Certainly, said the Sufi mystic, he could show William Dalrymple a djinn: but he would run away. With his wife Olivia, William stayed for a year in Delhi. Lodging with the beady-eyed Mrs Puri and her eccentric husband, rushing around in the International Backside taxi of Balvinder Singh, the sights and sensations of the city and the Delhi-wallahs closed in around him. Through the narrow alleys of the Old City, along the broad boulevard of the New City of the Raj, he pursued the spirit of the people and their living history through the burning heat and bitter cold of Delhi weather, finally to discover, in the crashing rains of the monsoon, his own and eternal City of Djinns.
