Aman Sethi's A Free Man opens in Sadar Bazaar, Old Delhi. Sadar Bazaar is one of the city's many ugly markets, in which lanes get narrower till they are tunnels one man wide, staircases run dangerously high, and every window and ventilator is blocked with goods.
Like every part of Delhi, the markets have overlapping traces of history that have survived periodical fires and the haphazard reconstructions that follow. Of all these markets, Sadar Bazaar especially is so ugly that any newcomer in Delhi reels, wondering how the capital of India can look this bad.
Everyday beauty
But inside this market are the artisans and labourers who keep the city humming. Years after leaving Delhi, what most of us remember with affection are not the lavish gardens or the block-printed glamour at the film festivals, but Urmila, Chameli, Shyam Lal, Ram Avtar, and all those mistris and mazdoors who brought an everyday beauty to our lives while they themselves lived so close to the bone. The city with such an appalling vacuum of humanity at the top first became legible when we met the people in its construction sites, workshops and markets.
Without yanking our emotional strings, Aman Sethi draws a nuanced picture of such mazdoors and mistris in Delhi. He lets their lives unfold through plain dialogue, through hearsay, through their own tales and histories, through abrupt shifts in mood that seem to match the shifts in their fortunes, through inconsistencies and lies.
Many lives
Of the lot who assemble every morning to nurse their hangovers in Bara Tooti, the square named after 12 taps whose present whereabouts are a mystery, the labourer who most often talks to Sethi is the house painter Mohammad Ashraf. Ashraf has also been a butcher, a tailor, a slipper maker, a floor polisher and, before all that, a biology student. What he cherishes is his azadi , freedom. “The maalik owns our work,” he says. “He does not own us.”
His friend and fellow painter Lalloo once owned his own paratha cart and lost it all during a night of drunken oblivion. Munna came to Delhi because in sozzled confusion he lost a borrowed bicycle. Kaka lets the mazdoors drink his tea on credit, but he also “banks” a good bit of their money. Gaddu's bright idea for getting rich is to sell a kidney one day.
The young porter Rehaan reminisces about the chickens and lambs back on the family farm. Naturally, his get-rich scheme begins with the purchase of a single goat. Because heavy furniture is moved down the corridors of power, not just in godowns, Rehaan often goes into Parliament, though he can't get his journalist friend in.
And then there's Aman Bhai himself, wandering about Bara Tooti with his phone recorder, dutifully smoking pot and swallowing country liquor while gathering material for his book. He drinks at an illegal bar constructed out of tarpaulin and street smarts. He watches loaders at the Old Delhi railway station. He goes to the Rajan Babu TB hospital to admit Satish, “pavement dweller and lawaris case (without kin)”.
Racing towards extinction
All the while, the city's bastis are racing towards extinction, or at least decimation. It is the time of todh-phodh , the demolition. The Commonwealth Games have created new priorities for city officials, and they are clearing illegal constructions and whole neighbourhoods in which workers live. As they crack down on encroachments, they also frighten away all those overnight jobs that feed mazdoors like Ashraf: the balcony enclosure, the conversion of a garage into a bedroom, the extension of a shop over the footpath. House owners won't even paint their walls, lest that attract the eye of a newly zealous official.
It is the todh-phodh that ultimately puts a long intermission in Ashraf's story (let us hope it is not the end). Facing months of unemployment in Delhi, Ashraf hopes to resurrect old business ties in Calcutta.
Sethi travels with him to document the man's disappointments, his readjusted expectations, and eventually his treatment for multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Sethi closes his book with the timeline of Ashraf's life that he has pursued for five years. The timeline is still full of holes. Ashraf, as ever, asserts the right to tell his own story.
A Free Man;Aman Sethi, Random House, Rs 399.
