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

by Aman Sethi

  ‘So what happened that day, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘That’s what I’m coming to. Listen.

  ‘One Saturday, maybe six months after I became the head kasai, I went out somewhere with my friends. We had a few drinks, it got very late, and I couldn’t make it back to the shop the next day. Sunday is always the busiest day of the week; in Bombay, the day when the menfolk buy the meat for the house. The women will buy the vegetables, but the men buy the meat. It is the only thing they buy—and Sunday everyone has a holiday from office.’

  That day, the queue stretched from the entrance of the shop all the way to the church down the road. Ashraf estimates that Qureshi, the owner, lost between five and seven thousand rupees that day. ‘Easily, kum se kum. Not to mention what it would take to win back all the business he lost that day.

  ‘So when I arrived on Monday—that too ten minutes late, he slapped me—full on the face, in front of everyone…and bas, it was over. I turned around and never went back to the shop again.’

  ‘You could have waited for his temper to cool and then gone back, no?’

  ‘I could. But I didn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This is temporary kaam, Aman bhai. If my heart is in it, I will say sorry and listen to the maalik’s insults and take his blows and slaps. But when my heart isn’t in it? I won’t. The maalik owns my work, Aman bhai, he doesn’t own me. Who is he to slap anyone? And what will I get with his forgiveness?’

  ‘Your job for one, Ashraf bhai.’

  ‘I don’t need a job like that.’

  ‘So then?’

  ‘So then I left Bombay. Once I had left Patna—I left my mother, my brother, my cousins, my friends, my life—what was the difference between Delhi and Bombay? Bombay and Calcutta? I didn’t leave my home to get slapped by someone like that, Aman bhai.’

  ‘So why did you leave home, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘That’s a story for another day. I did some mazdoor work in Bombay for a few days, then someone told me there was lots of work in Delhi. So I took a train to Surat, and from there to Punjab. I spent a month in Haryana and then one day I showed up at Old Delhi Railway Station.’

  ‘So what did you do when you came here?’

  ‘I met a bunch of chootiyas at Bara Tooti.’

  ‘Kalyaaaaniii, can we have some more?’ And the bottle of Everyday continued its dizzying orbit.

  •

  ‘Why are you doing this, Aman bhai?’ Ashraf wonders as we stumble cross-eyed through Teli Bara.

  ‘Doing what, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘Why are you spending all this time and money getting drunk with lafunters like us? What can we teach you?’

  ‘I’m trying to write a book.’

  ‘But who will want to read it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose my friends will buy it and maybe a few people interested in Delhi.’

  ‘But will you make any money?’

  ‘Well, I’ve already made some money.’

  ‘How much money?’

  ‘Enough to buy a laptop.’

  ‘Oh good.’ Relieved that I, like everyone else, have found a way to make just enough money off Sadar Bazaar, Ashraf stops at a tiny roadside shrine under a tree. ‘Mata ki kasam, Aman bhai, you will make lots of money.’

  ‘So will you, Ashraf bhai.’

  ‘And Lalloo—even if he is only my medium-type friend, he is my only friend, Aman bhai. My only friend. And Rehaan too.’

  ‘And Kaka too.’

  ‘We will all be rich, Aman bhai.’

  ‘Yes, Ashraf, some day we will all be rich.’

  4

  The morning after the drunken night at Kalyani’s I have decided it is finally time to sit down with Ashraf and sketch out a timeline of his life. I have a vague idea of the major events, but not a clear sense of the arc of his life. I’ve looked back at my notes and the years don’t seem to add up. Either Ashraf is only thirty years old, or there is a considerable chunk of his life still missing. This will be a no-holds-barred interview where no subject would be too sensitive or personal.

  My efforts are complicated by the fact that this morning, Ashraf is drunk. Not drunk-drunk in the unsteady, slurring, and hiccuping fashion, but drunk in an organized and matter-of-fact way—the sort of drunkeness that comes at the end of a cycle he once described to me in his meticulous fashion.

  It goes something like this:

  Time: 6 pm

  Money: About three hundred rupees between the two of them.

  Ashraf and Lalloo have just finished work. The shop’s bright pink, still-wet walls have the velvety texture of a wedding cake. The shopkeeper is happy with their work. He has paid them without complaint.

