhi was still alive.
An ambulance was waiting outside the gate of her house, as regulations demanded, but, this being Delhi, the driver had disappeared for a tea break. So Indira’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, bundled the Prime Minister into the back of a decrepit Hindustan Ambassador, and together they drove the three miles to the All-India Medical Institute.
Indira was probably dead on arrival, but it was not until one o’clock that the news was broken to the waiting world. The effect was immediate. When the crowds learned that their leader had been assassinated, and that a Sikh was responsible, the thin ice of Delhi’s tenuous peace was shattered. The mourners wanted blood. Grabbing sticks and stones and whatever else came to hand, they set off looking for Sikhs.
In those days Mr and Mrs Puri had a house beside the Medical Institute. They were thus the very first Sikh family to receive the attentions of the mob. Mrs Puri had just finished her lunch—as usual, dal, two vegetables and one hot aloo paratha—and was deep in her customary post-prandial knit, when she looked up from her woollies, peered out of her window and noticed three hundred emotional thugs massing around her garden gate and chanting: ‘Khoon ka badla khoon’- blood for blood, blood for blood, blood for blood.
‘They were very jungli peoples—not from good castes. So I told Ladoo to lock the door and stop them from coming in,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘We could hear them talking about us. They said: "These people are Sikhs. Let us kill them." Then they began to throw some stones and broke all the glasses. We switched off the lights and pretended no one was at home. We thought we would be killed. But first we wanted to kill some of them. You see actually we are kshatriyas, from the warrior caste. My blood was boiling and I very much wanted to give them good. But they were standing outside only. What could I do?’
The mob smashed every window in the house, burned the Puris’ car and incinerated their son’s motorbike. Then they attacked the front door. Luckily, Mr Puri was on the other side, leaning forward on his zimmer frame, armed to the teeth. He fired three times through the door with his old revolver and the mob fled. As they did so, old Mr Puri got Ladoo to kick open the door, then fired the rest of the round after them.
Three hours later, cruising in his taxi, Balvinder Singh passed Green Park, an area not far from the Medical Institute, when he encountered another mob. They surrounded the taxi and pelted it with stones. Balvinder was unhurt, but his front windscreen was shattered. He swore a few choice Punjabi obscenities, then returned quickly to his taxi stand. The next day, despite growing unrest, Balvinder and his brothers decided to return to work. For an hour they sat on their charpoys looking nervously out on to the empty streets before agreeing the moment had come to hide the cars and shut up the stand. At five past eleven they received a phone call. It warned them that the nearby Sujan Singh Park gurdwara was burning and that a large lynch mob was closing in on them. Leaving everything, they hastily set off to their house across the Jumna, twelve cousins in a convoy of three taxis.
They were nearing one of the bridges over the river when they were flagged down by a police patrol. The policemen told them that there were riots on the far side and that it was not safe to proceed. Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s father, said that there were riots on the near side too, and that it was impossible to go back. Moreover, they could not leave their wives and children without protection. The police let them through. For five minutes they drove without difficulty. Then, as they neared Laxmi Nagar, they ran into a road block. A crowd had placed a burning truck across part of the road and were massing behind it with an armoury of clubs and iron bars. The first two cars, containing Punjab, Balvinder and two of his brothers, swerved around the truck and made it through. The third taxi, containing three of Punjab’s young nephews, was attacked and stopped. The boys were pulled out of the cars, beaten with the rods, doused with kerosene and set alight.
That night, from their roof, Balvinder and his family could see fires burning all over Delhi. To save themselves from the fate of their cousins the brothers decided to cut their hair and shave off their beards; the first time they had ever done so. Punjab reminded them of their religion and tried to stop them; afterwards, in atonement, he refused to eat for a whole week.
