“When the world was new and Allah had created mankind from clay, he also made another race, like us in all things, but fashioned from fire. The djinns were spirits, invisible to the naked eye; to see them you had to fast and pray.

‘Could you show me a djinn?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ replied the Pir. ‘But you would run away.’”

I don’t remember how old I was when I started to believe in magic. Perhaps it was something I had always believed in. Or it had always believed in me. It is hard to know. What do you make in this world and what makes you? I was 17 when I first read William Dalrymple’s memoir of Delhi, the City of Djinns. It affected me deeply, as if he was inviting me into one of the many gateways burrowed across my hometown, to embrace it in a way I never had before, like a seance allows one to cross through the veil between worlds. The other world is always felt to some degree, and through repeated labours of believing in this feeling, it can be felt more. This veil can slowly be thinned, until you stand in the peripheries of both worlds, where the land is hard and ancient. Here, there is a crack in the slab, the place where the dead dance with the living, and a sole daisy splinters out from the underworld. What has this land seen in its time? What has it created? What has it destroyed?

Delhi is a haunted city. Haunted because it is a crumbling city. It rises as it falls, in rapid succession, and then does it again. New life breathes its first breath every day while an overbearing cloud of smog and air pollution colours the sky a dull grey-brown. A chronic decay settles on a metropolis that is teeming with vitality. The Yamuna river froths at the mouth, children and dogs playfight on her banks. Kindness and laughter is shared between pedestrians and rickshaw riders on busy traffic intersections, while a policeman unabashedly abuses a lone elderly Mussalman traveler at an airport gate. Kites circle the sky screaming with zeal and jubilee, and underneath them on the streets, women, young and old, are raped, killed, and forgotten.  

Delhi is haunted by its many djinns. Djinns are creatures of another realm: magical, dreadful, of their own volition. They tend to Delhi’s millenia-old gravesites and water the weeds at their feet. The Pir, a sufi guide Dalrymple meets, tells him they haunt the city because of how much they love it and cannot bear to see it empty, so they become faithful guardians of the land. They see it rise and fall time and time again. Burned by invaders, then risen out of its ashes like a phoenix, rebuilt, reincarnated. The city today exists as a collection of different fragments from time, ruins from ancient civilisations, the fiery soul of the medieval and early modern Islamic world roaring unfazed by the repeated attempts to make it disperse, echoes from the slaughter of riots, war, and the ripping of an old world into two nations, a new colonisation, and the agitation of the youthful cries for freedom that have never died. Delhi is a city “disjointed in time,” where one scene suddenly unravels into another completely different one, as if in a dream. As such, it allows its people to also be disjointed in time. Perhaps that is what is most appealing about its unruly grounds. 

If you are born in Delhi, or somehow find yourself drawn to its core, you needn’t belong to a human ancestor, you needn’t belong to a name, a family, or a lineage. The land under Delhi’s noise will make you a home immediately, as if you have always been there, as if you belong there in its arms. It knows how to host civilisations, to let life grow and prosper very well. Even when I did not feel a strong connection to my dispersed familial Bengali heritage, I always belonged to Delhi’s historic, chaotic earth. I think the city must have an immense centre of gravity, drawing me so close to the earth, never letting me forget that my body rests on its ground, never letting me drift too far away from reality. Nothing I could conjure up in my head could rival the beauty of what already exists. Where so many ages have been born and have come to pass, life continues to ripple outwards, creating possibility for many futures, creating passage for new life to flourish. As long as this effect can be felt, the ripple carries on.  

During the height of the pandemic, I was safe on the Vancouver peninsula in the comfort of a pleasant spring, old-growth trees, and western healthcare infrastructure. Across social media, I saw Delhi burning. The third wave of the Coronavirus had hit the capital particularly hard. Cemeteries were laden with corpses covered in white sheets, overcrowded. People upon people were posting information asking for oxygen cylinders and sharing phone numbers. I could feel the panic and devastation through my phone. Even worrying about my family felt like a moot activity, sitting so far away. Those images are scratched into my retinas. I felt like my understanding of the world changed completely, brazenly, setting on fire whatever ideas the child in me had carried so long. The next time I went back to Delhi, I felt it all over me. The landscape had changed. I felt a collective grief, a collective absence, a collective pain come over me, as if another age of the city had fallen to invasion, needing to renew.    

