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A review by oliainchina
Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali
5.0
I got to Twilight in Delhi through City of Djinns by William Dalrymple. I found the book by chance in one of the second-hand bookstores somewhere in Asia. I don't even remember what country it was, but it wasn't India. I had it for five years and a few months more, before I finally read it and was amazed by the book's simplicity and, at the same time, subtlety. It reads like a story from One Thousand and One Nights and it reminds me of other stories, more real ones.
“It was the terrible summer of nineteen hundred and eleven. No one had experienced such heat for many years,” so a chapter of Twilight in Delhi starts. Outside my room, the hottest summer has just ended in my own city, as well, and the story sounded in a more familiar key.
“The temperature rose higher and higher until it reached one hundred and fifteen in the shade. From seven in the morning, the loo began to moan, blowing drearily through the hopeless streets. The leaves of the henna tree became seared and wan, and the branches of the date palm became coated with sand. The dust blew through the unending noon; and men went out with their heads well covered and protected. The pigeons flew for a while and opened their beaks for heat. The crows cawed and the kites cried and their voices sounded so dull.
The sky lost its color and became dirty and bronzed. The loo did not stop even at night. the stars flickered in the sky behind the covering layer of dust. The sand rained down all night, came between the teeth, covered the beds, and sleep did not come near parched humanity.
Tempers rose and from all around came the loud voices of women quarrelling, husbands beating their wives, mothers beating their children, and there seemed no rest for men.
Fires broke out every now and then. At such times the sky was made red with the flames that shot up from the burning earth.”
As Ahmed Ali continues his story of ruin, love and broken hopes in the Muslim Delhi, Mahatma Gandhi was holding his action of peaceful resistance in South Africa and more decades would pass before the Independence and the dreams of Midnight's Children would be written by Salman Rushdie. Another story comes across, as a thread of silk, hinting on a more intricate design made of events, accidents, lives, passions.
On the other side of the continent, that same year of 1911, as The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan states, “It was an uncomfortable summer for [Sir Edward] Grey, [British foreign secretary]. He had suffered another personal tragedy earlier that year when his beloved brother George was killed by a lion in Africa and the Morocco crisis was keeping him in London, far from the respite of his estate at Fallodon. The Cabinet was divided over how firm to be with Germany and how much support to offer France. In the country, the wave of strikes went on and the heat wave was breaking records. (In the evenings Churchill would collect Grey and take him for a swim in his club.)”
The crisis over Morocco went on and Paul Bowles, whose marvelous novels and short stories are set in Morocco, was not even one years old at that time. But when he will cross the Atlantic to settle down in Morocco in 1947 the country would be still divided between France and Spain.
Speaking about the Atlantic, 1911 was exactly the year when the Titanic was launched in Belfast.
The heat that summer caused fires not only in Delhi. In Istanbul in the summer of 1911 a huge fire destroyed the downtown area.
Right at that time Le Corbusier traveled across the East getting inspiration and gathering material for his travelogue. Le Corbusier was a witness to the fire and noted that it was a melancholic spectacle. His drawings of Istanbul captivated Orhan Pamuk in his Istanbul.
One could continue playing with threads till the end of days. The number of events and characters that pass from one year to another, that cross at one point and get reconnected at some other place and time once again, is enough for a lifetime or even two. And when your eyes get tired, you lift your head from another thread and see folds and waves of that glittering fabric, your heart is full of enchantment and beauty.
“It was the terrible summer of nineteen hundred and eleven. No one had experienced such heat for many years,” so a chapter of Twilight in Delhi starts. Outside my room, the hottest summer has just ended in my own city, as well, and the story sounded in a more familiar key.
“The temperature rose higher and higher until it reached one hundred and fifteen in the shade. From seven in the morning, the loo began to moan, blowing drearily through the hopeless streets. The leaves of the henna tree became seared and wan, and the branches of the date palm became coated with sand. The dust blew through the unending noon; and men went out with their heads well covered and protected. The pigeons flew for a while and opened their beaks for heat. The crows cawed and the kites cried and their voices sounded so dull.
The sky lost its color and became dirty and bronzed. The loo did not stop even at night. the stars flickered in the sky behind the covering layer of dust. The sand rained down all night, came between the teeth, covered the beds, and sleep did not come near parched humanity.
Tempers rose and from all around came the loud voices of women quarrelling, husbands beating their wives, mothers beating their children, and there seemed no rest for men.
Fires broke out every now and then. At such times the sky was made red with the flames that shot up from the burning earth.”
As Ahmed Ali continues his story of ruin, love and broken hopes in the Muslim Delhi, Mahatma Gandhi was holding his action of peaceful resistance in South Africa and more decades would pass before the Independence and the dreams of Midnight's Children would be written by Salman Rushdie. Another story comes across, as a thread of silk, hinting on a more intricate design made of events, accidents, lives, passions.
On the other side of the continent, that same year of 1911, as The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan states, “It was an uncomfortable summer for [Sir Edward] Grey, [British foreign secretary]. He had suffered another personal tragedy earlier that year when his beloved brother George was killed by a lion in Africa and the Morocco crisis was keeping him in London, far from the respite of his estate at Fallodon. The Cabinet was divided over how firm to be with Germany and how much support to offer France. In the country, the wave of strikes went on and the heat wave was breaking records. (In the evenings Churchill would collect Grey and take him for a swim in his club.)”
The crisis over Morocco went on and Paul Bowles, whose marvelous novels and short stories are set in Morocco, was not even one years old at that time. But when he will cross the Atlantic to settle down in Morocco in 1947 the country would be still divided between France and Spain.
Speaking about the Atlantic, 1911 was exactly the year when the Titanic was launched in Belfast.
The heat that summer caused fires not only in Delhi. In Istanbul in the summer of 1911 a huge fire destroyed the downtown area.
Right at that time Le Corbusier traveled across the East getting inspiration and gathering material for his travelogue. Le Corbusier was a witness to the fire and noted that it was a melancholic spectacle. His drawings of Istanbul captivated Orhan Pamuk in his Istanbul.
One could continue playing with threads till the end of days. The number of events and characters that pass from one year to another, that cross at one point and get reconnected at some other place and time once again, is enough for a lifetime or even two. And when your eyes get tired, you lift your head from another thread and see folds and waves of that glittering fabric, your heart is full of enchantment and beauty.