A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (22 page)

Today he finds himself waiting in a downpour for Mohammed Ashraf to show up and take the five thousand rupees I had promised him on his discharge from the hospital. As a banker he is surprised at being kept waiting by someone who wants to borrow money. Creditors keep debtors waiting—not the other way around.

‘Should I leave or stay?’

‘Give him another ten minutes, no, Prithvi? Please?’

He calls back an hour later. ‘Ashraf’s taken the money,’ he says. ‘He says he’ll call you.’

That was six months ago. Since then I have been fielding calls from his friends.

Mustafa called first. ‘I can’t find Ashraf. He got drunk and groped my landlord’s daughter! So the landlord threw us out. I moved to my brother’s house, but Ashraf just ran down the street with the whole mohalla giving chase and I haven’t seen him since.’

‘You know how he is, Aman bhai,’ said Mustafa in a subsequent conversation when I called. ‘I heard he has taken up a house near the airport. Some people went looking but they couldn’t find him.’

‘His tools are still with me. He hasn’t come to collect them,’ said Prabhu the bootlegger. ‘Both Veeru and I miss him very much; he owes us a hundred rupees. This is how people repay kindness and gratitude.’

Mustafa still calls every few weeks; he hasn’t given up. ‘Any news, Aman bhai? I checked back at the hospital—nothing. I checked in Raja Bazaar; they haven’t heard from him either.’

I tell him not to worry. Ashraf has my number, I’ve written it on every piece of paper in his sling bag. I’ve given him my visiting card. I’ve left my number with Dr Bannerjee at the hospital; Prabhu has it saved on his phone. Ashraf will find us when he wants to.

He’ll probably call at two in the morning, his voice thick with whisky and laughter.

‘Aman bhai,’ he’ll say. ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you. You should come see me sometime.’

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

I
t is hard to offer an accurate glossary of the slang spoken on Delhi’s streets, particularly since it is drawn from dialects all across north India and the same word carries multiple, context-specific connotations that are opaque to unfamiliar users.
Bhai
, for instance, is an honorific indicating “brother,” a term of familiarity to describe social parity—though it can be a diminutive if used to indicate excessive familiarity with a social superior.
Bhaiyya
means “brother” as well and is subject to the same rules, but it is also used as a pejorative in Mumbai to describe working-class immigrants from Uttar Pradesh. Equals address one another with
beedu
.

The city’s slang is coarse, vivid, and strewn with expletives. “Dialogue-
bazi”
is the favorite sport of the
Dilliwallah
, or Delhi denizen;
bazi
is the Urdu word for “sport,” so dialogue-
bazi
is to speak in dialogue, like from a film.
Patang-bazi
is to fly a
patang
, or kite, and
laundi-bazi
is to play with a
laundi
, or young woman, and could imply anything from sex to romance to eve-teasing (that is, catcalling).

If you were living the
mazdoor ki zindagi
, or laborer’s life, in Delhi, you would spend your free time smoking
beedis
, or hand-rolled cheroots; drinking
desi sharab
, or country liquor; and eating
paneer
, or cottage cheese, at the
mandi
, or marketplace. But then, if you are reading this book, you are probably an
angrezi murgi
, or white hen.
Angrez
was originally used to describe the English, but is now a stand-in for generic “white person.” When Rehaan and I first met, he called me an
angrezi murgi
to stress the distance between us. Gradually he started calling me
Bhai
, but never came around to calling me
Yaar
.

You must be careful when you speak with a
Bhai
, but a
Yaar
is the sort of close friend you can call a
Bhenchod
, or a sister fucker, in a fit of exasperation. Because unlike the other
chootiyas
, or pussies, you encounter on the streets of Delhi, a
Bhenchod
knows that we are all basically
haramis
, bastards, who work like
gulaams
, slaves, during the day, smoke a
chillum
of weed at night, and dream of
laundiyas
.

When dreaming of
laundiyas
, you could do worse than fantasizing about Aishwariya and Sushmita, those two
chamak challos
with their swinging hips who became Miss World and Miss Universe way back in 1994 but are still so hot that even a
gaandu
, an ass-fucker (pejorative for homosexual), would know who they are.
Chamak challos
are special—they aren’t
randis
, or whores; they are the sort of girls who are coy enough, yet wise enough, to drop the
pallu
of their
sari
just enough to reveal a shapely bosom clad in a racy blouse that makes a man’s heart race
chaka-chak chaka-chak chaka-chak
like the train from Patna to Calcutta.

Back home, every
basti
, or neighborhood, has its
chamak challos
, but in Delhi we are all
ajnabis
, or strangers. Some
mazdoors
are seasonal workers—
barsati mendaks
, rain frogs who come to the city for short visits between sowing and harvest—but for many, the
paanwallah
, who sells betel nut,
beedis
, and chewing tobacco, or
gutka
, is their first and closest friend. But how many close friends can the
paanwallah
have? For him, you are just another restless wastrel, a
lafunter
, who works when he can or simply shows up for
langar
, or free food, handed out by Sikh devotees after prayers at their
Gurudwara
, the Sikh place of worship.

