A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi

by Aman Sethi

  ‘But people also told us he was an honest man who would be a good tenant. People will say anything that comes into their heads.

  ‘People are chootiyas,’ he concludes.

  Of course, Ashraf knew all along that Taneja was not to be trusted. Because Ashraf knows everything. ‘I told Dr Hussain when they made out the lease: never trust Punjabis. But no one listens to me.’ Except for me it seems. I have been listening to Ashraf for two hours this morning, and haven’t got a word in edgeways.

  ‘Taneja was a smuggler. He ran an auto parts business out of a showroom on Exhibition Street, but he simply bought fake Chinese parts from the Nepal border and sold them at the same prices as the real thing. Once he got into Dr Hussain’s house he was never going to go away.

  ‘If I thought like you presswallahs think, I would probably say Taneja was the reason I ended up at Bara Tooti. He would probably find it really funny that after all these years, you and I, sitting here in Delhi, are talking about him.

  ‘Yes, he would. He was that kind of chootiya. Before I met Taneja—I was a good boy, studying first year biology at Magadh University, hoping to become some sort of officer. But Taneja didn’t send me here. Maybe I was coming all along; I just needed something to show me the way.’

  Ashraf first mentioned Taneja many months after I began plotting his route from Patna to Delhi.

  ‘So why did you leave Patna?’ I would ask with admirable persistence.

  ‘Kuch ho gaya tha, something happened,’ he would say dismissively before suddenly turning my attention to something else. ‘Look at that man negotiating with a contractor—that contractor is a very big man; some say he almost became a minister in Madanlal Khurana’s sarkar.

  ‘See that tree near the corner? That one with the poster? That’s Indira’s tree. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Why did you leave Patna, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘Something happened. See that man using that fine chisel—we call that an asula…’

  And so it would continue: me pointing my recorder at Ashraf and asking questions, Ashraf deflecting them by distracting me with chowk trivia: ‘You know why rickshaw pullers are usually Biharis? Because no one else can afford to be one; Biharis can live more cheaply than anyone else. I’m a Bihari, I know these things.’

  Occasionally, Ashraf would reward my persistence with a straight answer.

  ‘Taneja! Taneja, Taneja, Taneja… Taneja wanted Dr Hussain’s house. You may not know this, but in many towns there are people—harami types—who keep an eye out for houses like Dr Hussain’s: a house where a retired person’s middle-aged son has unexpectedly died; someone’s children have left for another city; a wife of fifty years has a heart attack. So the old man will say, “What will I do alone in this big house?” and that’s when they strike.’

  Taneja appeared one morning, soon after Dr Hussain’s only daughter and her husband had left for Hyderabad. By the afternoon he had convinced Dr Hussain to take him in as a tenant. In the evening, Ashraf was sent along to buy stamp paper to formalize the lease.

  ‘Bas, in two months Taneja refused to pay rent, and in the third month he tried to throw Dr Hussain out of his own house. That’s when the aasmani firing took place, when I fired the gun in the air.’

  In the fourth month Dr Hussain took Taneja to court.

  In the seventh month a car suddenly veered off the road and knocked Dr Hussain down when the old man was out on his evening walk. He was rushed to the Holy Family Hospital, but the doctors were pessimistic about his chances.

  ‘Even there he was surrounded by Punjabis—one Dr Bhatia. Taneja was also a Punjabi. All these Punjabis in Bihar—they were all united. One Punjabi will never cross another Punjabi. You should know… The moment I saw him, I knew he would try something—and he did. He stopped Dr Hussain’s heart medication.

  ‘How can you do that? You tell me, Aman bhai, would you stop his heart medication?’

  ‘No, Ashraf bhai. No, I wouldn’t. Also, I’m only half Punjabi. My grandfather insists he is actually Pathan.’

  ‘Hmm. You certainly look somewhat Pathan.’ But he isn’t going to forgive me just yet. ‘Sethi! What kind of name is Sethi?’

  ‘Well, it’s a Punjabi name, but my family…’

  ‘Sethi is a Punjabi name!’ he interrupts. ‘Deep down you are all Punjabis.’

  ‘An entrepreneurial race,’ he adds as an afterthought, ‘but very cunning. Not like us Biharis.’

