City of Djinns: by William Dalrymple HarperCollins $288 THIS is not a travel book but a diary masquerading as a travel book. And like all diaries, the problem is how to make daily jottings of mundane conversations, random thoughts, reference's to one's recent past, the weather, and immediate surroundings into something interesting, coherent and structured that someone else will want to read. William Dalrymple tries hard but only partly succeeds.
The saving grace is Mr Dalrymple's intense curiosity about the past and his desire to unearth the ghosts of history - the city's Djinns - to see how well the spirits of Delhi culture and court life have survived to the present.
Historians believe that for a continuous period of almost three centuries Delhi has always been inhabited, and never abandoned like so many other great cities.
It was the capital city of the Pandava kings around 900 BC featured in the epic Mahabharata when Delhi was known as Inderprastha. Successive Mughal emperors made it their seat and the centre of Persian and Urdu culture and the British also made it their capital.
As each regime rose and fell it left behind descendants, now no longer the ruling class of Delhi, but still imbued with memories of a once-glorious past and still clinging to the last vestiges of Delhi ''culture''.
In the quest for the spirit of Delhi, Mr Dalrymple delves into libraries, consults scholars, historians and archaeologists and tracks down survivors of bygone eras: the great granddaughter of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafur II still living in the decay of old Delhi; the almost-senile relics of the British Raj, still hanging grimly to their past; great thinkers and Urdu poets living a soulless existence in post-partition Lahore, away from the Delhi of their inspiration and muse.