Every Thursday evening, a city folds back upon itself. Delhi — noisy, overbuilt, relentlessly forward-facing — makes room for something older. At the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla, a fourteenth-century citadel now half-swallowed by park and road, hundreds of petitioners arrive with candles, incense, and letters. The letters are addressed to the Djinn.

Petitioners at Feroz Shah Kotla at dusk
feroz shah kotla, new delhi — thursday evening, as the light fails.

The belief is specific: that the ruins are inhabited by benevolent spirits — Djinn — who have the power to grant wishes if properly petitioned. The ritual is not sanctioned by any formal religious authority. It has no single origin story. It simply exists, stubbornly, in the middle of a modern city, and thousands of people choose it over the alternatives.

A letter left for the Djinn Candles and incense offerings

the architecture of faith

What draws me to this subject is precisely what makes it difficult to photograph: the privacy of the transaction. These are not public performances of faith. They are urgent, intimate negotiations between a person and whatever they believe might help them. The man asking for release from debt. The woman asking for a child. The student asking to pass his exams. The letters, written in sometimes shaky Urdu or Hindi, are folded and pressed into the crevices of ancient stone.

Folded letters pressed into the ruins
hundreds of letters accumulate in the walls — the wishes of the city, written down.

I spent eight Thursdays at the Kotla before I made a single meaningful photograph. The first visits were about learning the grammar of the place: where people gathered, how the light moved as evening came in, which corners of the ruin held the densest ritual activity. Only then could I begin to make pictures that earned what they showed.

Candlelight at the ruins Petitioner in thought

belief as survival

What I came to understand, slowly, is that the Djinn-worshippers at Feroz Shah Kotla are not naive. They know they live in a city of bureaucrats and courts and banks and doctors. They use all of those systems too. The Thursday ritual is something else: a space where the ordinary rules of cause and effect are suspended, and where it is permissible — even expected — to ask for the impossible.

Evening ritual, Feroz Shah Kotla
the ruins hold the city's impossible wishes — and have done so for decades.

In a country where so many people live with so little margin for error, perhaps the most rational thing one can do is maintain a relationship with the miraculous. The Wish Granters are not a curiosity. They are a record of what human beings do when the ordinary world is not enough.

The last petitioners as the gates close
after dark — the last candles still burning as the security guard begins to clear the grounds.