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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Excerpt |
A Free Man
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| An intimate portrait of the lives of Delhi’s itinerant labourers |
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R IRANI FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| In Delhi, a working man can spend a lifetime searching for the ideal job with the perfect balance of kamai and azadi—where he is both fortunate and free.
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| “I |
'M LOOKING FOR A MAN named Mohammed Ashraf,” I said to a short, scruffy man who identified himself as Lalloo. |
“I had interviewed him for a story last year. I’m from the press.”
Mohammed Ashraf is a short man, a slight man, a dark man with salt-and-pepper hair; a sharp man, a lithe man, a polite man with a clipped moustache and reddish eyes.
I first met him in December 2005 while working on a story on a proposed Delhi government bill to provide health insurance for construction workers. I had spoken with all the experts, gotten all my quotes, and arrived early one morning to meet some construction workers, hoping to fit their views into a story that, for all purposes, I had already written. As I recall, Ashraf had been a terrible interview subject. He had refused to answer any questions directly, choosing instead to offer up quotes like: “If you had studied psychology, you would know that if you sleep without washing your feet, you get nightmares.” After this cryptic insight, he had clammed up and refused to offer his opinion on the Building and Other Construction Workers Act of 1996 and its proposed successor.
Six months later I was back in Sadar Bazaar, this time on a fellowship, searching for that very same Ashraf with the bombastic quotes. It would be a struggle to convince him to actually answer my questions, but I had time and Ashraf, as my editors and I had noted, made for excellent copy.
“Ashraf? ASHRAF!” Lalloo shouted as we picked our way through the maze of alleys behind Bara Tooti Chowk in Sadar Bazaar. “Look what a nice angrezi murgi we’ve found you!”
“An AC-type murgi”, added Rehaan, a muscular young boy of about 18, who sidled up to the two of us, and had crushed, filled and smoked a joint by the time we found Ashraf nursing a hangover in a shady corner of Barna Galli.
“You’ve come back,” said Ashraf, pulling on his beedi. “Are you working on another story?”
“No, no,” I replied. “This time it’s a research project. I want to understand the mazdoor ki zindagi—the life of the labourer. I want to interview you some more.”
“What happened to the last one? Did you bring a cutting of your article?”
“No.” “Well, bring it next time. Do you want some tea?”
Peering closely at the magazine I brought on my next visit, Ashraf tried not to sound disappointed. “But this doesn’t have my photo! This after you made me pose with a brush in one hand.”
“But I quoted you,” I pointed out. “Thrice”. “I can see that. But no photo.” And that’s how I fell in with Ashraf, Lalloo and Rehaan.
They made for an odd crew: Ashraf, the quick-witted dreamer of schemes, Lalloo, who walked with a limp and served as a foil for Ashraf’s ideas, and Rehaan, the quiet boy with a smouldering joint who didn’t say very much but listened to everything. It’s hard to tell if they even got along, but then getting along is largely beside the point in Bara Tooti, where the jokes are dark and largely unintelligible to outsiders, and conversations tangential and prone to the most unlikely non sequiturs.
“I knew this man,” Rehaan once said, apropos of nothing, “who used to inject his testicles to get high. What do you think of that, Aman bhai?”
| A |
CENTURY AGO, there were no directions to Sadar Bazaar—the market was where most journeys began. One of Delhi’s oldest bazaars, Sadar began as a grain market on the banks of a stream that ran all the way from Haryana, right through Azad Market Chowk, past the crossing where Novelty Cinema still stands, and up towards Red Fort before joining the |
Yamuna river. The waterway has long been paved over; but traders talk of the urli and palli sides of Azad Market as if the bazaar were still riven by a stream rather than a noisy, throbbing strip of traffic.
Unlike the more scenic parts of the city, Sadar Bazaar shows up on tourist maps of Delhi as the large empty space between the backpacker haven of Paharganj and picturesque Chandni Chowk. Her gruff shopkeepers are wholesalers of goods shorn of glamour: plastics, metal products, raw cotton, grains. Until recently, the bazaar functioned like a small city: goods produced at one end of Sadar were stocked in shops sold at the other. After a 2004 Supreme Court order banned factory work within city limits, the factories have fallen silent, but you can still buy fizzy drinks in Choona Mandi that have been bottled in the nether regions of Paharganj.
Ashraf lives in Bara Tooti Chowk, the crossing of twelve taps, one of Sadar’s road intersections. Despite its name, there isn’t a faucet in sight, let alone any drinking water. “I think the taps were installed by the Mughals,” said the proprietor of Garg Sweets, a prominent confectioner at the chowk. “I think it was the British,” said his son sitting next to him. Given that there is no trace of them, the running joke is that they must have been installed by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.
| R IRANI FOR THE CARAVAN |
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“For every person who makes a bit of money in Delhi, an entire village arrives in search of work,” says Ashraf.