In the meantime, the Singhs also took more concrete steps to protect themselves. The family lived in an entirely Sikh area—a taxi drivers’ colony—and the residents quickly armed themselves with kirpans (Sikh ceremonial swords) and formed makeshift vigilante forces to defend their narrow alleys. Preferring to concentrate on less resolutely guarded areas, the mobs left them in peace. For four days they lived under siege. Then the army was deployed; and as quickly as they had appeared, the rioters vanished.
Balvinder had lost three cousins in the riots. There were other, smaller losses too: Bulwan, Balvinder’s elder brother who lived slightly apart from the others, had his house burned to the ground; he had left it and taken shelter with his brothers. Everything he owned was destroyed. Over at the International Backside, the taxi stand’s shack was broken into; its primus, telephone and three rope-strung charpoys were all stolen. Someone had also discovered Balvinder’s hidden taxi and ran off with the back seat, the battery and the taxi meter. Yet compared to many other families of Sikhs in the capital, Balvinder Singh’s family were extremely lucky.
Trilokpuri is the dumping ground for Delhi’s poor.
It was constructed on a piece of waste land on the far side of the Jumna during the Emergency of 1975. It was intended to house the squatters whom Sanjay Gandhi evicted from their makeshift shelters on the pavements of Central Delhi; the area remains probably the most desperately poor neighbourhood in the whole city. During 1984 it was here, well away from the spying eyes of the journalists, the diplomats and the middle classes, that the worst massacres took place: of the 2150 Sikhs murdered in the capital during the three days of rioting, the great majority were killed here.
It was a warm, early October afternoon when I set off to see Trilokpuri. I had never been across the Jumna before and did not know what to expect. Balvinder Singh drove past the battlements of the Old Fort of Humayun, over the Ring Road and headed on across the lower Jumna bridge—exactly the route that he and his cousins had taken in October 1984.
Across the bridge, quite suddenly everything changed. If you took Lutyens’s city to be the eighth city of Delhi, we had crossed zones into a ninth, a sort of counter-Delhi: a Metropolis of the Poor. Here there were no tree-lined avenues, few advertising hoardings, still fewer cars. We passed alongside a rubbish dump crawling with rag-pickers. Thin chickens pecked around a litter of sagging roadside shacks. Women palmed buffalo-dung into chapattis of cooking fuel. Over everything hung a choking grey smog: fly-ash from a nearby power station. Here for the first time you got an impression of a fact which Delhi seemed almost purpose-built to hide: that the city is the capital not just of a resurgent regional power, formerly the jewel in Britain’s Imperial crown, but that it is also the chief metropolis of a desperately poor Third World country; a country whose affluent middle class is still outnumbered four or five to one by the impoverished rural masses.
When the outside world first discovered the Trilokpuri massacres, long after the rioters had disappeared, it was Block 32 that dominated the headlines. Dogs were found fighting over piles of purple human entrails. Charred and roasted bodies lay in great heaps in the gullies; kerosene fumes still hung heavy in the air. Piles of hair, cut from the Sikhs before they were burned alive, lay on the verandas. Hacked-off limbs clogged the gutters.
Yet, as the journalists soon discovered, it was difficult to find anyone who admitted to being present during the madness. Everyone was vague and noncommittal: the killers were men from outside; we were asleep; we saw nothing. Trying to find witnesses or survivors proved no easier five years later. I passed from block to block. What had once been a largely Sikh area was now entirely Hindu. The Sikhs had all moved, I was told. No, none of us were there at the time. We were visiting our villages when it happened. No, no one had seen anything. And the men sat cross-legged on their charpoys, gravely shaking their heads from side to side.
It was Balvinder who, while chatting in a chai shop, discovered that there was one solitary Sikh family left, in Block 30. They had been there at the time, he said, and had survived by hiding in a hole. Moreover, they were also witnesses; through a small chink they had seen everything.
