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

by Aman Sethi

  I suspect Ashraf sees himself as that man, the sort who jumps onto a train on a whim and is carried away to a faraway place. Ashraf loves the railways; he can talk about them forever. Stations, train numbers, timings, junctions, Ashraf remembers them all in a manner reminiscent of my grandfather’s mental catalogue of food prices from the 1930s. Such information is important for a man who spends his idle hours thinking of trains to jump on to.

  What about tickets?

  ‘You don’t need tickets. If the checker doesn’t come, you travel for free. If you get caught, you simply go to jail.’ Jail, according to Ashraf—who has never been to one—is an acceptable way of spending three months of a life in exchange for a short train ride. ‘They don’t make you work if you are in for less than six months,’ he claims. ‘All you do is eat and roam the premises.’

  His audience at Kaka’s tea shop is unconvinced. ‘You have to drink from the same tap that you use to wash your latrine!’ bellows Kaka, whose face, I have just realized, has acquired a crimson hue after years of sitting next to a lit stove. ‘Have you ever drunk from a latrine?’

  ‘Impossible!’ Ashraf is aghast at the callousness of the state. ‘Just last week the government distributed chlorine tablets worth ten thousand rupees at the chowk. For free! How can they make you drink from the latrine in jail?’

  ‘They make you drink from the latrine,’ Kaka insists as he throws a fistful of sugar into what looks like a pot full of liquid mud.

  Ashraf retreats into a contemplative silence. He and I have arrived at a temporary truce regarding his past; I shall stop pestering him for details on the condition that he will bring them up himself at some point.

  In the meantime, I look around for possible interview subjects. It is about six in the evening and we are sitting at Kaka’s tea shop—again! Munna’s story notwithstanding, I am bored of Bara Tooti and exhausted by its curious crowds, frustrated by their tendency to pick up my voice recorder and say ‘Is this your mobile phone?’ followed by ‘So everything I say is being recorded?’

  Yes, it is! Not only is it being recorded, I will be forced to listen to it when I review my tapes, forced to transcribe it in the hope that someone would have said something memorable, and forced to relive this moment when I review my transcripts. Over the last few months, my tapes are full of conversations just like these. In some I am ineffectually explaining how it doesn’t have a tape but it can be converted into a CD; elsewhere I concede that though the paanwallah has a cellphone that doubles up as a recorder, my phone does not record and my recorder cannot phone. ‘It’s like using a saw to hammer a nail,’ I point out rather brightly in one transcript.

  ‘Ashraf bhai, can we please go somewhere else? I cannot have another cup of this tea.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the tea?’

  ‘It’s too sweet.’

  ‘True. Kaka, your tea is bakwaas. Aman bhai says it’s too sweet.’

  ‘It’s because of you bhenchods. All day long you chootiyas smoke ganja and then complain that the chai is pheeka! So I put more sugar, and then Aman bhai says it’s too sweet, then Rehaan says it’s expensive, then Lalloo says there isn’t enough milk and you, you gaandu, say, “This time make mine special.” No chai for anyone today!’

  ‘Araam se, Kaka. I’m sorry.’ I smile my best ‘I’m one of the boys, but not really’ smile.

  ‘We could go to Kalyani’s,’ Ashraf suggests.

  ‘What’s Kalyani’s?’

  ‘It’s a bit like…it’s a bit like a permit room but without a permit.’

  ‘You mean an illegal bar?’ As a law-abiding denizen of South Delhi, I am instantly and constantly impressed by the illegality and ingenuity of the North. Having dismissed Ashraf’s concerns about money with an imperious wave of my hand, we are finally off on an adventure into the depths of Sadar Bazaar. Well, at least I am; Ashraf just wants to get drunk.

  We head down towards Teli Bara Road, past several buildings that I once romantically assumed were ruined havelis but which turned out to be perfectly functioning godowns. On my right I notice a small cinema (‘Must watch a film in the hall,’ say my notes from that day).

  ‘Do you watch films, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No interest.’

  Buoyed by the prospect of a drink at Kalyani’s, Ashraf prattles on about the government as we walk through the market. Having dispensed with the railways, he is now telling me about the Delhi Excise Department, a department he often thinks about.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ he declares. ‘See, Sheila Dikshit knows that there are homeless people in Delhi. How do we know that Sheila knows? Because every winter, the Delhi government sets up shaadi-style shamiana tents in Sadar Bazaar for mazdoors to sleep in. For free! Why would people leave their homes to sleep in a shamiana? They won’t. Which means the sarkar knows that mazdoors are homeless.

  ‘Now consider the Head of Excise. He knows that there is homelessness, he also knows that full ninety per cent of Delhi’s desi sharab is sold in Sadar Bazaar area—the same area where Sheila puts up shelters for the homeless! What does this mean, Aman bhai?’

  ‘It means these people drink themselves out of house and home?’

  ‘No! Don’t make a joke of this, everyone knows that isn’t true. They drink it in the streets! So the Excise Department is making us break the rule! Otherwise they should just not sell it!’

  ‘Would you prefer they didn’t?’

  ‘No, no,’ Ashraf backtracked in some haste. ‘I’m just saying I don’t understand it.

  ‘Neither do I, Ashraf bhai.’

  Drinking on the street is fun occasionally, but it loses colour really fast. Everyone is just a little bit nervous and so ends up drinking much faster than they would like to. Most mazdoors simply knock the bottle back in quick gulps and then wander about Bara Tooti in a daze. After seven, the chowk has a different feel to it—a rough edge exposed by the alcohol. A few fights break out, people intervene, and then the police show up.