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The chowk is now one of Delhi’s largest labour mandis, literally a labour market, on the streets of which daily wagers like Ashraf live, work, drink and dream. To get there, I would usually ride up early mornings on my motorcycle from Connaught Place, straight past New Delhi Railway Station, under the Daryaganj flyover, along Qutb Road, before turning left through the wholesale cotton market at Rui Mandi.
On other days, I would approach the chowk from Sadar Thana Road, and stop just short of the actual intersection itself. On the left was a small structure composed of bathroom tiles that I had once mistaken for a public urinal—only to realize that it was, in fact, a roadside shrine. On good days, Ashraf would be sitting by the shrine with a beedi and a cup of tea, chatting up construction contractors and hustling for work. On bad days, he’d be nursing his hangover at Kaka’s tea shop in an alley behind the main intersection.
Kaka’s tea shop wasn’t much of a shop as it was the fossilized remains of a creature formed by the inbreeding of generations of pots, pans, stoves and cement. The shop began as a large concrete shelf—about six feet high, 10 feet across, and three feet deep—fused onto the rear wall of the Aggarwal Samiti Mandir premises, but soon grew to take up most of the alleyway called Barna Galli. The temple management had leased out half the shelf to a silent machinist, who spent his day crouched on his narrow ledge with an array of lathes, wires, capacitors and resistors for company.
On the other half lay a disused kerosene stove, a large rectangular coffee machine, a telephone, and jars of tea, coffee, sugar, cardamom and flaky, biscuit-like ‘fen’. On a large table placed adjacent to the shelf, a kettle hissed on a gas burner placed amid glasses, teaspoons, sieves and packets of milk. On the floor, a few feet from the table, a young boy stirred a shallow vat of milk propped up over a gas burner by a set of bricks. A second boy scurried around taking orders from workers seated all along the alley.
Sanjay ‘Kaka’ Kumar was a flabby 40-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard. He sat comfortably on a plastic chair placed equidistant from all three stoves, directing his assistants with a series of precise hand gestures and the occasional curse. His tea shop was currently the subject of a legal battle between the jeweller who had built the shelf and the temple management that owned the wall on which the shelf was built. The jeweller had subletted the space out to Kaka, who dutifully deposited his rent of two hundred rupees every month in court.
Bara Tooti began its day at Kaka’s tea shop. The milk would arrive by five in the morning and the first batch of ‘morning special’ tea would be ready by a quarter past five. Ashraf and Lalloo would show up soon after and sit on a low ledge, waiting for the early morning cramps that milky tea and a beedi invariably produce.
“It’s almost eight and they are still sitting here,” Kaka would exclaim irrespective of when I arrived. “Outside at the chowk, work has come and gone, but these two are still waking up. Drink your chai, smoke your beedi, pay your two rupees for a shit, and go for work.”
“What’s so special about the morning special?” I once asked Kaka.
“It helps build pressure,” Kaka replied. “You understand pressure? Because a man doesn’t truly wake up till he shits.”
| I |
F YOU WANT A JOB in Bara Tooti, wake up early, order a cup of chai and wait by the main road—work will come to you. Shopkeepers looking to extend their storage space by knocking down a wall between two adjacent rooms; house owners looking to turn a balcony into an extra bedroom; contractors searching for extra labour; families looking for someone to |
whitewash their staircase the day before their daughter’s wedding—they all come down to Bara Tooti in search of mistrys and beldaars, karigars and mazdoors.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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mohanshekhar
15 August 2011
03:50 PM
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a beautiful, moving and probing chronicle. an exceptional piece of narrative.
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RK
24 July 2011
01:37 AM
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Excellent stuff!!!! Facts presented in a very interesting manner...
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Amoolya
20 July 2011
03:03 PM
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Great stuff! How much we have wanted this type of literature. There is so much richness in the chronicle of a life like this.
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Deepanjana
6 July 2011
03:30 PM
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Fantastic stuff. Just booked a copy of the book on uread.com
http://www.uread.com/book/free-man-aman-sethi/9788184001532
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Reyhan
6 July 2011
01:52 PM
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Very racy ,informative writing and at the same time profound! It should definitely be worth a read.Especially,for those of us in this city of their birth,who are living fairly secure secluded lives and unlikely to encounter these 'free citizens' but who are an ubiquitous and inevitabel part of the city.
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Ambarien
6 July 2011
03:54 AM
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I loved the easy, fluid quality of the narrative. I had read your posts on the sarai list..and it makes me very happy that it is all together as a book! looking forward.
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baba louie
2 July 2011
05:37 PM
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This is A-class stuff. Really, a very different humane piece of reporting. its has the knowledge and witticism of the streets.
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pringle man
30 June 2011
05:59 PM
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Resonates. Descriptions are very well written.
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