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

by Aman Sethi

  As I find out, people didn’t just lose themselves in transit; in Delhi, people are picked up off the street in broad daylight, incarcerated for years, and never seen or heard of ever again. The man behind many of these disappearances turns out to be a thickset man in his early forties: stocky, greying, fit for his age, clad in the nondescript brown favoured by government employees, unremarkable save for a pair of shiny white Campus sneakers.

  Sharmaji is a senior officer at the Beggars Court at Sewa Kutir, in Kingsway Camp in North Delhi. His job is to catch beggars and have them tried and punished in court. Begging in the national capital is a serious offence, and under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959, the Department of Welfare can arrest all those ‘having no visible means of subsistence and wandering about, or remaining in a public place in a condition or manner, [that made] it likely that the person doing so exists by soliciting or receiving alms’. It isn’t just the alleged beggar; the law also has provisions for sending the family and dependants of the accused off to a remand home if the court feels they might turn to begging.

  None of the men I know at Bara Tooti have any visible means of sustenance. If I saw Ashraf lying drunk on a pavement one evening, I wouldn’t know what to make of him. So how can Sharmaji tell a beggar from a working man who is merely poor?

  ‘You can tell by looking at the hands. The rickshaw pullers, for example, have rough calluses here.’ Sharmaji grabs my hand and points to the arc where the fingers join my palm. ‘It’s the rickshaw’s hard plastic handles. The skin first blisters, then the blisters become calluses and the calluses form little ridges.’

  ‘They also have big, bulging calves,’ Sharmaji adds as an afterthought. ‘And some of them sit funny.

  ‘Mazdoor hands are different from beggar hands. They have calluses too—but their nails are scuffed from handling bricks and sand. You won’t see a rickshaw puller with scuffed hands. Safediwallahs tendy to be tall and lanky and are usually sprinkled with paint dust. Carpenters are Muslims and usually carry tools. Never, Aman sir, never trust a man who travels without his tools.’

  Sharmaji, raiding officer for the Department of Social Welfare and the source of these ethnographic insights, has rather soft hands himself—the sort that might be subjected to the occasional massage of Pond’s Cold Cream. But he has strong fingers and well-rounded shoulders: the anatomy of a man used to grabbing people and shaking them about.

  ‘Beggars don’t have any calluses. How can they if they never work? Also, a working man—no matter how poor he is—will always look you in the eye when he talks to you. But beggars? No, they can’t look me in the eye.’

  ‘Now take you, for instance.’ He shakes my hand vigorously, somehow managing to point at me with my own fingers. ‘No one will mistake you for a beggar even if you dress up as one.’

  I try and imagine if I would look Sharmaji in the eye. He reminds me of a particularly feared mathematics teacher from school—a man who appeared reasonable at most times, but could be moved to violence by completely innocuous acts. My teacher too had a habit of grabbing students by the shoulder and jerking them about, an experience I found intensely disorienting.

  This should be a period of frenetic activity for Sharmaji and his team; the minister heading his department has promised to make Delhi ‘beggar free’ in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Sharmaji’s department has deadlines to meet, beggars to deport, and cases to file. The target for the year is at least five thousand beggars. But the reception area is empty, save for the two of us, as are the small courtrooms.

  Sharmaji’s raid vehicle has broken down, making it impossible for him to drive around the city chasing beggars. The wheels of the Delhi government do not move any faster for its own departments and so Sharmaji has been told that a new vehicle will arrive ‘in some time’.

  ‘Right now, the only beggars we have are those rounded up by the Delhi Police. But they don’t know how to read hands. The police can’t tell a beggar from a beldaar.’

  Suddenly I am very afraid for my friends.

  ‘The police don’t even know how to catch them.’ Sharmaji is disconsolate. ‘There is a special technique. You can’t just stop anywhere and run at them. Now where would you go to catch a beggar?’

  ‘I don’t know. A traffic light?’

