by Aman Sethi
No, it doesn’t bother him that the same two men now sell him two bottles of alcohol a day. ‘It wasn’t their fault; it could happen to anybody.’
•
On my last day, we set out to buy Ashraf a new set of tools—he wants a change from the safedi line.
‘Bengalis don’t care to paint their houses,’ he says with a sniff. ‘They are the shabbiest people I know.’
He wants to become a santrash—a specialized line of mazdoors who break houses rather than build them. ‘There is a system for everything in Calcutta,’ he says. ‘One line of people build, another set break, another set paint—everything is very organized.’
‘So is there a specific technique for breaking houses?’
‘Of course there is. There is a specific technique for everything.’
‘So what is it? You start from a particular wall…or…?’
‘You start from the roof, Aman bhai. If you break the walls first, you’ll get buried by the roof. You really can be very stupid at times.’
The santrash line traces its lineage back to court sculptors and anyone who worked with a hammer and a chisel.
‘There is a lot of work for santrashes in Calcutta: cutting air-conditioning ducts, making openings for exhaust fans, thin channels for laying electrical wiring, thick channels for water pipes.
‘The santrash line is a risky line. All sorts of things are released when you break a wall—dreams, desires, secrets…’
I like the idea of a house absorbing what occurs within the safety of its four walls: sound waves imprinting themselves onto wet concrete surfaces like a phonograph record to be read by the santrash’s hammer.
Ashraf natters on as we take the bus from Raja Bazaar to a part of Calcutta called Dharamtala. It’s a short ride but the bus makes many stops. As we step off near Calcutta’s large, open maidan, a man brushes against me and vanishes into the crowd. Instinctively, my hand reaches for my back pocket—my wallet is missing.
Ashraf takes the news rather well—certainly far better than I do.
‘Don’t worry, Aman bhai. Look, I have seven rupees in my pocket. Let’s get some tea and think—I’ll pay.’
We get tea. I smoke a cigarette: the wallet has my credit cards, my press card, and a significant amount of money. Worryingly, I still have to pay for my hotel and buy Ashraf his tools.
‘Don’t worry about the tools, Aman bhai, this happens to me all the time. Wake up feeling like I am going to conquer the world, only to be stabbed in the back.’
If only the staff at the hotel prove to be so understanding. I’m having visions of leaving my watch at the reception, promising to wire them money. Maybe they will tut-tut sympathetically and say that these things happen. Maybe my wallet shall miraculously reappear in my bag. I suddenly realize I don’t really know anyone at all in this city; my sole friend from Calcutta now works in Bombay.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. I think I’m going to call my mom.’
Ten minutes later, it’s all done. My parents have righted the balance of my world. The brother of a family friend has been located. He will be at a gathering of dentists at lunchtime at Trincas on Park Street. ‘Uncle will give you six thousand rupees,’ says my mother reassuringly. ‘Enough for your hotel bill and Ashraf’s tools.’
It’s only 11:30, but I can wait. Ashraf looks on as I call my bank to cancel my cards. Twenty minutes later that’s done too.
‘Do you have any more money, Ashraf? I really need a cigarette.’
‘Let me check.’
A crumpled ten-rupee note has emerged from a secret pocket in his trousers’ waistband. ‘I had forgotten all about it. Maybe I have some more money elsewhere.’ Ashraf smiles as he frisks himself for cash. ‘Let’s get you a cigarette and some tea.’
•
‘I was just thinking, Aman bhai, what would you have done if you didn’t have a phone?’
‘I’d probably ask someone if I could use their phone.’
‘What if you didn’t have that option? If your mother didn’t know someone in Calcutta? If no one knew anyone?’
‘I don’t know, Ashraf bhai. I’d probably go to the police and ask for help.’
‘Basically you would beg for help, wouldn’t you, Aman bhai? Just like the rest of us. Your level is a little higher—so you could go begging to the police. Our level is a little lower…’
‘So where would you go?’
‘To Jamil bhai.’
Jamil bhai, later to become Jamil saab, was a great man.
