Delhi : A Novel

Jagmohan Singh Khurmi

by KHUSHWANT SINGH

  Delhi : A Novel is a long and descriptive account about the city, it starts with the narrator, suggestively Khushwant Singh himself, just returning from England after 'having his fill of whoring in foreign lands', a bawdy , aging reprobate who loves the city of Delhi, as much as he loves the ugly but energetic hermaphrodite whore ''Bhagmati'', whom he literally picks up from a deserted road on a hot Delhi summer noon. Having no place to go after completing his/her jail sentence in the dreaded Tihar jail, (probably for selling sex), she/he begs to be taken under wing, the kind sardar obliges, and so starts a wonderful relationship of ups and downs in the narrator's life, Bhagmati , neither male nor female, but carries a great exotic sex appeal, from him giving some of the most sexually exciting moments, to picnicking around among the majestic remains of the incredible glory that Delhi was during its day in the sun, and in the end even saving his life from the mad mobs of 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Displaying his trademark gift of literal humour and a professional historian's control over narration, the writer takes turn, chapter by chapter, on the history of the great city and his own sexual exploits and misadventures with 'vilaity mems' and lonely army wives whom he is supposed to 'show Delhi', other eccentric journalists, editors and bureaucrats, a half-mad Sikh ex-army driver, a fanatic gurudwara ''bhaiji'' , among many other colorful characters. All the while the narrator travels through times Delhi has seen, telling us in a most interesting manner, as the first person, all that Delhi has been to Nadir Shah, Taimur and Aurangzeb etc. who plundered and destroyed Delhi, to Meer Taqi Meer and Bahadur Shah Zafar whom Delhi destroyed, he looks through the eyes of semi-historical characters like Musaddi Lal, a hindu convert working under the hostile Balban in the fourteenth centaury - the dawn of the Mughal Empire , right upto Nihal Singh, a Sikh mercenary who settles his historical score with the Mughals by helping the British in crushing the sepoy mutiny of 1857- the sunset of the Mughal empire, Mrs. Aldwell, wife to an English civil servant who converts to Islam to escape persecution (but still gets raped), the dynamic, inventive and shrewd Punjabi entrepreneurs who won the British contracts to build Lyuten's Delhi, to an angry young RSS hindu youth, disposed from western Punjab during the partition, looking for revenge by inflicting violence upon Delhi muslims, and accidentally becoming witness to perhaps the most important and decisive event in the country's history - the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi….

( This Review was also posted on Wikipedia by me on February 5, 2007 )