Sohan Singh Sandhu was an old man in a cream-coloured salwar kameez. He had the bushiest eyebrows I have ever seen: they seemed to join with his mutton-chop whiskers and full, Babylonian beard so as to give the impression of a face peeping out through thick undergrowth. He sat cross-legged on a rope bed, backed by a frieze of Sikh holy pictures: icons of beards and swords and haloes filled the wall. Sohan Singh Sandhu was the granthi (reader) of the local gurdwara. He gave us his card, and while we settled ourselves down on his charpoy he shouted through to the kitchen, telling his wife—whom we had not yet seen—to bring us some tea.
His family had originally lived in a pukka house in Shastri Nagar, on the rich bank of the Jumna. But in 1975, during the Emergency, bulldozers flattened their home; they were given half an hour to move their valuables. According to the police, the demolitions were necessary to make way for a line of new electricity pylons, but the last time he had visited the site of his old house the land was still lying vacant. Much later they had received a plot in Trilokpuri, along with a government loan to cover building materials. His three sons and he had built the house with their own hands. It wasn’t a bad area, he said. A little out of the way, but quite tolerable. And their neighbours, who had suffered the same evictions as they, had always been friendly.
The troubles began quite suddenly on 1 November 1984. They had been anxiously listening to the news on the radio when a Sikh boy came running down the gully shouting that a mob, four or five thousand strong, was massing nearby.
‘About 150 of us assembled on the waste land at the edge of the block,’ said Sandhu. ‘The mob stoned us and we stoned them back. It was during the stoning that my son was hit.’
He pointed to a charpoy in a dark corner of the room. There, so silent that we had failed to notice him, lay a boy of about my own age. Like his father he had a full, uncut beard and a powerful physique. But he was behaving oddly. Although he could obviously hear that we were talking about him he still lay on his back on the rope bed, admiring himself in a rickshaw wing-mirror that he held in his hand.
‘He had bad head injuries,’ said his father quietly. ‘Now he has some mental problem.’
The boy ignored us and continued to stare at the mirror. As we watched, his face suddenly suffused with child-like happiness, and still looking at the mirror he burst into a fit of high-pitched giggles. His father frowned and looked away.
‘After the stone throwing had been going on for two hours the police suddenly intervened. They escorted the mob away, then returned and collected all our weapons: they took all our lathis (sticks) and kirpans (swords); they even took away the stones and the bricks that were lying around our houses. They said: "There is a curfew. Lock yourselves up." When we had followed their instructions and retreated inside our houses, they let the mob loose.’
Groups of forty or fifty thugs descended on a single gully, flailing around them with their iron bars: ‘They would knock on a door. If it wasn’t opened they’d beat it down. Sometimes, when people had managed to barricade themselves in, they would climb up on the roof, break open the ceiling and pour in kerosene. Then they would burn everyone inside alive.’
‘They used our own kerosene,’ said Sandhu’s wife, appearing now with the tray of tea. She gave us each a glass and sat down on the bed beside her husband. ‘They stole it from us then used it to murder us.’
‘Once they shouted: "Send out the men and we won’t harm them." A couple of doors opened and some of our neighbours gave themselves up. They took them away. It was only later that we discovered they had taken them to the edge of the block, made them drink kerosene then set them alight.’
‘How did you manage to escape?’ I asked.
‘Look,’ said Sandhu. And getting up from the charpoy he pulled back a drape which covered the top of one wall. Behind lay a tiny cubby-hole filled with a metal trunk and two packing-cases laid end to end. ‘Ranjit,’ he indicated the son still lying in the corner, ‘Ranjit and I hid in there for three days.’
‘But you couldn’t possibly have fitted,’ I said.
‘We managed,’ replied Sandhu. ‘There was no other choice.’
‘Did they never think of looking behind the drapes?’ I asked.
‘We scattered all our jewellery and valuables at the front of the house. Most of the mob were interested only in looting. They took the jewellery and forgot about us.’ Sandhu smiled: ‘Once one of their leaders—a local Congress politician—came inside and rebuked them: "You are just looting," he said. "You should be killing." He flicked back the drape and saw our attic but we had placed the cases and mattresses in front of us. He said: "It is too small. Nobody can hide there."