In 1857, the Mughal Empire finally fell to the British. At its royal seat in the Red Fort in Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, its last emperor, prayed for his descendants. He acknowledged that the great reign of his ancestors was now complete. It was time for others to rule. I was not born a Muslim, but the djinns don’t care about this sort of thing. The djinns always liked me. Wandering the cityscapes of the western world I feel a little lost. Like the djinns are far from me. They can no longer protect me and make sure that I keep rising like this old city I am rooted in. I don’t know what a djinn really is. Maybe it is the embodiment of grief in everything we do. Like the place remembers all the places that came before it. As it remembers, it continues to love what has passed. Grief is in the maintenance of love, the love of every breath of life ever taken, but has not lived to see the day today. Maybe that is what the djinn, the corporeal form of our shared spirit, is: a breath that we have taken together. After some of the pandemic’s worst assaults on the city, my feeling of collective grief is the settling down of one of these great djinns. When something is lost, it takes shape as a supernatural being and clouds the atmosphere. I wonder if now, in the brown polluted air, these djinns are losing their ability to live on. If this air is clogging the pores that are needed to be kept open so the djinns can be felt. Because the djinns can only be felt, they cannot be seen. And what of the city then, if the djinns are gone? How will it live on? How will it remember? 

Djinns feel feelings through living hosts. They feel through me. They make me dance like there is nothing to this world but ecstasy. They fill me with sorrow that is too much for my small body to carry. The djinns can only be felt by those who believe in them, they need belief to attach to, or they disappear into nothingness. The djinns are the only conduit we have to speak with those who have passed before us. If we lose them, we lose any connection to our ancestors. If I must speak to the old land, I must speak through them. 

Sometimes I think I am running on empty. There is nothing inside me to give to the world. But I don’t think that is right. I think I just can’t feel them anymore. I can’t feel the djinns, because something in my sky is polluted. Something is clogged. A collection of words, phrases, borrowed mental structures, meant to keep me alive and comforted somehow, while my wounds that still need to know and attach to the world with their own words lie open and corroding in the air. Fear and a grief that still needs to be felt covers the space between the land and my breathing. The djinns that attach to me demand an audience with me. Do I make them feel safe somehow because of how heavy I am? Are they running away from something? Are they being hunted? Do they have no place to go? Does no one believe in them anymore? My ancestors are not happy. They are wailing, afraid, angry. They cling to me, reminding me of the horrors they have seen. No one will take them, no one will bear any responsibility of sharing this world with them. No one will remember them. The cost of things that die before they are born is heavy.

We are creatures of fear, this land tells me, so we need the djinns, phantasmal beings who embody our deepest dread. This is the only way our fears may speak to us, through the shadows, where we dare not set anything alight. We are afraid of what we might see, what horror may befall us if we could indeed see, if we could indeed meet this djinn and everything terrible he may bring. One cannot see djinns, one can only feel them, hear them whisper, feel their heat. What would happen if I walked into a dark room, felt something in the dark, and just stood calmly in its presence? 

As a child of Delhi, it is easier to leap into other worlds without thinking, to delight and rest in the company of djinns. Sometimes, I think the life that lives and grows on my body is also disjointed in time, frictive orchestral co-living of different experiences, different functioning to serve different needs, different adaptive mechanisms, concentrated in pockets of differently-weighing gravity, all making music, mostly cacophony, together through me. This is my experience of living as a disjointed person, longing for unity, longing for moments that sing like perfect harmony. The only unity I feel is when life rushes through me, pointing me in some direction, asking me to move towards something. 

Once I witnessed something in someone die. When they died, at the very last moment, their eyes gasped in expanse. In their final moment, they sought to experience as much as they possibly could have felt, knowing that in the next moment, all feeling would cease. I looked into those eyes and they took hold of me and burned me. Terror, exhilaration, frenzy, hunger, betrayal, contempt, fury, pain, sorrow, madness, ambition, and freedom; I felt everything. The eyes mirrored like Borges’ Aleph, a single point in space through which one could see everything, because these eyes were attempting to see everything, a feat only possible at the moment of leaping into death. 

Every time something dies and turns into a djinn it sends a reverse shockwave into the living world. It creates a depression in the land. Like my back is being flattened by a strong blast of wind. My ancestor is the land but I am also the land. The land is my back, where everything heavy rests. Do we remember the djinns or do the djinns remember us? What do you make in this world and what makes you? What are they telling me? What would they say if they could speak? But can’t they speak? I feel like they are always speaking to me. They are whatever memory is left of a time when others used to live, when others used to rule. Now it is time for someone else to live. Our ancestors only tell us one thing. Let it all go. Live as much as you can. Sing. Feel until feeling ceases.