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

  Of course, none of these categories are immutable; in times of crisis, mistrys swallow their pride and work in the trenches along with the mazdoors. When work is plentiful and mistrys are in short supply, ustads working on more than one construction site often pass on trade secrets to their understudies so that work progresses smoothly.

  Mohammed Ashraf is a safediwallah. Sometimes he is a mazdoor at a construction site hauling sacks of cement up endless flights of stairs; sometimes he is a beldaar mixing the cement that mazdoors bring to him; but he sees himself primarily as a safedi karigar, a master house painter. He is not a tall man, and so, in a sense, not particularly suited to his line of work. Ideally, safediwallahs are expected to be tall and long-limbed, with slender bodies that drape themselves around ladders, and elongated arms that cover walls, shutters, and shopfronts with easy, elegant strokes.

  Mohammed Ashraf is short and stubby, with a narrow but muscular chest and small, broad hands balanced on strong, flexible wrists. He is built just like a mazdoor—short, stable, and perfectly suited for lifting and carrying. But Ashraf does not grudge the throw of the dice that has made him a safediwallah with a mazdoor’s body. A small man’s body can do things that a slender chamak-challo cannot even contemplate.

  A small man carries the ground close to him wherever he goes, even as he hangs along the side of a building three storeys high. It is the memory of the ground that allows him to crawl into crevices, perch on narrow ledges, and balance on wobbly parapets. A short man knows the limits of his body, the extent of his reach, the exact position of his centre of balance. Unlike the tall man, he holds no illusions regarding his abilities or his dimensions; he will never overreach, overextend, or overbalance.

  •

  In the early days, I worried that my interviews were keeping Ashraf and Lalloo from finding work, only to be assured by Ashraf that if they were wasting time talking to me, they probably weren’t looking for work that day.

  ‘Only the barsati mendaks work every day, Aman bhai,’ said Ashraf. ‘Not lafunters like us. We work when we feel like it.’

  The barsati mendaks, the rain frogs of Bara Tooti, are the seasonal workers from villages in Delhi’s neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. Most of them have land back home, a few acres that their fathers own, which will soon be divided among brothers.

  They first come in January after the winter crop has been harvested and the fields lie fallow, and return home in time for the sowing season in July. Once sowing is complete, they return to Bara Tooti for another few months of work before heading back to the village around Diwali.

  The barsati mendaks work frantically and live frugally to save as much money as they can. In the weeks leading up to Diwali they stop drinking or smoking, and save every last rupee so as to have something to show for the long absence from home. On the day before they leave, the mendaks hurriedly pay off their debts and pile into interstate buses headed homewards, leaving behind a corps of hardened Bara Tooti denizens.

  Old-timers like Lalloo and Ashraf, with nowhere to go to and no one to send money to, sit by the roadside shrine I once almost pissed on, puffing on their beedis, rolling joints, and sipping whisky and water out of disposable Pepsi glasses. As Lalloo put it, ‘We are old frogs now, Aman bhai, with nowhere to hop to…’

  Ashraf and Lalloo met in Paharganj at a labour chowk called Choona Mandi, when Ashraf had just started work as a safediwallah. Lalloo had once worked as a mazdoor but a road accident had left him with a steel rod in his shin, rendering him incapable of heavy work. Lalloo bought a small handcart with the compensation he received and sold hot parathas to the mazdoors at the chowk.

  One morning, Ashraf awoke to find Lalloo passed out beside him. ‘He was completely drunk, Aman bhai. Fast asleep with his ass in the air.’ The handcart was gone—lost in a game of cards to some man whose face and name were beyond Lalloo’s recollection. Lalloo had sold off the remaining utensils in exchange for several bottles of alcohol and fallen into a deep sleep for nearly a day and a half. When he finally awoke, he had shed his earlier skin as a parathawallah and become a mazdoor, a metamorphosis that left him rather disturbed. Drinking with Lalloo was always unnerving; when drunk he was prone to fits of hysterical laughter that gave way to tears that rolled down his wrinkled face and vanished into his stubble.

  As Ashraf would often say, with a wink of the eye and tilt of the head, ‘Lalloo is a bit crack.’