  ‘Wrong!’ he says with some satisfaction. ‘Correct but wrong. Don’t worry, it is a logical mistake to make. You may find them at a traffic light, but you cannot catch them at a traffic light. You see the difference?’ He grabs my wrist again.

  ‘We all know that beggars stand at traffic lights, but if you try and catch them, they often run off straight into traffic. The result? Accidents, traffic jams, and the public also gets upset.’

  Instead Sharmaji and his team stake out at the major temples in the city. ‘It is the fault of our culture. If people spend lakhs of rupees in feeding the beggars, why would anyone work? All they do is sit and wait to be fed. This is not how you give discipline to the nation.’

  At temples, the beggars tend to be more docile and less likely to escape through rush hour traffic. ‘Temples, train stations, bus stands. Here you will not only find beggars, but also be able to arrest them.

  ‘It is best to arrive after they have been fed. Mid-afternoon to late evening, when they are drowsy and there aren’t too many pilgrims around.’

  Unsurprisingly, Sharmaji also has a photographic memory. ‘I never forget faces—never. I will never forget your face. It is stored in my brain’s computer.’ Since the Begging Act prescribes ‘Not less than one year and not exceeding three years for first time offenders. Ten years for repeat offenders,’ raiding officers like Sharmaji are often asked to testify if they had ever arrested the person before. ‘Obviously nobody gives the same name twice. So we have registers and registers of the same people—only stored under different names and addresses.’

  Most departments would have buckled under the weight of such voluminous and apparently useless data, but not the Department of Social Welfare which has already begun to computerize its registers. Equipped with the latest advances in biometric technology, the Beggar Information System or BIS 2.1 is ‘like our own passport office’. The machine is designed to store the details of every single person arrested by Sharmaji’s team: name, date of birth, place of birth, photograph, and biometric fingerprint. Once registered, the information is stored ‘forever’, implying that recidivists will no longer fool the judge by claiming that they got off a train in Delhi, were robbed of all their possessions, and were begging to get enough money to go back home. Once arrested, the beggars will be marched off to the registration room, photographed, fingerprinted, and presented before the court. If convicted, they are taken to one of twelve prisons set aside for beggars and locked up for a minimum of one year and a maximum of three.

  ‘So can I see this system?’ I am eager to witness the information revolution at work. ‘Where is the machine stored?’

  ‘On the first floor.’ Sharmaji is unsure. ‘It isn’t really working these days. We have called the technician, but after a point he stopped taking our calls.’ Occasionally, the receptionist—who is on his lunch break—calls the technician from a different phone number from another department, but the technician has wised up to these tricks. ‘He says some part is missing and he shall come only when it arrives from the warehouse.’

  ‘I just want to see it. We don’t need to use it or anything.’

  ‘Come along then.’

  Sharmaji turns the key, and there it is, under a shroud of white plastic dust covers: the Beggar Information System Version 2.1. It is a record of every beggar with the misfortune of crossing Sharmaji and his team. The machine is a rather bland-looking personal computer with little to distinguish it apart from a rather clunky-looking webcam and what appears to be a small plastic matchbox.

  ‘Is this it?’ I find it hard to conceal my disappointment.

  ‘Well, yes. To be honest, we were a little surprised ourselves. We expected s
omething a lot bigger.’

  ‘So this is the biometric reader?’ I pick up the box and toss it in my hands casually.

  ‘Careful, Aman sir, careful. This is not a toy, this is a biometric device. The beggars place their thumbprint on the glass and the webcam takes their photo. That way we have full identification.’

  ‘So is the database searchable?’

  ‘There are a few small problems,’ Sharmaji says sheepishly as he fires up the machine. The designers had failed to read the tender document carefully. The tender, freely available on the internet, clearly asks for ‘an interface to identify the habitual beggars at the time of reception by scanning the thumb impression or keying in other relevant information to establish the identity’, but this crucial detail had slipped the designers’ mind. Instead, the firm (whose name Sharmaji coyly refused to reveal: ‘You are from the press, no? He he he’) had provided two separate interfaces—one for data entry and one for data search, thereby doubling the time required for registration instead of halving it. It was this particular software error that the technician appeared unable to fix till the ‘missing part’ arrived.