  On the fourth day after the attack, Ashraf received a frantic phone call urging him to come to the hospital immediately. Dr Hussain had refused to take his medicines. Ashraf arrived to find a grimly determined Dr Hussain fending off all efforts to feed him. Ashraf held Dr Hussain’s hands and coaxed him into accepting a bowl of cornflakes. The old man sat up in bed for the first time since his admission and clenched Ashraf’s hands tightly—as if to ward off a spasm. Ashraf stood by the bed, talking as fast as he could in his most reassuring tone.

  ‘Cornflakes, Doctor saab—cornflakes and milk, warm milk. Cornflakes and warm milk, with sugar—just a little sugar. For energy, sugar gives us energy.’

  Talking faster and faster he wiped away the milk that had dribbled out of Dr Hussain’s mouth, assured him that the medicines were already working, that Dr Hussain was already looking much stronger. ‘I checked; your passport is still valid. Once you get out we’ll leave this place and go for a holiday to America. But for that you need to eat, Doctor saab, please eat. You need to swallow these pills, you need to drink enough water, you need to…’

  Dr Hussain waved his hand as if to silence Ashraf; his grip on Ashraf’s hands slowly slackened and a perfect stillness filled the room.

  Dr Hussain was buried in a quiet ceremony in Patna. There was no close male relative in the family, and so the body, which had to be washed as per custom, was bathed by Ashraf. The last rites were completed in the presence of the local maulvi, the shrouded figure was lowered into the grave, and laid on its right side in the direction facing Mecca.

  A few days after the funeral, a policeman accosted Ashraf on the street. ‘Taneja has not forgotten the firing. Be careful, Ashraf, there have been a lot of car accidents lately.’

  A month later, Mohammed Ashraf packed his clothes, his books, and his dissection kit and left Patna.

  ‘What about college, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘What about college, Aman bhai? I was so stressed that I forgot to register for my second year exams. Then, the house got sold. I said to myself, “Forget college, Ashraf. We need a roof over our heads.” My mother found a house in the jhuggi, I needed a job, so I dropped out.’

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Ashraf looks uncomfortable. Rather than quelling my curiosity, the story of Ashraf’s childhood has prompted a barrage of questions: How old were you? How did you get admission? Couldn’t you re-enroll? What did your mother think?

  On and on, I fired away till finally I made my first big mistake.

  ‘Are you sure you are talking about going to college and not school, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘What do you think? I may be a mazdoor, but I can tell the difference between school and college. I have sliced open frogs with my own hands.’

  ‘No, not for a minute am I suggesting… All I am saying is…’ But it is too late. Ashraf is very annoyed.

  For many weeks thereafter, Ashraf would intersperse his conversation with me with the occasional nugget of trivia. ‘This cigarette you are smoking, the active ingredient is nicotine. Nicotine is also used as pesticide. It is very bad for your health.’

  ‘Thank you, Ashraf.’

  ‘It’s fine. Your tea has—what was it?—coffee? No, no, caffeine. Too much caffeine is not good for your health either.’

  ‘That’s great, Ashraf bhai.’

  ‘I just remembered a lesson from my first year biology, that’s all. Funny how you remember these things all of a sudden.’

  4

  On a blazing afternoon in June, Ashraf and his cohorts retired to one of the
shady alleyways surrounding Bara Tooti. It was too hot to work, too hot to drink, too hot to sleep, and since there is little else to do at the chowk, mazdoors sat around swapping stories in a desultory, disinterested manner that went something like this:

  ‘It’s so hot, yaar…’

  ‘This is nothing. Once I was travelling between Lucknow and Kanpur in the month of May… That day it was so hot the floor of the bus was chaka-chak with sweat…’

  ‘Lucknow? I didn’t know you were from Lucknow…’

  ‘I’m not, I’m from Meerut…’

  ‘It must get really hot in Meerut…’

  ‘Not as hot as here…’

  ‘God, it’s so hot…’

  Most stories are travellers’ tales, beginning with a bus, truck, or train ride and ending with, ‘…and then I came to Bara Tooti, and it has been the same ever since.’

  Ashraf tells me one of his favourite stories—that of his first night in Delhi, when, for him, the city was still a mysterious place of freedom, camaraderie, and possibility.