For a period in the 1980s, or so Ashraf says, he ruled the beedi-rolling trade in Calcutta. Every beedi produced in Calcutta was rolled by his workers, slipped into paper packets bearing the insignia of various brands, and shipped out to the rest of the country.
In later years, he handed over control to his sons and went about setting up the entire stretch of shops from the Raja Bazaar main road down towards Narkul Danga.
‘Jamil saab was like us; he came out of Raja Bazaar when there wasn’t much of a bazaar to speak of. All this is before my time, but I heard that one day Jamil saab got all the people living in Raja Bazaar together and asked them to dip their hands into a cloth bag and pull out a chit. Jamil saab then looked at every chit and said, “You, you will become a butcher and sell chicken. You will open a vegetable shop; you will sell milk.” On and on he went, telling everyone what they should do. Then he gave everyone some money to start their shops and told them to buy their things and start immediately.’
It seems that for some years he took rent from everyone, but later he made so much money that he even stopped doing that. In a manner faintly reminiscent of the freeing of slaves, Ashraf claims Jamil called everyone out one day. (In Ashraf’s narrative Jamil saab was always calling people out into a gathering to hear his latest diktat.) He said, ‘You are free now. As long as I am alive no one will ask you for any rent or hafta or donation or anything.’ And no one did.
Soon after, Jamil saab retired to a house in South Calcutta and dedicated himself to doing good works. He would come to his office in Raja Bazaar for a few hours every day to hold court, listen to complaints, redress wrongs.
A lot of mazdoors would go to him at festival time. ‘They would say a pickpocket stole their money and train ticket and they were left with nothing. Jamil saab would listen and ask one or two questions. Only one or two questions.’ Ashraf is insistent on the precise nature of the interrogation.
‘He would only ask, “Where are you from? Where were you going to? And how much was the ticket?” and from just those three questions, he would be able to tell if you were lying!’
‘Exactly how?’
‘Because Jamil saab knew the exact rail fares between any two stations. See, in the railways, it’s all a formula.’ I’ve started Ashraf off on the railways again. ‘The fare is based on the distance—and Jamil saab knew the distance to everywhere, so automatically he knew the fare.’
As Ashraf would put it, ‘It really is very simple.’ If Jamil saab believed you, he would call up his most trusted munshi—from Ashraf’s description, a sad little man with nothing to do except book train tickets—and ask him to buy the mazdoor a ticket on the next train. ‘Sometimes, he would even give the mazdoor a little extra money for the journey.’
‘So did you ever need to go to Jamil saab, Ashraf bhai?’
‘No, I didn’t, but I knew several people who did. But now he’s gone.’
According to Ashraf, there are Jamil-like figures in every major city—except Delhi. Bombay, for instance, has the Ghanswallahs. ‘They are an old Parsi family. I think their forefathers sold horse fodder to the British. They also give money to mazdoors to go home.’
I observe that no one gives money for people to come to cities—only to go back home.
Ashraf nods his head; we sit back in the maidan and wait for lunchtime and its promise of money.
•
We are looking for a workshop from where to
buy a good hammer and a set of chennis—metal picks of various sizes and strength to cut holes in brick, plaster, and concrete surfaces. Hammers are relatively easy to come by, but you can’t buy a chenni off the shelf.
The meeting with my father’s friend’s brother had gone surprisingly well—notwithstanding my dishevelled appearance. ‘Best of luck, son,’ he said gravely as he gave me his number. ‘Any further troubles, just call.’
Six thousand rupees tucked into my jeans (how I wish I had a secret pocket) I slipped out into the street where Ashraf was waiting, and together we headed off to Dharamtala.
‘The best chennis are made from the suspension coils of old model Ambassador cars,’ says the blacksmith as he bangs away on his anvil. ‘The only problem is you can’t find any scrap any more. China is buying everything. Old cars, spare parts, spoons, plates, ships—anything made of metal that you drop into a dustbin gets sorted, packed, and shipped off to China. Same with suspension coils. How will India become great if we keep selling everything to the Chinese?’
A good chenni must be absolutely straight to transmit the force of the hammer into the wall. Any kinks and the chenni will snap when you strike it too hard.
