Proprietorially of Delhi

Malvika Singh&rsquos perpetual city, a potted history of Delhi in bijou packaging, is the latest in Aleph Book Company&rsquos &lsquoshort biography&rsquo series. The commissioning editor has made some canny choices &mdash Amitava Kumar on Patna Naresh Fernandes on Bombay Indrajit Hazra on Calcutta Mushirul Hasan on Lucknow forthcoming &mdash and Singh, &lsquoMala&rsquo to her friends, is another clever choice the consummate insider writing about the most insidery of cities, a city that prizes connections and who you know. And Singh, publisher of the thoughtful, quasi-academic monthly magazine Seminar, knows everyone.

Her parents, the journalists Romesh and Raj Thapar, founded Seminar in 1959 after becoming disillusioned with the Communist Party. From prominent Punjabi families, the Thapars were a fixture on the Bombay social scene. Still, shortly after founding Seminar, the family moved to Delhi where Singh&rsquos grandfather had built a large house. At Modern School on Barakhamba, she met her husband Tejbir Singh, a grandson of Sobha Singh who famously won the contract to build much of Lutyens&rsquo Delhi.

Small wonder, then, that Malvika Singh writes proprietorially of Delhi. It is a city she has watched grow from the spacious but insular and bureaucratic city of her youth &mdash at least New Delhi, as opposed to the narrow lanes and fragrant food of Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi &mdash to a roiling, vital metropolis. A book of this nature perforce has to be anecdotal, the centuries-long history of Delhi lightly skimmed to get to the marrow of a particular, privileged Delhi life.

Singh is an engaging raconteur without being a particularly insightful one. Perpetual City will occasion more than the odd eye roll. The book is studded throughout with nostalgia and affection for the social lives and meals of the great and the good. Here is a typical passage &ldquoI recall some splendid dinners through the sixties of the last century at the Charat Ram home on Sardar Patel Marg... Charat Ram and Bharat Ram were sons of Lala Shri Ram who was the head of one of Delhi&rsquos most influential business clans.&rdquo Mala Singh&rsquos life, as this slim volume shows (and shows and shows), has been graced. One of her favourite words is &lsquodelightful&rsquo. She has written a relentlessly nice book and when the subject is Delhi that takes some doing.