Are Jinns (Djinns) attracted to jasmine, the much celebrated flower that women love to adorn their hairdo with? According to author Sadia Dehlvi, mothers and grandmothers in the olden days forbade unmarried girls from scenting their bed with jasmine because the Jinns were so fond of it that they fell in love with them.

Sadia has made this the title of her new book, Jasmine and Jinns (Harper Collins). It may be a far-fetched title for book of mainly non-vegetarian recipes and family history but perhaps given in the hope that it would attract readers too (despite its high price of Rs 699 for just 211 pages). In this connection one remembers another belief: that girls shouldn’t walk on the terrace at dusk with hair open after a bath as Jinns, the invincible beings created from fire, took possession of them and they pined away under their influence.

Talking about recipes, a connoisseur once opined that among housewives Sadia made the best Aloo-Gosht (meat and potato curry) in Delhi. One tasted it at the home of her friend and Urdu litterateur Rakhshanda Jalil and seemed to be convinced by the assertion. Sadia has a whole list of Salans (curries) and assorted dishes handed down from generation to generation in her family of Punjabi Saudagaran (merchants) who converted from being Khatris to Islam under the influence of Pir Shamsuddin. The family came to Delhi during a plague in 1657 at the time of Shah Jahan and the head, Hafiz Yusuf, opted for the surname, “Dehlvi” as a tribute to its city of adoption.

Sadia’s father, Yunis Dehlvi used to bring out a popular Urdu magazine, Shama, from Asaf Ali Road, which was illustrated by Sudhir Dar (once The Statesman cartoonist, whose Page 1 pocket cartoon, Out of My Mind, was the craze in the 1960s and 70s).

The title, incidentally, was suggested by the paper’s editor, A E Charlton. Sadia got her first journalism lessons in Sun magazine, edited by Vijay Shankar, and after that became a columnist and author. Cooking is her pastime, otherwise as a socialite she is probably the Indian counterpart of Sherry Rehman of Pakistan.

It is beside the point that her ancestral bungalow in Chankyapuri was bought by ex-Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Mayawati. The eating joint, Al Kausar, started by her mother and situated just opposite the big house, is, however, still there, selling delicious kababs and biryani.

But the aroma doesn’t seem to attract the Jinns, made famous earlier by J F Fanthome and William Dalrymple.