Ashraf selects a few pieces and as the blacksmith straightens them out tells me how he is fighting a case against the Uttar Pradesh government for removing him from his post as a homoeopathic healer in a government hospital. ‘I have come up with a pioneering cure for cancer,’ says the blacksmith. ‘But I can only tell you about it once I have the time to file for a patent. You have to be very careful. How can we make India great if we keep stealing each other’s ideas?’
6
‘You could say nothing has changed, Aman bhai, and then again everything has changed. No one has changed, but everyone has changed.’
Looking at Kaka, it’s hard to imagine that only five years have passed since I started coming to Bara Tooti. I’ve been away in the US for one of those years, and in that time—the gulf that I had so assiduously bridged—seems to have widened again. I’ve forgotten many names, many faces have forgotten me. It’s eight in the morning, but the crowd seems to have abandoned Kaka’s. A year after the financial crisis obliterated any chances I had of finding a job in New York, have the mazdoors of Bara Tooti finally lost faith in their banker as well?
‘You have certainly changed, Kaka,’ I say. ‘For one, you have become even fatter.’
‘Don’t make fun of an old man, Aman bhai. I think I have diabetes.’
‘Must be all that sugar in your tea, Kaka. Where is everybody?’
‘Haven’t you heard? Do you remember this man called Sunil, Aman bhai? Thin fellow with wispy brown hair, moustache but no beard—never drank, never smoked, never took ganja? Sunil found a thekedari on the Sonipat side near a place called Rai. A short assignment of maybe three or four days; a factory needed to be painted.’
‘They all went—Rehaan, Naushad, Kale Baba, Munna. The factory sent an open van and they set off like schoolchildren on a class trip to the local Coca-Cola factory.
‘Well, this was more a warehouse than a factory—with those high, double ceilings. So Munna and Kale Baba lashed the ladders together and reinforced them with double knots. Rehaan climbed up and was putting primer on the exhaust grilles. He was right on top; maybe two storeys up when—I don’t quite know what happened—the ladder slipped.’
The body is breakable. The body with its puffed-out chest, its tight, rope-like biceps, its dense, bulging calves. The body that can scramble up walls, balance on pillars, and drag a loaded handcart up three flights of stairs. Dropped off a tall ladder, these bones shatter, these muscles tear, these tendons snap, and when they do, they leave behind a crumpled shell in the place of a boy as beautiful and agile as Rehaan.
He was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was in a coma for almost a week. Munna found a small black diary in his breast pocket and called his family. They came down on the fourth day after the accident. He died on the seventh without ever regaining consciousness.
‘Remember Naushad, Rehaan’s friend? Maybe you never spoke with him, but he and Rehaan used to smoke together all the time. Two days after Rehaan’s accident, Naushad was leaning over the side of the factory’s terrace, putting a base coat on a ledge. His elbow nudged the pot of paint, he leaned out further to save it, and fell six storeys to his death. No one even knew who to call, and you wouldn’t have recognized his body anyway.’
‘What about Kale Baba?’
The old man whose skin was leathery, whose hair was so wiry, whose beard was so crusty that it was impossible to imagine a site at which even the most persistent of infections could take root. The old man who made eighty thousand rupees when his brothers gave him a share of their shop, but drank it away in less than eighty days.
‘They used to say that even death couldn’t kill Kale Baba, but he died on this trip too. Some say it was pneumonia, but Lalloo says it was heartbreak.’
‘Lalloo’s here? Did he finally restart his paratha business?’
‘Ah, Lalloo. We hadn’t seen him for three days and then one morning I found him sleeping on the main road near the chowk. I called out his name; I shouted, “Lalloo, Lalloo,” and he awoke with a start and ran at me with madness in his eyes. He picked up a brick and hit me on the forehead.’
At the chowk, they say he ran down Teli Bara Road to Kalyani’s and asked for the thousand rupees he had given her for safekeeping. He tried to buy some Everyday, but she refused so he swore at her and ran off towards the railway station.
