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

by Aman Sethi

  ‘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

  ‘Side, 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 contrac
ts over a few drinks.

  On still summer evenings, when the oppressive closeness of the jhuggi became impossible to bear, she would roll up one entire side of the tent so that patrons could watch trains as they shunted up and down the railway tracks. On winter nights, the crowded shack exuded the warm, cosy glow of whisky and company.

  Soon Kalyani cut a deal with the local liquor vend to supply to her in bulk amounts and came to an agreement with the local policemen. Kalyani was an ardent supporter of the Delhi Police—law enforcement was necessary for a favourable investment climate. If the police didn’t harass people drinking on the streets, why would people come to Kalyani’s?

  ‘We wouldn’t. Well, maybe I would, because Kalyani is now a friend, but ninety per cent people would not come.’

  ‘What sort of friend is she, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘No, Aman bhai, she is a married woman—shaadi-shuda. She also has kids—three of them!’

  ‘So? Maybe she secretly despises her husband and wants to leave him.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. I have met him several times.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you should let that stop you. I think she is a great girl.’

  ‘In that case I think you should fuck her. Just show her your press card; I’m sure that would impress her.’

  Ashraf continues to protest vehemently, but I am convinced that he should try his luck with Kalyani; if nothing else, at least for the sake of my story. Looking back at my notes, I find I have been needlessly sensitive about certain issues—primarily sex. There is no sex in my story—a lacuna that could easily be addressed if Ashraf has some.

  Ashraf is at least in his late thirties. Does he not have sex?

  ‘In Dilli? No. Absolutely not. No chance, never. Ekdum NO.’ Rarely have I seen Ashraf exhibit a resolve so steady. So has he ever had sex at all?

  ‘Of course. Multiple times on several occasions. Just not in Dilli, it’s not safe. I know these things. I once whitewashed a chodai khana on GB Road; there I saw everything. Some poor chootiya will ask, “Kitna?” and the randi will assure him, “Hundred rupees,” or something. But once he’s in, they will take everything he has. Everything—watch, belt, rings, money, everything! And you can’t even report these people to the police.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because then you’ll go straight from the chodai khana into the police thana, Aman bhai, and it’s hard to tell which is worse.’

  ‘So what’s a good place?’

  ‘Bombay. Calcutta is not bad, but Bombay is the best. Kamatipura. Get off at Grant Road Railway Station, walk towards Bhindi Bazaar. My favourite was this girl in Arab Galli—her father walked with a limp. I visited her every Tuesday and paid between fifty and a hundred rupees depending on her mood.’

  ‘When were you in Bombay?’

  ‘Many years ago, before I came here.’

  ‘Why Tuesday?’

  ‘Tuesday means half day at the shop.’

  ‘What shop?’

  ‘The meat shop where I worked.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘I don’t know, Aman bhai—it’s not like I was marrying her.’

  3

  ‘PHAAT! On the cheek! On my cheek, he pasted one. Phaat.’ Arm pulled back past his shoulder Ashraf mimics the action, a crisp straight-elbowed arc that almost lands on my cheek.

  If every city that Ashraf has visited has had a single defining moment, then in Bombay, that moment is ‘the slap’.

  ‘It was like “Phaat”, not two quick phut-phut-type smacks. No, it was a chaanta—phataack.’

  We are still drinking at Kalyani’s. I have finished my raisins and, to Kalyani’s relief, have poured myself a large drink. ‘She gets nervous when people don’t drink,’ Ashraf says, as he warms to his tale.

  To deflect my queries about his sex life, Ashraf has offered me what he thinks might be a comparable anecdote about his time in Bombay—this being the first I have heard of him having lived in that city. I am still trying to build a year-wise timeline of Ashraf’s life but as far as Ashraf is concerned, he was brought up in Patna and is now in Delhi—everything else can only be accessed via oblique enquiries. As a result, every interview is a bit like playing a word association game. Kalyani to sex to Bombay whorehouse to slapping.

  ‘You got slapped in a whorehouse, Ashraf bhai?’ I’m laughing through the fixed grimace I acquire when exposed to desi alcohol.

  ‘No, yaar. Not in the whorehouse, in the meat shop. Kuch ho gaya tha. Something happened.’

  Up to this point, I had assumed that the meat shop was the whorehouse, but I’m clearly mistaken.

  ‘Kya ho gaya? What happened? Where were you? Tell me from the beginning.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing—so I get off the train…’

  ‘Why were you on the train, where were you going?’

