Delhi

Delhi: A Novel (published 1990) is a historical novel 

The book moves backwards and forwards in time through the history of Delhi. It has as its backdrop the story of a journalist fallen on bad times (possibly an autobiographical figure) and his relationship with a hijra (eunuch) named Bhagmati.

This vast, erotic, irreverent magnum opus on the city of Delhi 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 her jail sentence in the dreaded Tihar Jail (probably for selling sex), she begs to be taken under his wing. The kind sardar obliges, and thus begins a wonderful relationship of ups and downs in the narrator’s life. Bhagmati, neither male nor female but possessive of great exotic sex appeal, vitalizes his life amidst the majestic remains of Delhi in its heyday, and even saves the narrator's life from the mad mobs of the 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 colourful 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 her, and to Meer Taqi Meer and Bahadur Shah Zafar whom Delhidestroyed; he looks through the eyes of semi-historical characters like Musaddi Lal Kayasth, a Hindu convert working under the hostile Ghiyas ud din Balban in the fourteenth century—the dawn of the Mughal Empire, right up to Nihal Singh, a Sikhmercenary who settles his historical score with the Mughals 

Khushwant Singh (February 2, 1915 – March 20, 2014) was an Indian novelist, lawyer, politician and journalist. An Indo-Anglian writer, Singh was best known for his trenchant secularism,^[1] his humor, and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioral characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit. He served as the editor of several literary and news magazines, as well as two newspapers, through the 1970s and 1980s. He was the recipient of Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award in India.