  ‘I arrived on the late night train from Surat, Gujarat, around half past nine, at Old Delhi Railway Station. I had nothing on me. Absolutely nothing. One bundle of clothes and maybe two or three beedis.

  ‘On the train someone had said that in Delhi, the police harassed those who slept on railway platforms, so I thought I would sleep outside Jama Masjid. But the guard told me that the masjid was closed for the night. I slipped into one of the lanes near the masjid and I saw some people playing cards.

  ‘You should always ask permission before approaching a group of card players because if any money goes missing later, they will always blame it on you. So I said, “Bhaiya, I’m new to this place. Can I sleep somewhere around here?” They looked up. One of them said, “Have you eaten?” I shook my head. He pressed a five-rupee coin into my hand and pointed me towards a stall.

  ‘I ate, bought some beedis, unrolled my sheet, and fell asleep right there on the pavement.’

  When he awoke the next morning, the city was already wide awake. Last night’s card players had disappeared, as had the food stall, the beedi seller, and even the security guard. Only Jama Masjid remained where it had been last night, its onion-shaped domes reassuring in their solidity.

  Ashraf spent the first week exploring the city, searching out work and places to sleep. ‘And then I found Bara Tooti and it has been the same ever since,’ Ashraf concludes with a wry smile.

  ‘But if Delhi is such a boring place, why does anyone even come here?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s hard to say, Aman bhai. Everyone has their own special reasons, personal reasons, family reasons, emotional reasons. You can’t just go around asking people why they are here.

  ‘There is something Delhi can give you—a sense of azadi, freedom from your past. Everyone knows Delhi. Delhi has Qutub Minar, Red Fort, Old Fort. For every person who makes a bit of money in Delhi, an entire village arrives in search of work. So if you are leaving home, you might as well come to Delhi. Where else would a runaway run away to?’

  One summer afternoon, I met a painter called Idris who claimed that he came away to Delhi after he shot someone with a country-made pistol.

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘No, that was the biggest mistake. He survived and now he wants to kill me.

  ‘There are just two types of people here,’ he said, pulling me close. ‘Those who pull the trigger, and those who survive the shootout. Goli maar ke bhi log aate hain. Goli kha ke bhi log aate hain.’

  I looked past him at the gaggle of mazdoors fanning themselves in the heat. If only each one of them was a gunslinging mercenary on the run, I thought wistfully.

  •

  J.P. Singh Pagal is a man who tells Delhi stories better than most. He is short, slender, and hyperactive, with enormous eyes that constantly goggle, as if he were seeing the world for the first time.

  J.P. appeared one day at Bara Tooti, weaving through the crowd of exhausted mazdoors, pulling furiously on his chillum, exhaling plumes of bittersweet marijuana, interrupting conversations, pushing, shoving, joking, bitching, shouting, and laughing his curious ascending laugh.

  Tales of unexplained disappearances, stories of amazing good fortune, whispers of a strange dark creature that prowls the eastern borders of the city—J.P. Singh knew them all and had seen them all. ‘Watch out, it’s the half-man-half-machine-half-monkey-fully-dangerous Monkeyman. I was there, beedu, I saw him and I screamed! Just like the lady who dropped her pallu in fright; just like the man who killed his sister and threw her body in the gutter. I saw them all, haha, HaHa, HAHA!

  ‘And what’s this? A recorder? Gathering evidence?’

  ‘No, no, I’m just a reporter.’

  ‘You say you are a reporter. I say you are a policeman. Haha, HaHa, HAHA!’

  Nonetheless, he sat down beside me and reduced my cunning interview technique to shambles.

  Aman: So Ravi bhai, would you say that building a house is more art than a craft?

  Ravi: Er…

  J.P. Singh: Tell us, Ravi—you son of a randi. Is it an art or a craft? What are your views on quality versus quantity? Tell us, tell us, you chootiya. Did you know they found a condom in a Pepsi bottle? A used one! Haha. I put it there. And the fire in Meerut? I was carrying the matches. The woman whose clothes fell off in the Fashion Week, the bomb that went off, the film with Dino Morea and that londiya—I always forget her name…

  A: You made it?

  J.P.: (in all seriousness) I made it.