  The last time we drank out on the pavement, Ashraf almost got us both beaten up and arrested. The evening had started pleasantly enough—Ashraf and Lalloo were drinking quarters of the Mafia brand—Everyday, the chowk favourite, was not available and Shokeen, Ashraf’s ‘number two favourite’, was sold out for the day—I was nursing a small drink myself, while Rehaan was telling us about the time an outbreak of the Ranikhet disease at his farm back home had forced him to kill off his entire flock of chickens. ‘I grabbed each bird by the neck and forced a shot of rum down its throat. They ran around for a few minutes and then suddenly they became very still.’

  ‘How did you know they were dead?’ I asked. ‘Maybe the alcohol just knocked them out.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it did. So then I dug a deep hole and buried them.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Well, asleep. Buried them asleep,’ said Rehaan, folding his hands under his head like a pillow as if to emphasize the humanity of this avian genocide.

  Thwack! A steel-tipped lathi struck the bottle of Mafia with inch-perfect accuracy, scattering shards of glass across the pavement. We looked up to see a giant policeman glowering at us, his stick poised for another strike.

  ‘Bhenchodon! Who said you could drink on this pavement? Go drink in your house!’

  ‘Where else can we drink, Constable saab? The chowk is our house; this pavement is our drawing room.’ Ashraf had been drinking since six.

  ‘Chootiya, I’ll make the police station your bedroom if you don’t shut up right now. What’s under that shawl?’ Whack, whack, whack—the lathi struck the pavement on either side of Lalloo.

  ‘Police saab, we made a mistake, forgive us, forgive us, forgive us.’ Lalloo stretched out on the pavement, his hands alternately touching the constable’s shoes and covering his own head to ward off further blows.

  ‘And you? Who are you? Who are you?’ The lathi waved in my direction.

  ‘He’s from the pr
ess!’

  Thanks, Ashraf, why don’t you give him my home address and telephone number as well.

  ‘What are you doing here? Encouraging this sort of illegal behaviour?’

  ‘He is from the press; he can go wherever he wants!’ It was Ashraf again. He was talking too much now. ‘Whenever he wants! However he wants.’ Shut up, Ashraf, shut up! Please just shut up!

  ‘I am interviewing them, officerji,’ I explained, standing up and adopting what I hoped was a professorial air. ‘This is an important part of my research.’

  It took another fifteen minutes to resolve the matter, with no help from Mohammed Ashraf who piped up every time the constable showed signs of calming down. ‘You tell us where to drink! Should we drink in your thana then? I’ll come every day at six o’clock.’

  Fortunately, Rehaan and Lalloo shut him up. I smoothened the constable’s ruffled feathers and sent him on his way. ‘I’m warning you,’ he said as he walked off. ‘Don’t mix with this lot. There is a cell waiting for them in the lock-up—you’ll get thrown in as well.’

  Ashraf was incandescent. ‘Why didn’t you flash your press card and tell him to fuck off?’

  ‘Oh really? What was I supposed to tell him? “Hi, I’m from the press, so why don’t you fuck off while I break the law and drink in the open with my friends?”’

  ‘All of you are the same. In front of the police, tumhari phat jaati hai—you get fucked!’

  ‘Shut up, Ashraf, I’m going home.’

  •

  It is to escape the tyrannies of the officials of the Excise Department and the evil henchmen in the Delhi Police that Ashraf now leads me to ‘a secret place that everyone knows’. Somewhere in Sadar Bazaar, a low-slung tarpaulin worm sprawls lazily along the footpath. From a distance it appears to be a consignment of material waiting to be loaded onto an arriving truck but on closer examination reveals itself as a tunnel-like hut fronted entirely by interlocking sheets of cardboard and ply. At one end, a heavy wooden blanket masks a sturdy wooden door on which Ashraf now gently knocks. ‘This is Kalyani’s—the secret place,’ he says. ‘Don’t mention the location in your book.’

  Originally a series of individual rooms divided by thatch and plywood partitions, the structure has since had its inner walls knocked down to create a hall about twenty feet long and about seven feet high. While the road-facing wall of Kalyani’s is an impregnable assemblage of wood, cardboard, and tarpaulin, the far wall has been folded up, offering much-needed ventilation and a pleasing view of a set of railway tracks. ‘This is Kalyani’s,’ begins Ashraf somewhat unnecessarily, ‘and that is Kalyani.’

  ‘Ashraf,’ Kalyani greets him with genuine enthusiasm even as she appraises me with some suspicion. She puts her head to one side and stares at me like an annoyed hen, an impression heightened by her sharp nose, her light, bobbing gait, and her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun that sits high on her almost perfectly spherical head. She is slender, about thirty-five years old, and speaks, like Ashraf, with a soft Bihari accent. ‘This is Aman bhai. He’s a friend of mine—he is okay.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Ashraf.’ She pours him a steep glass of Everyday. ‘Does he drink?’ For a second I hesitate, only to be revisited by the memory of an Everyday hangover that felt like a kick to the head, and politely refuse. She gives me a look of pity with just a trace of contempt and hands me a handful of raisins. ‘Chaba le,’ she says caustically, as she slips out through a fold in the wall.

  As I chew on raisins, Ashraf goes about finishing his half bottle of Everyday. Made from the finest commonly available ingredients, Everyday whisky isn’t for everyone. New recruits often shun this intoxicating brew, in favour of more bombastic brands like Hulchul that shakes the very foundations of a man’s being; Jalwa Spiced Country Liquor that speaks of youth, fire, and passion; Toofan, infused with the pent-up vigour and vitality of an impending storm; and Ghadar Desi that is a perfect antidote to colonial oppression. Enclosed in a squarish, clear-glass bottle, the name printed across in simple bilingual lettering, Everyday makes no such promises, its prosaic name serving as a reminder of an incontrovertible truth: Everyday—for those who crave it every day, day after day.

  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 assassina
tion, 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.