  ‘Aman bhai…’

  ‘Arre, at least tell me the basic facts.’

  ‘You take the mazaa out of every story. Where’s your glass? Oye Kalyani, where’s Aman bhai’s glass? Pour another one for Aman bhai.’

  •

  Submerged in the depths of a train compartment, a slender figure struggled through the crush of commuters on the Monday morning Virar Slow. As the train pulled into Malad Station Mohammed Ashraf burst through the crowd and scurried down the road.

  Late night, last night—kuch ho gaya, kuch ho gaya. He can explain, they will understand, something happened, some things happen.

  Slip, trip, jump, slide—the long road past the church had never looked so long. Up the slope, up the slope, almost there, almost there, panting, gasping, ‘Salaam walekum, Maalik.’

  ‘That’s when he slapped me. In front of everyone.’

  ‘Phaaat!’ Onomatopoeia is one of Ashraf’s many talents.

  ‘A slap like that, Aman bhai, that’s a full stop. Once you get slapped like that in front of everyone, you can never work in there again. Your izzat is gone; no one will ever give you respect, and a head kasai cannot function without respect.’

  The story started with Mohammed Ashraf installed as the head kasai of Fauji Halal Shop in Malad whose proprietor was a Javed Qureshi.

  The head kasai decides everything: who does what, who sits where, and also other things like when the knives should be changed, how often the floor should be mopped. In a chicken shop, the floor must always be clean. If the floor is clean, the customer will think everything is clean. All these things must be decided in advance because once the day begins, there is no time.

  Apart from cleanliness, the other important thing is speed. The head kasai sets the speed of the shop. Speed is crucial—the more time a customer spends in a shop, the dirtier he is likely to think it is. The customer is like a child; he must be distracted immediately. The kasai should grab the chicken and keep asking questions—‘Is it for curry? Or kebabs?’, ‘Big pieces or small?’, ‘Do you want the liver?’—all to keep the customer engrossed. Once the customer’s attention starts to wander, he will stare closely at the kasai’s hands, he will wonder how often the kasai washes them, he may notice the fly buzzing around inside the glass display case, maybe a cockroach will run across the floor. By the time he gets his chicken, he will be so full of sights, sounds, and smells that he may never return to the shop again.

  In a fast shop, the head kasai is like a hungry machine: shredding, cutting, slicing, and chopping everything that is placed before him. His assistants function like boiler room boys—shovelling fuel so that the furnace never goes cold. Customers step up to the cage and pick their chicken; the assistant tags the chicken with a plastic counter, beheads it quickly and cleanly, and flings it into the dibba to cool down. The kasai reaches in, pulls out the chicken, calls out the number, asks the customer how he wants it cut, and hands over the cut bird—all in less than ten minutes.

  ‘In full form, I could skin, cut, clean, and dice a whole chicken in about two minutes. I had studied biology up to first year college so I knew exactly how to cut the bird. I
only had to learn to undress the chicken, which is easy once you know the basic technique.’

  ‘What’s that, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘Kapde utarna, Aman bhai, the technique for undressing is always the same—be it a goat, a bird, or a woman. Start from the limbs and work your way inwards and upwards. Make cuts near the legs, tear the skin away from each side, and then reach up to the neck and peel from the head downwards.

  ‘Once I had perfected my skinning technique, it was only a matter of time before I became a head kasai. No one else in the shop had my kind of skill.’ Ashraf reaches out for the Everyday to replenish his glass and mine. ‘You will not believe me, Aman bhai. I was a brilliant kasai—one of the best in Bombay. I could make one kilo of chicken into one and a half kilos simply by skinning it.’

  The trick, as I learnt later, is fairly common among most experienced butchers. It takes a while to master, but once learnt—like any good conjuring trick—it is impossible for the audience to spot.

  ‘The first step is to strip the chicken of its feathers and skin it as carefully as you can. Then dip it in the rinsing tub and wash it thoroughly. Now, everyone washes the chicken; but before washing make two deep incisions just above the thigh, where the leg joins the abdomen, and make sure the water is slightly warm. Then you knead the chicken legs in a smooth pumping action—pumping is crucial—and the flesh soaks up the water just like a sponge. It only takes a few seconds, while the customer stands there marvelling at the time you have taken to wash his chicken. By the time you cut it, the chicken will look pinker, firmer, healthier, and even its head will swell up to twice its size. The customer will be happy with the juicy, healthy chicken, your maalik will be happy with the extra money, and you will be happy because he will make you head kasai.’