  The other, more pressing problem lies with the scanner itself. Though the tender had mandated a ‘scratch-resistant’ scanning surface, the scanner—as befitting any high-tech gadget—was extraordinarily sensitive to dust. It worked best when recording images of clean, slightly moist thumbs that, when pressed down onto the glass surface, flattened ever so slightly to allow for a true record of the fingerprint in question. ‘But these beggars,’ the exasperation in Sharmaji’s voice is palpable, ‘their hands are so dirty, so filthy, that the scanner just cannot pick up the image.’ All they got were blurry smudges that the machine was unable to identify, let alone catalogue and search. ‘So we started washing their hands before registering them. But that took too long.’ The department also tried bathing them—but, after a bath, the beggars look ‘just like anyone else’. How then can the judge make his decision?

  ‘Now we register once manually before the hearings. And then again on computer in the evenings. That way we have complete records.’

  ‘But you can’t search them.’

  ‘We can.’ Sharmaji is quick to defend BIS 2.1. ‘It just takes some time, that’s all. In India, all everyone wants to do is criticize.’

  As I get up to leave, Sharmaji points out three freshly bathed men leaving the reception centre. ‘The judge gave them a second chance.’

  I catch up with one of them on my way out. ‘Are you a beggar?’

  ‘Of course not, I’m a snake charmer.’

  ‘So where’s your snake?’

  ‘Sharmaji asked me the same question. The Wildlife Department took it away.’

  •

  Unlike the Beggars Court, which has an office with a signboard, the kidney snatchers of Ashraf’s nightmares turned out to be harder to find. I tried hanging around Koria Pull, waiting for someone to approach me, but kept bumping into drug dealers who followed me at a safe distance and whispered, ‘Hashish?’ every time I turned around.

  A year after Ashraf and I had our conversation about the kidney racket in Old Delhi, I found myself at a police press conference in Gurgaon. On a tip-off from a young police officer from Moradabad, Manjul Saini, the Gurgaon Police had stumbled upon a racket in which a team of rogue doctors had illegally transplanted more than six hundred kidneys in the last nine years.

  At the time of the conference, the lynchpin, Dr Amit Kumar, was still at large. It would be another few months before he would be arrested in Kathmandu.

  The modus operandi was scarily similar to what Ashraf had described: pimps prowled the labour chowks in and around Delhi and lured them away with the promise of work. Thereafter, the labourers were forced to undergo operations in which the doctors robbed them of their kidneys, gave them a nominal sum of money, and threw them back on the street. The kidneys were then sold to wealthy Indian and foreign buyers.

  When the police raided one of the clinics run by the group, they found two labourers who were just about to be wheeled into the operation theatre. For three other labourers though, the police arrived too late.

  Soon after the press conference, I went across to the Civil Hospital in Gurgaon where Nasir, Salim, and Shakeel were recuperating after their forced surgeries. I asked them if they remembered anything from their ordeal.

  They remembered a great deal.

  •

  The room zoomed, and slipped and slid and panned; the walls closed in and in—so close, still moving, can’t stop them, the room zoomed and slid and panned. The ceiling fan turned one way and then another. Everything seemed like something else and then the same thing happened the other way around.

  A pain—a jagging pain, a deep scar, a long cut, a careful tear, a knife mark. Down his side he felt the criss-cross of surgical thread. He felt the sheet rub against his back. He felt the pillow under his head, he felt his bladder pressing up against the curve of his stomach. Nausea dribbling through his body, he felt last night’s meal pressed up against his chest, crawling up his throat—a spider, a big hairy spider with spiky razor-tipped legs. Dal chawal; it was dal chawal—yellow dal with pyaaz ka tadka, cooked by the skinny man who looked Bihari. It had taken a day or two for the routine to be hammered out. It is hard to portion out responsibilities when two Nepalis with guns threaten you every time you open your mouth.