  •

  Ashraf and Lalloo could be described as ‘work oriented’ rather than ‘work seeking’. They usually worked for a week at a time, followed by a week of leisure financed by their earnings. Some weeks, Ashraf would make up to a thousand rupees, but he had to be careful when his money ran out.

  ‘The worst was this one morning when I woke up—still completely drunk—and I didn’t have two rupees to take a shit,’ Ashraf once said when we were sitting with Rehaan and Lalloo at Kaka’s. ‘All my money was gone. Everything. And I didn’t know where Lalloo was. I had to ask Kaka for the money—oh, the humiliation.

  ‘“Kaka, can I have two rupees?” I ask.

  ‘“Why two rupees, Ashraf bhai? You can have this tea for free.”

  ‘“No, tea will make it worse, I need two rupees.”

  ‘“But what can you get for two rupees these days?”

  ‘Oh god, it was terrible.’ Ashraf shuddered at the thought. ‘I think I should just keep two rupees in my special pocket.’

  All the clothes in Bara Tooti had special pockets for money and important papers: a breast pocket sewn on the inside of the shirt, rather than the outside; a pouch stitched into the waistband of a pair of faded trousers; an extra pocket-inside-a-pocket. Every mazdoor a walking album panelled with money, papers, phone numbers, and creased photocopies of ration cards.

  Rehaan, for instance, always carried two tattered photocopies of his ration card (registered back home in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh), a copy of his class five mark sheet that looked like it had survived a flood, a small black telephone diary, and his entire medical history in the form of a prescription for a painkiller—all secreted in various pockets on his person. In a plastic bag that never left his side, he carried a blurry X-ray of a large translucent bone gleaming against a greenish black background.

  ‘Inside pocket, outside pocket, it doesn’t make a difference if you are dead drunk on a pavement in Old Delhi,’ Lalloo once said sullenly. ‘You can save a thousand rupees only to have it stolen in one night. Perfectly decent young boys, who neither smoke nor drink, have awoken to find their slippers stolen in the night. Who knows where money goes in the night? In the morning there is always mazdoori.’

  In the morning there will be shops to be painted, walls to be built, loads to be lifted, and trenches to be dug. There is always work on offer, but Ashraf and Lalloo have been around long enough to keep a lookout for the right job.

  ‘The ideal job,’ Ashraf once said, as if elucidating a complex mathematical function, ‘has the perfect balance of kamai and azadi.’ Through the course of his life, a working man must experiment with as many combinations as he can before discovering the point where these counteracting forces offset each other to arrive at a solitary moment of serenity—a point when he is both free and fortunate. At that point, a man may be excused for rocking back and forth gently, tempting fate on both sides—reaching out for that tipping point, but sliding back before his fingers touch either side. Alas, it is bliss that few, like Ashraf, attain.

  ‘Kamai is what makes work work. Without kamai, it is not work, it is a hobby. Some call it charity; others may call it exercise—but it certainly isn’t a job. A job is something a man is paid to do—and his pay is his kamai. Many of us…’ Ashraf paused to stand up and take in the tea-sipping mazdoors, the gossiping mistrys, and the lazing beldaars in a smooth arc of his arm, ‘many of us choose jobs only on the basis of their kamai. Six thousand rupees a month! A man could get rich with that kind of money! But they forget a crucial thing. What is that crucia
l thing?

  ‘Azadi, Aman bhai, Azadi,’ he continued without waiting for an answer. ‘Azadi is the freedom to tell the maalik to fuck off when you want to. The maalik owns our work. He does not own us. Every morning a hundred contractors come to Bara Tooti offering permanent jobs for six thousand rupees a month. But those haramis wouldn’t pay their mother six thousand rupees if she worked for them. On the first day, the contractor will give you two hundred rupees and say, “Let no one say that contractor Choduram Aggarwal doesn’t pay his workers.” On the second day he will do the same. But on the third day, he will give you only hundred rupees, and promise to pay you the rest later. By the end of the second week, he will pay you only a third of what he owes you. And by the end of the month, you will realize that contractor Choduram Aggarwal really does not pay his workers. But by now it is too late. You can’t leave. He owes you three thousand rupees already. You are now… What are you now, Aman bhai?’

  ‘I have no idea, Ashraf bhai.’ It was clear that these questions were purely rhetorical.

