Inside Dehli's Magician's Ghetto

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie refers to Delhi's magician's quarter, a fabulous place in which fire-eaters, snake charmers, fakirs, contortionists, jugglers, and fortune tellers live in a presumably Harry Potter like reality, with spells crashing through the air, an endless stream of juggled objects being hurled around and kept off the ground by thousands of people, and inhabitants whizzing around on magic carpets. I just assumed it was a wonderfully unrealistic creation of the author, until I looked it up and found that it was the real deal: there genuinely is a slum section of Dehli in which the city's various conjurors congregate to live in crudely raised shacks. From there, they can draw in passing tourists with their displays and scrape a living, or venture out to entertainer jobs in wealthier areas.

It's probably pretty far from the fantastical version of my mind, a 24-hour circus where the fun never stops, where a succession of wild and crazy performers jostle for the attention of any passing tourist, diving in front of the camera to perform their wondrous feats before being jostled aside and having their place taken by another magician, but just the idea of an area in which all the city's entertainers live together is enough to make the world sound a jolly place. Perhaps it's a good juxtaposition between the fantasy of a perfect world and the true world we live in when the actual place is nothing like the dream, but is instead like any other slum, in which people are crammed together under leaky tarpaulins, half-starved, but just happen to be professional conjurers. The most up-to-date article I could find on the Magician's Ghetto suggests that in 2010 India were looking to bulldoze it to the ground to tidy the area in time for the upcoming Commonwealth Games. After this article the trail runs cold, so hopefully it never came to pass and the Magician's Ghetto lives on.