  The tall Muslim with the red beard had disappeared soon after he offered the job. It was to be a big one, in Ballabgarh, at least five to six months: one hundred and fifty rupees a day, plus free food and accommodation. They were getting labour from all across the country. They needed a few experienced hands, which is why they had come down to Choona Mandi Chowk for a safediwallah. They would provide all the paints and brushes.

  He said yes. The Muslim’s accomplice put him onto a Roadways bus. They got off at India Gate and into a waiting car. The driver of the black Maruti Esteem told him to sit low on his seat. The car ride lasted almost four hours. He fell asleep several times. They gave him an injection, took some blood. They told him it was a rush job for a government agency; they needed to take blood tests for the health scheme.

  ‘Health scheme?’

  Yes, health scheme. Didn’t he know the government now offered free health care to all labourers?

  Even dehadi ka labour like him?

  Even dehadi ka labour like him. After all, this was the sarkar of the aam aadmi. Everyone has got to be on the health scheme.

  Once they stopped the car and took out a large box from the back. They put a drop of his blood into what looked like a painter’s palette. They told him not to worry; he had passed the blood test. Now he would certainly get the job.

  It was dark by the time the car reached the eerie abandoned house in what looked like a jungle. By now he was really tired; they practically carried him in. That’s when he saw the armed Nepali guards watching over ten cowering mazdoors.

  They stayed in that house for almost a week. There were provisions of rice, wheat, dal, and a cooking stove to prepare their meals. No paints or brushes though. Inmates disappeared every other day and more arrived to take their places, but the guards neither answered his questions nor let him address them to anyone else, and so he never found out where the older inmates went and where the new ones had come from. They all looked like they had been picked up from chowks across Delhi, but were probably from all over the country.

  One night they woke him up at one o’clock and told him to get dressed. They told him to lie down on the back seat of a car and keep his head down. They drove for about ten minutes before they stopped and changed cars. This time he was put into a black Hyundai Santro and told to lie down once more. They stopped outside a large black gate. The guard got out and knocked three times. The gate opened, and they pushed him in at gunpoint and strapped him into a stretcher.

  A man in a green surgical mask and gown walked up to him and slid a needle into his vein. He felt his muscles spasm and the ceilin
g swirled into a fast spinning vortex before he passed out.

  He awoke on his side, vomiting violently, bringing up nothing but fluid. A nurse, her face obscured by a surgical mask, handed him a tissue to clean himself. ‘What have they done to me, Nurse? What have they done?’ She stared back impassively; she had ‘Chinese eyes’. He grabbed her hand and pleaded with her to tell him, and so she did.

  He lay back in his stretcher and ran his hand along the long gash, mouthing gentle consoling sounds. ‘You’re going to be okay,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  •

  My phone rings; it is 1 am.

  It’s Ashraf.

  Satish is sick.

  If Ashraf is to be believed, Satish is dying. Satish is coughing up blood, Satish is going deaf, Satish can’t talk, Satish can’t walk, Satish can’t work. All Satish can do is sit in a corner with a rag to his mouth, holding in the blood that leaks out of his lungs and onto the pavement in scattered flecks that look like paan stains but aren’t.

  Who is Satish?

  Satish is a young boy, like Rehaan. He is very shy, but he is very smart. I haven’t met him, because he usually works at Choona Mandi, a chowk in Paharganj not far from Bara Tooti, but Ashraf loves him like a younger brother. Satish taught Ashraf how to varnish wood, Satish taught Lalloo how to win at cards. Satish is the only person Rehaan listens to. But Satish is dying. Well, right now he is sleeping, but he is very sick. I must come tomorrow as early as I can.

  I will come tomorrow. Goodnight, Ashraf.

  Goodnight.

  three

  LAWARIS,