‘That was the worst moment. I whispered to Ranjit: "Do not be afraid. It will be a quick pain, then it will be over." And I told him that he was a Sikh and that he must be brave. I said: "They have to kill you. When the moment comes do not beg them for your life."’
‘You were very lucky,’ I said.
‘I was,’ replied Sandhu. ‘But my other two sons were less fortunate. On the second day they were discovered hiding in the shop of some Hindu friends. The mob burned the shop. Then they put rubber tyres around the necks of my sons, doused them with petrol and burned them too.’
The old man was sitting cross-legged beside his wife. His voice was lowered yet he spoke almost matter-of-factly. Up to that point he had hardly mentioned his other two sons at all.
‘God is behind every act,’ he said. ‘There must have been something wrong that we did in the past.’
‘Yet you were spared.’
‘It was not our turn,’ he replied. ‘That was why we were saved.’ He shrugged and pointed to the ceiling: ‘He is the one who saves.’
There was a halt in the conversation. There was nothing more to say.
Sandhu brought out an album of old photographs: the two dead boys—formal black and white studio photographs, two youths in turbans staring straight at the camera, one with heavy plastic glasses, the other with a slight squint; a shot of the wreckage in the house after the looting—clothes strewn everywhere, smashed crockery, a half-burned charpoy; a snap of a smashed-up autorickshaw, a lump of buckled metal with a frosted windscreen.
‘That was Ranjit’s,’ said his father. ‘He used to be a driver.’
For a few seconds no one spoke. Then I asked: ‘Aren’t you frightened it might happen again?’
‘No: now we are no longer worried. I am still the granthi of the gurdwara. I give langoor (food) to the poor Hindus; the rich Hindus give us offerings. These wounds are healed now.’
‘But isn’t it upsetting to stay on in the same street? To live where your children were murdered?’
‘Personally I would like to leave. To return to the Punjab. It is my wife who wishes to stay. She says: "This is where my children used to eat, to sleep, to play, to laugh …"’
‘I feel they are still here,’ said Mrs Sandhu. ‘They built this house with their hands. They fitted the bricks and the mud.’ She shook her head. ‘Since they died not for one day have I left this place. I will die here.’
On the bed in the corner, her one surviving son suddenly broke out laughing again. We all turned towards him. He was still staring at himself in the wing-mirror of his old rickshaw.
Delhi had many failings, but I had never felt it was a violent city. In all the time I had spent in the dark mohallas (quarters) of the old walled city I had never once felt threatened. There were no areas that I felt uneasy to visit after sunset. Instead I had always found Delhi-wallahs, particularly the poor, remarkable for their gentleness and elaborate courtesy. Wherever we went, complete strangers would invite Olivia and me to sit and talk and share a glass of tea with them. To one brought up on a diet of starchy English reserve this habitual kindness of the Delhi-wallah was as touching as it was strange.
Yet as Balvinder and Sandhu could witness, when provoked the inhabitants of this mild town could rise up and commit acts of extreme brutality. Men would avert their eyes as next door neighbours were burned alive or disembowelled. The same people who would invite you to share their last plate of food could, with equal spontaneity, lose control and run amok. Then, with equal ease they could return to their bazaars and shops, factories and offices and carry on as if nothing had happened. It was difficult to understand.
Moreover, despite Delhi’s historic reputation as the most cultured town in India, the city’s history was punctuated with many such flashes of terrible, orgiastic violence. It was not just invaders who put the people of Delhi to the sword. During the Middle Ages and throughout the long Mughal twilight the town was continually rent with bloody riots, even small civil wars. Out of the first twelve Sultans, only two died peacefully in their beds; the rest were killed, usually in a horrible manner and almost always by their courtiers or subjects. Invaders like Timur the Lame were able to storm the high walls of the city only because the inhabitants were already busy cutting each others’ throats. The death toll from bazaar disputes such as the eighteenth-century Shoe Sellers’ Riot could run into tens of thousands.
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