  The desi sharab shop is open for business. Ashraf and Lalloo buy a half each of Everyday for fifty rupees apiece, and another quarter each for twenty-five rupees apiece.

  Time: 11 pm

  Money: About one hundred rupees

  The half bottles are over. Fifty rupees have been spent on something, but on what exactly? Ashraf isn’t sure. There was some food—boiled eggs, maybe a roti or two? With dal. If there was roti, there must have been dal. Possibly a cup of tea. Six rupees were spent on squishy packets of water—that is certain.

  The pauwas, or quarter bottles, are still intact; Ashraf keeps them in his breast pocket. He keeps the money in his shoes. He wraps his shoes in his pants. He puts his pants under his head—like a pillow. He throws a shawl over himself.

  Time: 2 am, maybe later

  Money: Indeterminate

  The fever-like hold of Everyday breaks. Ashraf wakes up with a start. He is sweating profusely. He is desperately thirsty. He staggers across to a leaky tap down the road and drinks in long, deep gulps. He returns to his spot to find Lalloo awake and in a similar state. It’s impossible to sleep; the flickering street lamp gives Ashraf a headache. He can feel the pavement tremble below him. Somewhere underground, something is stirring. Is the Metro still under construction?

  Lalloo suggests they crack open one of the quarter bottles. Ashraf agrees. Half an hour later, they have finished both bottles. Sleep arrives with the suddenness of a road accident.

  Time: 7:30 am

  Money: Twenty rupees

  Some maderchod has stolen the money. Lalloo still has some left, but Ashraf’s shoes have been picked clean. Ashraf is sick. The alcohol has made him woozy. Kaka is sympathetic, he offers them tea on credit. They meet Rehaan at the tea shop. Rehaan has another twenty rupees. The thekas haven’t opened yet; it’s way too early. They walk down to Kalyani’s. She takes thirty-five rupees and gives them only a quarter to split between them. Her tea is free, though.

  Time: 9:30 am

  Money: Five rupees

  Five rupees buys two rotis and some dal. They now have no money at all. They sit at the chowk trying to look sober and employable. Ashraf has brought out the lucky charm that he saves for situations like this: the condom, or ‘kandome’ as he calls it.

  The kandome is a broad, heavy brush with long, thick bristles encrusted with paint. The bright red handle is solid wood and fits just right. It is the most useless brush Ashraf owns: it’s too heavy and soaks up too much paint.

  ‘I bought it when I was just starting out. It looks like a brush a professional would use.’

  A well-stocked bag is a sign of tajurba, experience. A maalik likes a workman with impressive-looking tools. At the chowk, where safediwallahs are arranged like mannequins in a shop window, the maalik is drawn to the one with five, six, seven, brushes in his bag. He thinks this man is a true karigar; he has a different brush for each surface. It’s not a brush, it’s a badge of honour.

  ‘It’s just like a kandome, Aman bhai. On TV you may stand next to Shabana Azmi and promise to use it, but you know you never will.’

  Time: 1:30 pm

  Money: Hundred rupees

  The kandome has protected them. They are lucky to have found this job—a small shop beyond Mithai Pull towards Baraf Khana. It is luncht
ime, the maalik has agreed to give them fifty rupees each for lunch. He will deduct it from the money he will pay them in the evening. A plate of chana kulcha each sets them back ten rupees. The desi sharab theka is still shut: it opens only at five. But the English store has been open for an hour and a half; it doesn’t keep Everyday, so they settle for rum at seventy rupees for an addha.

  Time: 6 pm

  Money: Two hundred and twenty rupees

  Ashraf and Lalloo have just finished work. The desi sharab theka is open for business.

  Ashraf’s appetite for work and alcohol varies inversely. The more he works, the less he drinks; he eats better, his face fills out, he gets his salt-and-pepper hair coloured boot-polish black, and he spouts irreverent verses. This virtuous feedback loop continues till work runs out, at which point Ashraf and Lalloo drink away the money they have saved over weeks of work. Ashraf’s cheeks start to hollow, he stops shaving, the hair dye fades away.

  Today, his hands are trembling and his hair looks like it has been trimmed with garden shears.

