A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (7 page)

The best way to drink Everyday is to mix about two inches of the liquor with half an inch of water and knock it back in largish gulps. The first sip is usually the worst. The raw, metallic taste of uncured alcohol bites down on the tongue like a steel clamp, inducing an almost irrepressible urge to spit out the offending liquid. However, once the gag reflex has been suppressed, each sip becomes successively easier till the taste becomes irrelevant. Veterans recommend that each glass be accompanied by light stomach liners like hard-boiled eggs, a plate of raw paneer, and a plentiful supply of Howrah beedis.

After enough Everyday, Tilak Bridge looks like Howrah Bridge, Sadar Bazaar looks like Bara Bazaar, India Gate looks like the Gateway of India. After enough Everyday, Lalloo looks like Kaka, Rehaan looks like Munna, house painters look like lost artists, carpenters seem as sombre as Supreme Court judges. The broad intersections of the bazaar divide into the side streets of smaller towns. The tea shop on Barna Galli becomes Bhisu da’s place in Tangra, the butcher up the street in Kasaipura becomes the halal shop in Malad. After enough Everyday, Mohammed Ashraf occasionally drops his guard and talks about what’s really bothering him.

Today he is feeling bored, even depressed, by the chowk, his life, everything. ‘I have no friends here,’ he says. ‘In Dilli there is azadi, but there is also a lot of akelapan, the loneliness of being a stranger in every city. Har sheher mein ajnabi.’

‘But what about Lalloo? Isn’t Lalloo your friend?’

‘He is, but he isn’t a jigri yaar. He isn’t my close friend.’

‘What sort of friend is he?’

‘He is a medium-type friend.’

This is another of Ashraf’s terms—medium-type. Classification is important to Ashraf: it is important to draw lines, make tables, and, most essentially, mark time. To distinguish between now and then, yesterday and today, because tomorrow and thereafter may be better or worse or at least different. Marking time is important as it allows for planning. Planning is crucial, as it indicates a degree of purpose without which a man could easily lose his way. Bara Tooti is full of those who, according to Ashraf, have lost their way; and in the presence of such company, it is important to run on his own sense of time.

The passing of time is rarely a matter of comment at Bara Tooti. For most regulars time is measured as the distance between the point when the bus fare from Moradabad to Delhi was four rupees, dehadi was eighteen rupees, and a room at Takiya Wali Masjid could be rented for twelve rupees a month, to now when the rents have risen to three hundred rupees a month, dehadi is a hundred and fifty rupees and the bus ticket is a hundred and twelve rupees.

For Lalloo, entire weeks run into each other before he senses their passing. Most events occur either too fast to register, or too slowly to notice. Lalloo doesn’t even know how long it has been since he came to Delhi, since he went home, since he last spoke to his wife. Yes, Lalloo has a wife, in a house on the Nepal border in faraway Gorakhpur. I found out by accident, when Lalloo and Ashraf were once particularly drunk. ‘Take down his story, Aman bhai, he even has a wife,’ Ashraf exclaimed. ‘And a father-in-law who is a big man in the coal mining business.’

But Lalloo was too drunk to talk that day and the next time, it was as if the conversation had never occurred. ‘What wife, Aman bhai? What father-in-law? What coal mine? You have been observing us all this time. Where would I hide her?’

With the exception of Ashraf, no one at the chowk makes the effort of talking to me more than they have to. There is a point when even a good chat can stop being time-pass and become a chore—particularly a chat that doesn’t respect the careful conventions of place and time.

Chowk time creeps along at its own glacial pace, marked only by epochal events and the coming and going of regulars: the year of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the year of Kale Baba’s first illness, the year of Lambu Mistry’s return. Seasons will change, and Ashraf and Lalloo will move cyclically around the lamp post with the surveillance cameras. In summer they will sit in the northwest quadrant of the chowk, shielded from the blazing sun. In winter they will shift to the centre to soak in the sun’s comforting warmth. In the monsoons, they can sleep in the southeast quadrant, where the sheltered pavements offer respite from the rains.

Occasionally events can shake the chowk out of its monotony, alerting its residents to the transformations around them. In one particularly fast-paced year, even as dehadi remained constant, Kaka raised the price of tea three times, citing the rising prices of sugar and milk, thus forcing his patrons to work harder for longer hours. In another year, before Ashraf’s time, three regulars died of pneumonia, making it seem like the winter lasted right up to April when the last old-timer finally succumbed to his illness.