  My recordings from that day are littered with J.P.’s comments on me, my work, and everyone I met. He followed me around for hours as I walked the chowk asking undeniably boring questions. For instance, this clip on ‘How to build a house’:

  A: How do you pass time while building a house?

  Mazdoor: We work.

  A: But you think of things while you work?

  Mazdoor: Everyone does.

  A: What do you think of?

  Mazdoor: I think of work when I work.

  J.P., in the meantime, provided background chatter, humming around my ears like an irate wasp. As I sought new insights into the condition of labour, he distracted my subjects by passing on news—‘Dino Morea’s new movie is called Raaz. It’s a hit!’; handing out insults—‘Arre chootiya, answer the question;’ and spreading paranoia—‘You see those security cameras over there? There, you chootiya, up there. It’s recording your every move, it has a microphone that tapes what you say. You see that small shop behind it? That’s where the riot police lie resting. A word from the control room and they will burst out with sticks and guns to hit you and shoot you and beat you into pulp.’

  Elsewhere, when I asked a man about his favourite building:

  J.P.: You know of the Taj Mahal?

  Mazdoor: Yes.

  J.P.: Did you know Shah Jahan cut off the hands of everyone who worked on it?

  M: No.

  J.P.: Do you know if it still happens around here?

  M: No…

  J.P.: Trust me, it happens.

  When I finally gave up, we sat down for a smoke: me with my cigarettes—no more beedis; after a year in Bara Tooti, I realized being one of the boys is an experiment fraught with peril—and he with his chillum. Time passed. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and lit another. I felt I should ask J.P. a few questions—he would be great for the book—but I couldn’t bring myself to. But what if I never saw him again? Suddenly I was exhausted.

  J.P. Singh leaned over and handed me a photograph. Shot in a studio, it captured a young, dashing J.P., astride a stationary motorcycle arranged against a painted backdrop that seemed to be whizzing past. He looked happy; a shapely feminine hand rested on his shoulder. From the angle of the handle, I deduced she must be sitting sideways ‘ladies-style’, also facing the camera. I ‘deduced’, as the photograph had been neatly torn in two, excising J.P.’s companion (and the rear wheel of the bike) from the frame. When I asked him about the photogra
ph, he snatched it from my hand. ‘The world changed, and so did we,’ he sang mournfully and slipped away into the evening’s gathering darkness.

  J.P. was right; the world was changing, an imperceptible hysteria was pulsing through the city. For as long as I can remember, Delhi looked like a giant construction site inhabited by bulldozers, cranes, and massive columns of prefabricated concrete; but the rubble has masked the incredible changes and dislocations of factories, homes, and livelihoods that occurred as Delhi changed from a sleepy north Indian city into a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower. Working class settlements like Yamuna Pushta, Nangla Machi, and Sanjay Amar Colony were flattened by government demolition squads to make way for broader roads, bigger power stations, and the Commonwealth Games.

  Before he settled down on a footpath in Bara Tooti, Ashraf lived in Sanjay Amar Colony, a settlement on the western bank of the Yamuna river.

  ‘When I arrived in Delhi, I did all kinds of work—I worked in a meat shop, I travelled to Punjab with a construction crew, I did mazdoori at Bara Tooti. I did anything I could find and slept wherever I found space.

  ‘Then one day, I found work with a Masterji who stitched sports sets. Some company gave him pre-cut pieces of cloth which we stitched into shorts and vests.’

  It was a big company that outsourced its stitching to hundreds of workers across Delhi and exported the finished products to Dubai. Every month a company representative would come to Masterji’s tiny two-room house-cum-workshop, pick up the stitched garments, and drop off fresh supplies for the coming month.

  ‘There were just two of us with our sewing machines, Masterji and I. For two, maybe three years, we lived together, ate together, and worked together. The work was easy, my clothes were always neat, clean, and well tailored. It was great.’

  Then in 2004, a bulldozer drove up to Sanjay Amar Colony and razed it to the ground.

  ‘We had heard of demolition drives across the city, but we never thought it would happen to us,’ Ashraf says. In the first drive, more than 150,000 homes were demolished. Eventually, about 350,000 houses would be levelled as part of a beautification drive launched by a cabal of government agencies.