  ‘At what point in the cycle are you now, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘I don’t know, Aman bhai. But you ask your questions, don’t worry.’ Ashraf rubs his temples; he really does look very sick, but I am determined to chalk out the timeline. It is unlikely that Ashraf will work today; it takes at least a day to recover from this sort of drinking, so I might as well use this time.

  ‘When did you get to Delhi, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘Not sure, some years ago.’

  ‘Which year—1999, 2000, 2001?’

  ‘Which year is it now?’

  ‘What are your earliest memories, Ashraf bhai? Do you remember any events—riots, floods, drought?’

  ‘I remember, in school… I was quite senior then. I was cycling to Grace Ma’am’s early one morning with the newspaper. Back then I could still read some English. Stopped outside her house. I remember handing her the paper—it was The Times of India, Patna edition—and her drowsiness giving way to sheer panic when she distractedly glanced at the headlines.

  ‘Ashraf? What are you doing here? You must go home. You must go home!’

  ‘Why, Grace Ma’am? Is there no school today?’

  ‘Ashraf!’ She was getting hysterical now. ‘Go home. Go Home.’

  ‘But why?’

  She held up the paper. ‘Indira is Dead!’ ‘Indira is dead!’ She was shaking now, crying. ‘Please go home. God knows what will happen. Indira is DEAD!’

  Ashraf used to cycle down to Grace Ma’am’s twice a day. Once in the mornings to drop off The Times of India and once in the evenings with the Hindi papers. She couldn’t read the latter, which was half the problem. That, according to Ashraf, is when he became a ‘complete harami’.

  Grace Ma’am had a secret. She taught moral science and mathematics at a missionary school, but she played the lottery. She didn’t smoke, or drink; she wasn’t married, had no kids. She needed to do something, so she played lottery. Kalpataru—that was her favourite brand. Everyone has their own brands that they think are ‘lucky’ brands. But a lucky brand of lottery tickets is like a lucky pack of cigarettes—nonsense, all of it.

  ‘Ashraf, put fifty rupees in Kalpataru,’ she would say in her funny, slightly accented Hindi. She was a ‘Madrasi from Kerala’. She was a nice lady, but never won anything. Ashraf used to sell her tickets anyway—he was a real business-type child. Early mornings he would sell boiled eggs and bread, in the day he would go to school, and in the afternoons he would buy lottery tickets for thirty paise each and sell them for fifty paise. As a kid, Ashraf always had money.

  One day a gentleman-type lady came to his table and hurriedly asked for Kalpatru tickets. ‘Jaldi, jaldi,’ she said, and immediately he knew that she was scared. In those days, gentleman-type ladies couldn’t buy lottery tickets, and certainly not schoolteachers. Grace Ma’am could have lost her job. So he said, ‘I don’t have enough tickets right now, I can drop them off at your house.’ So that’s how it started.

  Every morning, he would go to her house to drop off the morning newspapers and in the afternoons—on days when the results were coming out—he would go with the Hindi newspapers. The Times of India never carried lottery results back then—at least not for Kalpatru brand.

  ‘She would say, “One-rupee ticket: number nine, seven, five, whatever. Two-rupee tickets, five-rupee tickets…” Like that she would call out the numbers.’

  He would look at the tickets and in front of her, with a straight face, without blinking, without sweating, calmly say, ‘No, Grace Ma’am, nothing today, all the tickets are zero today.’ She would just let the tickets drop to the floor, like she was worried the numbers would get stuck to her fingers. Ashraf would pick them up and claim the rewards.

  ‘Even when she won?’

  ‘Only when she won, Aman bhai. You can really be quite stupid sometimes. Sometimes I let her win. Sometimes when she had won five hundred rupees, I would say it was only two hundred rupees and keep the rest. It was a great business.’ Ashraf is wistful, impressed by the derring-do of his younger self. ‘Back then I was a true business-type.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I am a choosa hua aam, a mango sucked dry. Back then I could do anything. Anything! I once started a business worth lakhs with just fifty rupees!

  ‘You will not believe me now, Aman bhai, but I used to be a major-level thekedar. Me and Raja, together we ran the biggest thekas in Raja Bazaar.’

  ‘In Bombay?’

  ‘No, no. In Calcutta. I was briefly in Calcutta before I went to Bombay. I was there for three years. I had uncles in Calcutta.’