For Ashraf, a stable friendship is premised on a shared notion of time. When Ashraf describes his childhood friends, for instance, he speaks of a group that woke up together, skipped class together, and felt hungry, thirsty, horny, lonesome, and depressed in the perfect synchronicity of ‘close friends’. Twenty years later, each one has different scales of time by which they weigh the importance of each passing moment: some are district collectors for whom the clock ticks each time the state government changes; others, now policemen, set their watches to the length of the commissioner’s tenure. Still others have become businessmen who mark time in the days it takes for their payments to arrive, while Ashraf waits on a footpath in Delhi, making medium-term plans with medium-type friends.

‘Medium-type friends are those who do not make chootiyas of each other. If I ask you to help me out, it is expected that you will, on the condition I actually need your help and am not asking you simply because I’m too lazy to help myself. And the same goes for when you need help. And even then, you won’t give me assistance. You’ll
lend
it to me. Get it? You’ll
lend
it; and I’ll
return
it. So it’s contractual. Dehadi friendship, that’s what it is—dehadi friendship where everything is out in the open and no one is making a chootiya out of anyone.

‘I need to get out of this city, Aman bhai; here I am in very bad company—sangat hi kharaab hai. I need to go to a city like Calcutta where even the dehadi mazdoors are family-type people, who come to work and then go home to sleep with their wives and kids… I mean they don’t sleep with their kids but you know what I mean…’ On and on Ashraf chatters.

‘I’m telling you, no fighting-shightng, no daaru-shaaru, no gaali-galoch, no randi-baazi…’

I really should be noting all of this down, but I am more interested in Kalyani. ‘No cursing-shursing, choda-chodi, jhagda-shagda…’ Even as Ashraf natters on, she bustles about—sometimes picking up one of the many children who clatter around the back of the room, sometimes giving Ashraf some water. At least ten different people come in, stare at me, talk to her in surreptitious whispers, and slip out silently. Still, Ashraf talks on…

When he finally concludes, I ask him if I can interview Kalyani.

‘Why?’ He appears annoyed that his life is not exciting enough to be the sole subject of my research.

‘Because she is the first woman I have met in Sadar.’

It’s not as if there aren’t any women in North Delhi—I have seen them on buses on the Ring Road, along the riverbank near what used to be Yamuna Pushta working class residential colony before it was demolished by the Municipal Corporation, in tiny tea shops in the mohallas of what used to be Sanjay Amar Colony before it was demolished by the corporation, in Nangla Maachi before it was demolished by the corporation, in LNJP before it was demolished by the corporation, and of course near the railway station. So they clearly exist; but not here in Sadar Bazaar. In Sadar, all the chaiwallahs are men, the waiters are men, the beedi sellers are men; the pavements are littered with male vegetable sellers, male jewellery salesmen, male tailors, and male cooks. Even the sari and blouse salespersons are men.

But Kalyani is undeniably a woman. ‘Not just any woman, Aman bhai, she is a business-type woman.’

‘You can ask her, but she will ninety per cent say no,’ says Ashraf with a surety that borders on smugness.

I ask Kalyani if I can interview her.

She says no.

Ashraf laughs to himself.

‘I’ll tell you her story, don’t worry.’ The whisky has made him magnanimous. ‘Kalyani has two businesses—daana and daaru.’

2

‘S
ide, side, side.’ The crowds looked up at the giant trucks tiptoeing along Naya Bazaar’s narrow gallis and obligingly ‘gave side’. It was three in the afternoon; the trucks weren’t supposed be here—they were allowed to enter the city only between 8 pm and 8 am. But the grain merchants of Naya Bazaar worked twenty-four hours a day: the police had been paid off, and business continued as it must. The police kept an eye on every truck that entered—each consignment meant a commission. The truck drivers kept an eye out for policemen—they had been given an exact amount of money for the cops; what they saved, they kept.

