A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (16 page)

Bhagwan Das wakes up at six o’clock each morning and follows a routine that has the rigidity of a ritual. Three rotis with vegetables, curd, and a quarter chakki of butter. Then he dons his work clothes: one of three identical pairs of plain white shirts and trousers that are washed every day in a solution of Dettol and detergent. At work, he is careful to avoid any contact with blood or saliva, and at the end of his shift he washes his hands with two separate soaps—an antiseptic one and a neem one—kept especially for this purpose. The dirty clothes are stuffed into a plastic bag and dropped into their antiseptic solution on returning home.

‘I am very disciplined. No meat, no alcohol, no paan, no gutka, and no beedis.’ Except on Tuesdays when, like all barbers, he takes his weekly holiday and sits out in his small veranda in his house in Shahdara, and pours himself a stiff whisky and lights a cigarette. ‘A quarter bottle of whisky and three cigarettes—that’s all I allow myself.

‘On Tuesdays I think about how so many people lose everything and die in a hospital—sad, sick, and lonely. It’s important to think about these things: Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What could happen if this happens? What will happen then? I am healthy now. My wife loves me; my son is working in a call centre. But I could fall ill tomorrow. What if my wife deserts me? What if my children disown me?’

‘What will you do then, Bhagwan Das?’

‘I’ll lie down on one of these beds, safe in the knowledge that the ward boys will look after me and the doctors will heal me.’

‘But who will shave the barber?’

‘That is a good question. Who will shave the barber?’

•

I’m travelling in Aligarh when my phone rings.

‘Mister Sethi?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am calling from RBTB Hospital. Please speak to Mr Satish.’

Satish is not doing well at all and has demanded to speak to me. A doctor has agreed to make the call; unfortunately, it is of little use. I bellow down the phone, but get surprisingly little response.

‘Yes, you are right,’ the doctor admits, having taken back the phone. ‘He is quite deaf.’

‘So how am I supposed to speak to him?’

‘Well, I thought he could at least speak to you! Don’t worry, it’s just an allergic reaction to streptomycin. He will be fine.’

‘Well, he doesn’t sound fine.’ In the background I can hear Satish mumbling incoherently.

‘Everything is under control. Please come as soon as you can.’

I make a hurried phone call to my sister. She agrees to go down to the hospital with a friend of hers. She calls back triumphant.

‘It’s fine. We’ve fixed everything. He just needed a change of underwear. They hadn’t bathed him since he was admitted a month ago.’ They bought a fresh set of clothes, two sets of underwear, a mug, a bucket, and some soap. She said he seemed much happier.

4

S
atish Kumar, Bed Number 53, Rajan Babu Tuberculosis Hospital, is dead.

He was discharged on 11 July. They said his TB was in recession, they said he would make it. But then he got worse. Finally, a social worker from the Sewa Ashram took him away to spend his last days in peace. He died on 13 July 2006 at Sewa Ashram, Narela. A nurse at the Ashram told me that the last rites were performed at the electric crematorium at Rajghat.

No one at the mandi even knew when it happened. They still don’t know. I have found out today. I am preparing myself to tell them.

I found out when I went to the hospital and saw someone else in his bed. Singh Sahib, right across in Bed 56, told me that the bed had been reassigned to another patient. He told me that several people had been discharged in the same week. Singh Sahib is an emaciated shell—TB has hollowed him out. Satish is only one of the many he has seen die around him. He has been in Ward M 13 for almost four months without dying or being discharged—a record of sorts. He spends most of his time lying flat on his back, alternately calling up his ‘Chandigarh walle sardarji’, who doesn’t pick up his calls, and castigating his family via telephone for not visiting him. It used to be a running joke in the ward that no one who walked in with a cellphone could walk out without having dialled a number for Singh Sahib. But now there is no one left to laugh any more.

Everyone has gone: Manoj the electrician in the yellow shorts who used to fill Satish’s water bottles; Krishna the aspiring social worker who used to run down to the STD to make calls for Satish; Pratap Singh, Satish’s self-appointed caretaker, and former colleague at Choona Mandi; and even Ammi and her son Salil. Ammi, who used to stay up nights nursing Satish’s cough with glucose solution.

Towards the end, I knew Satish would not make it. They kept giving him his medicines, but he wasn’t getting any better. By the second month in RBTB, he had lost so much weight that his body lost its sense of proportion. His eyes bulged out from his shrunken face and cheeks, his jaw jutted out awkwardly. His head seemed abnormally large for his emaciated body and his hands looked too heavy for his twig-like wrists.