  ‘You never told me this.’

  ‘I must have forgotten. I started a business with a friend of mine—a good, close friend—Raja. He was really smart.’

  ‘The same guy who was a Double BA because he had two wives?’

  ‘Same guy.’

  5

  Raja was so shrewd that he left his first wife and seduced and married a much older woman who owned not one, but two houses in the lanes of Raja Bazaar. So Raja never paid rent, and saved all his money.

  Raja was so fair that when people asked him where he was from, he said ‘Punjab’ and they believed him. People automatically placed their trust in him. He had a noble bearing even though his father came from Bangladesh and named him after the marketplace where he was born—Raja from Raja Bazaar.

  Before Ashraf met Raja, he was a normal dehadi-type. He worked twelve-hour shifts at the Royal Bengal Slipper Factory where he fitted leather foot straps onto sandal soles and dropped the finished product into a plastic bag. The owner was a bastard. He paid Ashraf fifteen rupees a day. In six months, Ashraf moved to Prince Footwear. Now he poured molten plastic into moulds to make plastic footwear. Plastic footwear was the height of fashion in Calcutta. Still is. Everybody wanted a pair. Ashraf made eighteen rupees a day.

  Then Ashraf met Raja and became a business-type. In a sense, he had always been a business-type: a business-type in search of the right business. Raja was starting his own floor polishing business in Calcutta. It was a simple model: win a contract through a contact, rent a machine, rent the labour, and add a 15 per cent commission for yourself. Ashraf had good contacts: his uncle’s younger son used to rent out machines to polish floors and offered them a ten per cent discount. They put down a fifty-rupee deposit for the machine and started their own polishing business.

  Once he became a business-type, Ashraf wore freshly pressed shirts and had his shoes polished by the shoe polish boy at Sealdah Station. Ashraf earned thousands of rupees a month, which he spent on clothes, food, and his family. He never drank, rarely smoked, and never spoke roughly to anyone. He was a picture of respectability.

  Ashraf’s younger brother Aslam, who had accompanied him to Calcutta, was only fifteen, but he was already a goonda-type. Despite Ashraf’s urging, he refused to go to school and instead worked at a local garage; he called himself a ‘motor spray-painter’. It wasn’t hi
s fault, but the garage where Aslam worked was illegal. So every six months, the Municipal Corporation would send a halla gaadi full of supervisors and policemen to shut the shop, impound all the cars, and arrest all the workers for good measure. The next morning, the owner of the garage would pay a fine of thirty-five rupees a spray painter at the Lal Bazaar Police Station and the workers would be released with minimal fuss.

  The problem began when Aslam started making friends in jail. Apart from an assortment of beggars, street vendors, and rickshaw pullers, the station occasionally had a few genuinely dangerous men—criminal types with police records and gang rivalries.

  In jail, Aslam once met a man called Vikas Pandey who asked him for a favour. ‘The police say they can release me, but I don’t have any money. Can you tell my mother to come and bail me out?’

  A few weeks later, Aslam was eating at a dhaba in Topsiya when Pandey walked in. He rushed up to Aslam and thanked him profusely. ‘If you need anything, just let me know,’ he said with a wink. From that day on, the dhaba owner refused to accept any payment from Aslam.

  Ashraf told him to stop going to that dhaba.

  Another time, Aslam was standing in line for a movie ticket when a man sidled up to him. ‘You are Vikas Pandey’s friend, aren’t you? Here, take these…’ and he pressed two movie tickets into Aslam’s hand.

  Ashraf told him to stop going to the movies.

  ‘Aslam has fallen in with Vikas Pandey’s gang of pocketmaars,’ Raja warned Ashraf. ‘Pandey is the ringleader of the Bihari pickpocket gang. You know what Biharis are like.’

  ‘I’m a Bihari too,’ Ashraf answered indignantly, but resolved to talk to Aslam again. But Aslam would not listen. After a while he quit his job at the garage and became a full-time goonda. Ashraf often saw him hanging around Bara Bazaar with his new friends, smoking beedis, bullying street vendors, and picking fights with other gangs. He started staying out late and would get angry whenever anyone at home asked him where he had been. After a point, he came home only twice or thrice a week—when he would sleep for the whole day and most of the night, and slip out at dawn before anyone woke up.