It is true that the city is a hard place in which to live, but remember this isn’t just any city. This is Delhi, where everyone is a
baazigar
, or gambler, and a man too timid to risk
kuch bhi
—anything—may lose
sab kuch
: everything.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
his book would not have been possible without the extraordinary generosity and companionship of everyone at Bara Tooti Chowk, Sadar Bazaar. Lalloo, Rehaan, Sanjay Kumar (Kaka in the book), Munna, Lambu, Satish, Kalyani, J.P. Singh, and Bhagwan Das not only tolerated my persistent and intrusive presence, but made me a part of their lives and quests in the city. I am grateful for their patience with a lafunter like me.

I first began working on this manuscript on the suggestion of Aarti Sethi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta who read all my articles, essays, and drafts on Bara Tooti. Their intelligent and close reading of my manuscript kept me honest as a writer. Jeebesh Bagchi profoundly influenced my understanding spaces like Bara Tooti, and helped me think through ways of seeing, perceiving, and writing about Ashraf and his friends.

Rana Dasgupta read through the final proofs, smoothening out sentences and gently disentangling mixed metaphors. I thank him for his incredible generosity.

I thank Bhrigupati Singh for wading through my early drafts and helping vary the pace of the narrative. Prithvi Chachra helped me out in Calcutta and visited Ashraf as he struggled with his illness. I also thank Akshaya and Ishan Tankha, Shiva Bajpai, Shovan Gandhi, Tushar Bajaj, and Anirvan Sen for their deep friendship and constant support through the years.

This book began as a project for the Sarai CSDS Independent Research Fellowship programme. I am grateful to everyone at Sarai for their generosity and camaraderie.

Chiki Sarkar’s tireless editing has made this a much better book than I could have hoped to write.

I am indebted to Mohammed Ashraf, his stories, jokes, admonishments, and reminiscences. Thank you, Ashraf bhai.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

A
man Sethi was born in Bombay in 1983. He studied chemistry in Delhi, and journalism in Chennai and New York. He is currently the Chhattisgarh correspondent for
The Hindu
. This is his first book.

More Praise for

A Free Man

“[Sethi] is a smart and wily reporter, a dogged listener, a digger. . . . Fascinating.”

—Thomas Larson,
Los Angeles Review of Books

“Important [and] powerful.”

—Mridu Rai,
San Francisco Chronicle

“The experiences of a day laborer are revealed with compassion and surprising humor by a young Indian journalist.”

—Abbe Wright,
O, The Oprah Magazine

“Vivid and funny narrative nonfiction about an Indian day laborer—and about the slippery relationship between a journalist and his subject.”

—Molly Fischer,
Capital New York

“[Sethi’s] portraits are colorful and sharp, and his descriptions of various aspects of lower-class Indian culture . . . are unfailingly lucid.”

—David Hammerschlag,
Bookslut

“Incredibly entertaining . . . deftly written. . . . [
A Free Man
] reads like an adventure.”

—Subashini Navaratnam,
PopMatters

“[
A Free Man
] fixes its sights on a single individual: Mohammad Ashraf is a
mazdoor
—a construction worker—living on the streets of north Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, forever either recovering from a hangover or drinking his way into one. . . . Sethi allows Ashraf’s trenchant voice to flood the book, and Ashraf rarely lets him down.”

—Samanth Subramanian,
Bookforum

“A darkly comical and eminently readable work of narrative journalism that brings readers into the heart and soul of old Delhi.”

—Colleen Mondor,
Booklist

“A moving and irrepressible work of narrative reporting.”

—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review

“Alternately sad, defiant, carefree and understated, this journey into a world hidden in plain sight is well worth taking.”

—
Kirkus
Reviews
, starred review

“Funny and disturbing.”

—Arundhati Roy, author of
The God of Small Things

“
A Free Man
is a beautiful work of journalism, sympathetic and graceful.”

—Esther Duflo, author of
Poor Economics
and a MacArthur Fellow

“With
A Free Man
, Aman Sethi comes to the forefront of an extraordinary new generation of Indian nonfiction writers. His compassion and humor are matched by a fierce determination to tell the stories of ordinary Indians, too often forgotten in the scramble for the spoils of the economic boom.”

—Hari Kunzru, author of
Gods Without Men

“
A Free Man
is stunning. Not only is Sethi a remarkable reporter and storyteller, but he possesses a novelist’s ear for language, sense of the absurd, and perfect pitch. I’m bowled over, totally.”

—Sylvia Nasar, author of
A Beautiful Mind
and
A Grand Pursuit

“Funny, poignant, and deeply moving,
A Free Man
is an extraordinary vignette into an extraordinary life.”

—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of
The Emperor of All Maladies

Copyright © 2012, 2011 by Aman Sethi

First American Edition 2012

All rights reserved

First published as a Norton paperback 2013

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write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110

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Production manager: Devon Zahn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sethi, Aman, 1983–

A free man : a true story of life and death in Delhi / Aman Sethi. —
1st American ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-393-08890-8 (hardcover)

1. Mohammed, Ashraf, 1966– 2. Homeless persons—India—Delhi—Biography. 3. Day laborers—India—Delhi—Biography. 4. Delhi (India)—Biography. 5. Life change events—India—Delhi—Case studies. 6. Delhi (India)—Social conditions. 7. Urban poor—India—Delhi. 8. Marginality, Social—India—Delhi. I. Title.

HV4600.D4S48 2012

362.5’92092—dc23

[B]

                                                          2012022384

ISBN 978-0-393-34660-2 pbk.

eISBN: 978-0-393-08972-1

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