An allergic reaction to streptomycin had worsened his condition, rendering him almost entirely deaf; antibiotics-induced jaundice had turned his nails, eyes, and skin yellow. The doctors assured me his hearing would return once he was taken off the drug, but that won’t happen now.

Despite Ashraf’s repeated promises to see Satish, he didn’t visit him once. Every time I visited the chowk, he would ask after Satish and reveal another facet of their unusual relationship. ‘Satish was actually Lalloo’s friend,’ he said. ‘But the three of us became very close. He worked in Choona Mandi but we spent most evenings together.’

But he never went to see Satish; never dropped in in the evening; never took the gang from Bara Tooti along to cheer Satish up. ‘Hospitals depress me,’ he offered when I confronted him. ‘We are all waiting for him to come back.’

After a point, Singh Sahib says, Satish just lost his will to live. Three months in hospital had worn him down. Then a young boy across the room died and someone else took his place. Then Pratap Singh was discharged and went home to his village. Then Krishna, then Ammi and Salil, and finally Manoj. Only Satish and Singh Sahib remained—staring blankly at each other across the narrow aisle. And then the social workers took Satish away. Singh Sahib tells me about the Ashram; I call them, which is when they tell me of Satish’s death.

Now there is only Singh Sahib in Bed 56. Someone else has taken Satish’s place—the same way he took someone else’s. Satish’s earthen water pot is gone from the bedside table, as is his spare underwear that used to hang on the headrest. His pink plastic bowl and steel tumbler have been replaced by plastic Pepsi bottles (now filled with water), a loaf of Harvest Gold bread, and a solitary boiled egg. The hospital authorities claim to change linen as often as possible, but the sheets still bear unwashable traces of their many previous occupants. A man-sized sweat stain darkens the length of the bedsheet—a trailing after-image of countless coughing, sweating, retching bodies.

During what were to be his last days, Satish often vacillated between going home and staying back in the hospital. Some days he declared he wanted to leave for his hometown Bina by the next train. ‘It’s one of Madhya Pradesh’s bigger junctions, Bina Junction—everyone knows of it.’ He had a phone number: a simple six-digit number with a bulky, imposing area code. He last dialled it ten years ago; he wondered if the number would be the same—so much had happened since he left home at thirteen.

Ashraf often wondered why Satish left home. What sin could have forced him out of the cosy sleepiness of Bina into the uncontrolled chaos of Delhi? What could he have done at thirteen? Theft? Murder? Rape?

Satish spoke little of his motivations, but Ashraf spent hours agonizing about the past of the quiet painter. ‘He must have stolen some money from his father’s pocket, that could be the only thing,’ Ashraf concluded. ‘But how much could it have been? Now he will go home, and I will give him five hundred rupees and even if his father doesn’t forgive him outright, his mother will; and she will make his father forgive him!’

But Ashraf never did convince Satish to go home. Satish listened quietly to Ashraf’s remonstrations—smiling grimly, and occasionally shaking his head in disagreement.

Satish once borrowed my cellphone and dialled a number from memory: 07580 221083. The phone rang for a while, and then stopped—so the number still existed. Fortunately Bina was a small town, its phones insulated from the incessant violence of changing numbers and differing exchanges. He dialled the number again, and handed me the phone. This time someone answered the phone.

‘Hello, who is this?’

‘I’m calling from Delhi. I want to speak to Lallan Singh of Paliwal.’

‘Sorry, you have the wrong number. There is no Lallan Singh here.’

‘Wait, wait, is this Bina, Madhya Pradesh? I am calling from Delhi.’

‘Yes it is, but…’

‘Lallan Singh is your neighbour. He doesn’t have a phone. Please call him, I am his son’s friend speaking.’

‘No, I’m sorry, Lallan Singh’s not my neighbour. You have the wrong number.’

‘No, wait, one last question. I’m calling all the way from Delhi. Is this the kirane ki dukaan near the doodhwalla?’

‘No, it isn’t. I’m sorry.’