  ‘A gulam! A slave. A khacchar, a mule with neither kamai nor azadi. Which is why the best way to earn is on dehadi. If Choduram pays you on the first day, you work for him on the second. He pays on the second, work for the third. He stops paying, you stop working. After all, even if you are an LLPP, you still have your self-respect.’

  ‘An LLPP?’

  Ashraf couldn’t help grinning to himself. This was classic Ashraf. There was a punchline somewhere, but he wasn’t going to give it away cheap. He paused for a theatrical pull on his beedi and intoned with mock gravitas, ‘In the super-specialized world of today everyone needs a degree. Some are BAs, some are MAs, some are CAs, and the truly unfortunate are PAs. The really well read are PhDs, but here on the chowk, ninety per cent of the mazdoors are LLPPs—the universal degree that we are all born with.’

  ‘An LLPP?’

  ‘Yes, an LLPP—Likh Lowda Padh Patthar. And when they ask you what you are, answer loudly and proudly. Chances are they will never know what it means.’

  What it means, literally, is Write Penis Read Stone—Ashrafspeak for someone who is completely illiterate. Ashraf is proud of his literacy; he can even read little bits of English. He carried a pocket-sized Hindi to English dictionary in his sling bag for years; the idea was to learn one English word a day but he never got around to doing it. Then he lost his bag.

  Ashraf understands the need to appear educated. Many years ago, Ashraf had a friend who, when asked what his qualifications were, answered, ‘Double BA.’

  ‘The other party was so impressed that they gave us the contract right away.’

  ‘So what were his degrees in, Ashraf bhai?’

  ‘Oh, in nothing and nothing. In Bengali, we say “biye” for marriage. Raja was twice married, hence “double biye”. Smart, no?’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘In our line, we have to be brilliant,’ Ashraf continued with some earnestness. ‘To become a businessman you should be ready for anything, you should have answers for everything.’

  To become a businessman is Ashraf’s fondest dream because he believes it will free him from the clutches of a maalik forever. Even a mazdoor must answer to the man who hires him for the day; but to be a businessman, Ashraf believes, is to never have to be answerable to anyone.

  Before becoming a safediwallah at Bara Tooti, Ashraf was many things in many places: he sold lemons, eggs, chickens, vests, suit lengths, and lottery tickets. He worked as a butcher, a tailor, an electrician’s apprentice. He studied biology, he learnt how to repair television sets. He lived in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Patna, and somewhere in Punjab. But his earliest memories are of an airy house in Patna’s Patliputra Colony.

  3

  He found it while clearing out the drawers of the old writing desk in the drawing room, next to the sofa with the shotgun. Slim, rectangular, with a grainy, textured cover, it was wrapped in clear plastic and secured with rubber bands—the thin black sort that hold the morning newspapers together in bulky rolls. A strangely familiar face stared out of the photograph on the first page.

  ‘Who is this, Doctor saab?’ Mohammed Ashraf, aged ten years, held up a fragile passport.

  ‘That’s me with a full head of hair.’

  ‘What is this for?’

  ‘It’s for going to America.’

  In 1947, Syed Mustapha Hussain went to America to complete his PhD at the University of Michigan. ‘That too on full scholarship. I told Nehru, “This country needs two things: farmers and scientists.”’

  ‘You knew Pandit Nehru?’

  ‘Of course. Back then, everyone knew everyone.’

  Upon his return in the 1950s, Dr Hussain settled in Patna and rose to considerable prominence in the Department of Animal Husbandry. Depending on which interview tape I consult, Ashraf came to Dr Hussain’s house when he was five/eight/ten with his mother Sakina and his younger brother Aslam from their village in the Guraru taluk of Bihar’s Gaya district. His father died when Ashraf was just one/two/three; Ashraf has few memories of his father except that he ‘did something with the railways’ and was rarely home.

  In Patna, Sakina found work with Dr Hussain. Right from the beginning, Ashraf loved Dr Hussain. He still remembers his address, 207 Patliputra Colony.