As soon as one truck pulled into the godown, it was set upon on all sides by a swarm of workers armed with vicious steel hooks that they used as handles to gain purchase on the soft gunny sacks. A chain was formed with two loaders frantically hacking at the cargo with their hooks and tossing the sacks down to an assembly line of palledars who carried the load into the godown. A foreman rushed about exhorting his team to unload before the police arrived. ‘Jaldi, jaldi, jaldi,’ he screamed, even as the hooks bit into the sacks’ soft flesh, scattering showers of grain. ‘Careful, careful, you chootiyas,’ he cautioned. ‘Don’t damage the goods.’

The driver gunned the engine even as the last bag of rice was thrown off, and the truck shouldered its way out of the market as quickly as it could.

As the truck left, a young woman emerged from a corner of the courtyard, darted across the parking bay, and swept up the mixture of grain, mud, and grit into a gunny sack in one smooth motion. Before anyone could react, she had slung the bag over her shoulder and disappeared into the jostling streets.

•

The first time she did it, it took Kalyani three days to sift through that one sack of grain and grit, from which she got three kilos of clean, fragrant basmati rice. A few months later, she was collecting between ten and fifteen kilos of rice a day which she sold every Wednesday at the weekly market on Koria Pull.

She was careful not to visit the same godown too often, but word invariably got around. The same team of palledars moved from godown to godown and spread the news of a fleet-footed young woman who had discovered yet another way to make an honest day’s living in Sadar Bazaar. The workers called her ‘chidiya’—the little bird who scratched around for grain and flew off when anyone approached. As her business grew, she slowly began hiring women from across the basti and paid them to clean the rice. A year later, Kalyani approached the godown owners in Naya Bazaar and offered them a flat fee for the right to collect rice, wheat, and pulses from their premises. Once the owners agreed, she hired a group of women to work as grain collectors—and prepared to get rich.

‘It’s all about control. To run a business you need control—over yourself. Kalyani has control. She spends the whole day in a house full of liquor. Can you imagine me doing that?’

Frankly, I can’t. I can’t imagine Ashraf spending more than five minutes in the proximity of a bottle before draining it.

‘See, that’s what I mean. Even with a business-type brain you need a control-type personality. Now look at Kalyani, and look at me.

‘Kalyani is always looking for ways to make money: that’s her personality. So am I, but I’m a mast maula, dil chowda, seena sandook, lowda bandook! A dancing adventurer, with my heart for a treasure chest and my penis for a gun.

‘People like us never have any money. The moment we earn some, we give to someone like Kalyani.’

Since the daana business now runs itself, Kalyani devotes a lot of her time to the daaru business—it’s much less work and the margins are much higher. The shack where we are sitting is a relatively new space; Kalyani moved in about a year and a half ago, after her house on the Yamuna bank was demolished as part of a slum clearance drive ordered by the Delhi High Court. The family moved to Sadar to be closer to her business and found a place right opposite a desi sharab theka.

Liquor vends in Delhi fall under two separate excise categories: L-2 licences meant for ‘English Wine and Beer’ shops that stock ‘Indian made foreign liquor’ like whisky, beer, rum, or vodka, and L-10 licences for desi sharab shops that stock country-made liquor like Hulchul, Toofan, and Mafia. This may seem a minor difference, but wine and beer shops are authorized to open at noon, while desi sharab thekas can only open after five in the evening. The idea is to discourage Delhi’s working class from drinking on the job, but instead, the policy forces drinkers like Ashraf to buy higher priced ‘English wine’ through the day before shifting to desi sharab after five.

It didn’t take long for Kalyani to spot the need for an off-hours desi sharab vend. One evening, she took some money out of her daana business and sent her husband to buy a crate of desi sharab at twenty-five rupees a quarter bottle and sold it the next day for thirty-five rupees a quarter bottle. It was more expensive than a licensed vendor, but cheaper than the English Wine and Beer shops.

Soon patrons began to arrive at all times of the day. Loaders, having loaded their trucks in time for the border closing at eight in the morning, showed up at nine and stayed till noon. Painters, like Ashraf, slathered on a layer of primer and stopped by for a drink while they waited for the foundation layers to dry. Through the day, Kalyani continued with her various other engagements: her clients entered and left from the daaru end of the tunnel, while her grain sorters used the daana entrance at the other end.

After a while, workers at Bara Tooti began coming to her during regular hours, even though Kalyani’s was much more expensive. Almost by accident, Kalyani had set up Bara Tooti’s first bar where mazdoors, beldaars, and mistrys could gather through the day, swap stories, and settle contracts over a few drinks.