Bina is a small town, and the numbers don’t change. But people do. People change and people move—from one house to another, from one mohalla to the next. Boxes are packed, trunks are brought out from under the beds, telephone numbers surrendered, security deposits collected, and the numbers, just like hospital beds, are transferred to other homes and families. They are circulated among new sets of relatives, new colleagues at work, new sons in different towns, new daughters now married and settled. But the old numbers are never forgotten; they lie in a tiny pocket diary carried in the inside pocket of a shirt worn in Bara Tooti. A phone number in a small town near a big railway station—waiting to be dialled once more, ten years too late.

‘Hello, I’m calling from Delhi, can I speak to Lallan Singh?’

‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t his number any more.’

•

My phone rings.

It’s Ashraf.

He has heard about Satish.

He’s crying.

I had gone straight to Bara Tooti once I left the hospital, but Ashraf wasn’t there. Kaka told me he had gone looking for work with Lalloo. Kaka gave me a cup of tea. ‘For free,’ he said, ‘in memory of Satish. He was a good boy, a nice boy, a quiet boy. Always paid on time. He was a polite boy—never did danga, never did gaali-galoch, never drank and got into fights.’

Ashraf found good work that day. He bought mangoes. ‘Maybe I’ll take some to Satish,’ he told Kaka. ‘I’ll sit with him for a while and give him a mango.’

Then Kaka told him; so he’s called me.

He wants to go away from Delhi, far, far away. When will I come next to Bara Tooti?

I will come tomorrow. Goodnight, Ashraf.

Goodnight.

•

‘Electric crematorium at Rajghat? Not bad, Satish, not bad at all.’ Ashraf forces out a smile between drags of his beedi. ‘Rajiv Gandhi was cremated there, wasn’t he? He must have gone straight up to heaven.’

‘These things are important.’ Ashraf is slipping into one of his monologues. ‘If you are cremated in the wrong place, who knows where you might end up. I was personally present when Dr Hussain was buried. I bathed the body. There was no one else. Who would wash him and dress him? We called a qazi; he said, “Ashraf, you were like his son. You do it.” So I did it.’

‘How is Lalloo? I haven’t seen him in a long time.’

‘Lalloo is upset. He is drinking somewhere. You know what Satish did to Lalloo, don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Satish was a young boy, but he drank like a bastard. At the time, Lalloo never drank. He had a small stand at Choona Mandi where he sold parathas and sabzi for five rupees a plate. Satish was the one who got him started on drink. One time they sat down and drank for two days straight, non-stop. They ran out of money, so they drank on credit at one shop in Choona Mandi itself. Then they ran out of credit there, so they came to the corner shop at Bara Tooti. Then they ran out of credit there, so they moved to Kalyani’s and drank there. By the time Kalyani threw them out of her house on the morning of the third day, they were in debt for about a thousand rupees, maybe more. But when they got back to Choona Mandi, Lalloo’s stand was gone! Everything. The plates, the spoons, utensils, kerosene burner, even the stale atta and sabzi—all gone. That’s when Lalloo went a little crazy, and he’s been like that ever since.’

‘You never mentioned this before. You told me Lalloo lost his shop at cards.’

‘Yes, yes. He and Satish and this other man were playing cards together. And then they started drinking. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, does it?’

‘Why were they still friends? Didn’t Lalloo hate him after that?’

‘It wasn’t all Satish’s fault. He didn’t force Lalloo to drink; there must have been some reason why Lalloo drank like that
.
Kuch toh majboori hogi/yun aadmi bewafa nahin hota/raat ka intezaar kaun kare/din mein kya kya nahin hota.’

This was one of Ashraf’s favourite sayings, ‘There must have been compulsions/For a man to go astray/Why wait for nightfall/When anything can happen in the day.’

If Lalloo really was selling parathas in Old Delhi when he could have been living with his estranged wife and wealthy father-in-law in Gorakhpur, I can imagine him suddenly cracking one day, but why was Satish drinking like that?

‘He was young. People do stupid things when they are young. Satish also played a lot of cards. And I think he sold his kidney.’

‘What?’

‘I think so. That boy was capable of anything—even selling his own kidneys. He must have done it for the money. The problem with Satish was that things always worked out for him somehow, so he kept doing stupider and stupider things. Then of course, he got TB.

‘Even now, look at what’s happened: Ram Avatar died last week; the police took his body to the Baraf Khana and will probably donate it to science. Satish dies; he goes to the electric crematorium in Rajghat where Rajiv Gandhi was cremated. So Ram Avatar’s spirit wanders from one medical school to another where college kids tear out his organs and put them into jars. Satish goes straight to heaven.’