  Dr Hussain taught Ashraf how to clean a shotgun and told him stories about going on shikar and hunting leopards. Dr Hussain took Ashraf to Hyderabad when he went to visit his daughter. During the trip, when Ashraf suddenly developed a sharp pain in his molars, Dr Hussain took him to the best dentist in Hyderabad, who pulled out Ashraf’s tooth for free just because he respected Dr Hussain. Dr Hussain insisted Ashraf go to school and occasionally helped him with his homework. Dr Hussain told Ashraf that if he studied hard and did well enough, maybe he could go America too and become a doctor like Dr Hussain.

  Till he was sixteen, Ashraf’s life kept pace with Dr Hussain’s dreams; he finished high school and enrolled in a biology programme at Patna’s Magadh University. He sat in class with the ‘mummy–daddy’ type children whose mummies would pack their lunch and daddies would pick them up after class. No one made lunch for Ashraf and in the evenings he hurried home to help out; but he still studied twice as hard as everyone else.

  Then, one evening in February, a few months before his exams, he was startled by the sound of a determined thumping on the front door.

  •

  Rinse rat in water and place on dissection tray on dorsal side.

  Pin limbs to dissection tray.

  Make first incision along the vertical axis, bisecting the rat from abdomen to chin.

  Take care to cut only skin, avoiding damage to major veins and arteries.

  ‘Just the skin, just the skin,’ muttered Ashraf as he struggled to memorize the instructions. Cut a vein by accident and the tray becomes a mess of bright red roohafza- coloured water.

  Lift the rat’s skin with the forceps and pin to dissection tray.

  What was that noise?

  Studying in his room on the terrace, Ashraf was disturbed by a commotion on the first floor. Someone was banging on the front door. Someone was kicking the door hard enough to shake dust from its frame.

  Locate the thymus gland which is placed over the anterior portion of the heart. Carefully move it out of the way.

  He looked over the side of the terrace, still murmuring the dissection procedure under his breath.

  Using forceps, carefully cut muscle and fatty tissue away from major arteries.

  It was Taneja, the tenant from the ground floor—Taneja and a gang of men. They were hammering away at the ageing door; it would not hold for much longer. Dr Hussain was shouting. He was shouting, ‘Idiot, nonsense fellow,’ as loudly as he could. The men were laughing loudly. This was a strictly ‘Bhenchod, chootiya’ group.

  The men had guns.

  Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.

  The men had guns!

  Dr Hussain had a gun.

  Dr Hussa
in had a shotgun on the sofa near the writing desk.

  The stairs from the terrace to the back door of the kitchen were steep. Check the table near the balcony. The pellets were in the small drawer under the radio set.

  They had not noticed, they could not notice. Dr Hussain was still shouting in the hall. Stand in the balcony, must stand in the balcony. Remember what Dr Hussain had said about the shikar, the time he almost shot a leopard. Stand firm, keep your feet planted, take a deep breath. Don’t tremble. Don’t tremble. Stop trembling! Aim carefully. Squeeze the trigger gently, no jerky movements, just like squeezing a lemon, only a little firmer. Ready, Aim, Fire!

  Not Ready!

  Can’t Aim!

  Aim at Anything!

  Aim! Shoot! Fire!

  Shoot! Aim!

  Shoot!

  Just Shoot!

  He pulled the trigger. The butt of the ancient shotgun recoiled violently, slipping off Ashraf’s shoulder and crashing against his ribs with a dull thud. Dazed and deafened, Ashraf stared down at the garden: the pellets had ripped a jagged hole in the canopy of the banyan tree. Taneja and his cohorts stood motionless as tiny shredded leaves fluttered down around them like wedding confetti.

  Taneja was the first to look up. Ashraf was shouting incoherently, tears streaming down his face. His shaking hands cradled Dr Hussain’s favourite shotgun, its sights pointed squarely at Taneja. The double-barrelled shotgun quivered, as if anticipating another explosion. Taneja turned around and walked back into the house; the hoodlums slipped into their vehicles and zoomed off in a cloud of dust. Ashraf returned the gun to its place next to the side table and went back to his study.

  If all steps are carried out correctly, the student should be able to see the rat’s beating heart.

  •

  ‘Subhash Chandra Taneja was tall and fair. He was a Punjabi just like you,’ says Ashraf, as if I am somehow responsible for the conduct of this man. ‘People used to say he looked a bit like Feroz Khan.