Three days later, some boys from Bara Tooti were riding home in a thekedar’s tempo when they saw a naked man running along Sadar Thana Road chasing cycle rickshaws. They shouted, ‘Lalloo, Lalloo,’ but he kept running, his fists full of money, screaming, ‘Two hundred rupees for the day. Today I want to see all of Delhi, everything. Five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred for the day.’ They tried to get the truck to stop, but they were stuck in the back and the driver in the cab couldn’t hear them. They said they could hear his voice all the way to Bara Tooti: ‘Eight hundred, nine hundred, ten thousand rupees for a cycle ride around Delhi.’
No one ever saw the body. The chikwallahs on Idgah Road told Munna that the police had found a scarred, naked body of a forty-something man who had a steel rod in his leg. His opened fist still had some money in it. There was froth around his mouth. The police took the body and put it in the morgue at Baraf Khana.
They said he died of pagalpan—madness.
7
‘I’m looking for a man called Mohammed Ashraf.’
The attendant, sprawled out on the wooden bench, sits up and rubs his eyes.
‘This is the Bihari Ashraf?’
‘Yes, I was told he is a patient here.’
‘Bed 32, Narayani Ward, second floor.’
A year on, Ashraf has been diagnosed with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR, as everyone in Narayani Ward at the K.S. Rai TB Hospital in Jadavpur terms it. He was diagnosed in September last year and has since spent the past ten months at the hospital.
I spot him on the balcony; he’s in a clean lungi and a thin cotton vest. He’s lost a lot of muscle on his arms, but ten months of regular meals have given him a rather substantial paunch.
‘Sit, sit, sit.’ He wipes the wooden bench he is sitting on and pulls up a chair. A face mask dangles freely around his neck; he pulls it on, but then takes it off as he starts talking. ‘Where have you been? How was America? How did you find me? It’s so good to see you.’
‘How are you?’ I ask, my questions excitedly tumbling over Ashraf’s. ‘How long have you been here? America was okay. I called up Prabhu the bootlegger. He told me you had TB. I’m so glad I found you.’
The doctors have told me not to stay beyond twenty minutes and to keep my face turned away at all times. But it’s hard to look away and set a time limit while talking to Ashraf.
‘Soon after you left for America, I began to wake up coughing. I ignored it, but it got
worse and worse. So I stopped smoking. But it wouldn’t stop. So I stopped drinking, but it still continued.
‘By then Prabhu and Veeru were also getting a little worried. I went to the doctor. I thought, might as well get treatment and go to my death well-dressed and prepared.’
Multi-drug-resistant TB is the ghost of Indian TB programmes past. The earliest cases of drug resistance were noted in 1947 when the TB bacteria displayed a worrying resistance to streptomycin, the first antibiotic treatment for tuberculosis. By the 1960s, strains of the bacteria had developed resistance to newer drugs like Isoniazid; and by the late 1990s, the bacteria had got the better of Rifampicin, a semi-synthetic antibiotic expressly used to fight the disease. A primary cause for the resistance, according to medical journals, was that patients did not complete the full course of their medication—in effect, serving as living, breathing petri dishes for more and more virulent strains of the disease.
‘The problem with the patient is that the bacteria are lodged deep inside the tissue,’ said Dr T. Bannerjee. ‘His tests will come back negative, but in the X-ray we can see the bacteria eating away at his lungs.’ Dr Bannerjee was a slight, neatly dressed Bengali gentleman with a fondness for checked shirts in varying shades of brown. He had a clipped moustache and his hair was arranged around a razor-sharp side parting. Years of interviewing TB patients had trained Dr Bannerjee to sit as far behind his desk as he possibly could, and to face his subject as infrequently as possible. My meeting was conducted entirely in side profile, Dr Bannerjee shooting me quick glances from the corner of his eye as he spoke of Ashraf’s predicament. ‘I hope you can convince him to stay for the full treatment. The MDR drugs are highly toxic and patients like him, with no one to encourage them, often drop out once the symptoms disappear.’
On Bed 32 in Narayani Ward, Ashraf insists he will complete the course. ‘I should complete at least one course of one thing in my life,’ he remarks.