A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (10 page)

‘So we went back to Patna. In two days flat we gave up the lease, and I found a small house in Patna.’

‘And Aslam?’

‘He came back with us. We told him to meet us at the station.’

‘And the business?’

‘I left the business to Raja.’

‘And you never went back?’

‘I did—once, but that was for some other work.’

‘What work?’

‘Some things a man should keep to himself. Like this. I don’t have to tell you everything.’

‘But it doesn’t make any sense. I’m sure you could have gone back to Calcutta if you wanted. Left the matter to cool for a few months and then restarted your partnership with Raja.’

‘I could, but I didn’t want to. I hated Calcutta after that.’

‘I can’t build a proper timeline if you don’t tell me things.’

‘Fuck your timeline.’

6

A
shraf and I haven’t really spoken since our ill-tempered argument about the timeline. We say our hellos when we meet at the chowk, but I spend most of my time talking to other people.

My interviews actually seem to be going better without Ashraf. Everyone tends to go a bit quiet when Ashraf decides to hold forth; after all, Ashraf is a ‘pada-likha’ aadmi, a man of learning, which obviously gives him the right to shut everyone up.

Without Ashraf, mazdoors open up to me with greater ease; they are hesitant about their past but always eager to talk about their future. Everyone at Bara Tooti has at least one good idea that they are convinced will make them unimaginably wealthy—something about the chowk breeds the wildest schemes. Its residents are invariably those who have tried their hand at practically everything before arriving at this crossing in Old Delhi. Former cooks, vegetable vendors, dhaba boys, farmers, factory workers—Bara Tooti finds a way to feed them all while they find their feet.

I once met a man in Bara Tooti who managed the bar in a rundown shack on Calangute Beach in Goa before leaving after a dispute over money. The man sitting next to him had spent many years working for a wedding caterer before he had a fight with the head cook. He told me his speciality was kulfi; the trick lay in lowering the flame to a flicker halfway through the cooking.

The most incredible scheme was told to me by Guddu, a young man of twenty-two, who ended up in Bara Tooti when his first dream ended in disappointment.

‘What did you want to do?’ I asked.

‘I wanted to sell my kidney.’

Tired of working as newspaper boys at Lucknow Railway Station, Guddu and a friend took a train to Jaipur in search of a hospital that bought kidneys for about two lakh rupees. ‘We would spend the money in full masti, and when it finished, buy a ticket to Bombay and become full-time beggars outside one of the mandirs where all the film stars come to pray.

‘But the hospital said no. They said they didn’t do that sort of thing any more.’

When I last met Guddu, he was planning to go back home to Lucknow and start a business with his brothers. He said he still had both his kidneys.

The theory of capital accumulation currently in fashion at Bara Tooti involves a motorcycle and two cellphones. It also requires two people to be somewhere on the periphery of Lucknow; but Lalloo is convinced it will work. ‘Hundred per cent. With a system like this you just can’t lose money.’

The idea is for one person to sit at a vegetable market on the outskirts of Lucknow, while his business partner roams the fields on the outskirts of the outskirts. ‘The two are constantly in touch, talking to each other like on walkie-talkies. Constantly comparing the prices of vegetables in the market and in the fields. The moment the price of, say, mirchi starts rising in the market, you call up the other person and say, “Buy fifty kilos of mirchi.’’’ The green chillies are purchased and delivered in a matter of hours on the motorcycle. At this point, the two partners exchange places, with the marketer now heading to the fields while the other monitors prices in the market. ‘Do this two or three times a day, and you are set.’

‘So do it, Lalloo.’

‘Ah, but for that I need two cellphones and a motorcycle.’

•

Ashraf’s absence has also meant that I have more time to get to know Rehaan, the young man who often hangs out with Ashraf and Lalloo and says very little. Rehaan is a bit intense, but unlike Ashraf—who has been almost monotonically gloomy for the last several weeks—Rehaan actually seems to have moods: sad, thoughtful, playful, earnest. He’s also happy to respond to questions with answers, rather than see every enquirer into his personal life as a burglar who must be wrestled to the ground and beaten senseless before he makes off with a precious memento.

Rehaan comes from Sitapur, a small town in Uttar Pradesh of about 150,000 residents.

‘Can you tell me something more about your town, Rehaan?’

‘It has an eye hospital.’

In my early recordings, Rehaan is the humming silence in the background, occasionally breaking into the conversation in a gruff mumble, as if he were still learning how to use his freshly cracked ‘man’ voice. He talks of the small orchard behind his house, the land that he farmed with his elder brothers, an aunt that he sometimes sends money home with, the lack of work in Sitapur. Above all, Rehaan talks about his animals, each story beginning with a tragic loss. Along with the epidemic that once struck Rehaan’s chicken coop, it appears that death cast a long shadow across the farmyard.

‘We had a young lamb once, everyone loved it,’ he remarks in one oft-repeated story. ‘It was a really pretty lamb, but one day it died.’

‘Umm…how did it die, Rehaan?’’

‘We had a young lamb,’ he begins again. ‘I think my father brought it home. I really loved that lamb. I used to give it milk to drink, from a baby bottle with a nipple. It would only drink from my hands.’

Then one day, the lamb chose to eat from the hand of another…

‘One morning, I fed the lamb and tethered him to a papaya tree in our front yard. But the lamb was still hungry. He bleated pitifully; but I knew that you should never, never overfeed a young animal. So I left him there and went off.

‘In my absence, someone—I still don’t know who—heard the bleating and fed him some rice!’

‘So?’

‘He died, Aman bhai. He died! He shat himself to death. You never, ever, ever feed a young lamb boiled rice—never, ever, never.’

Rehaan also used to rear young bulbuls for bird fights; some died, some flew away. ‘We used to tie a fine length of wool around their waists and tether them to short stakes a few feet apart.’

According to Rehaan, the sight of another similarly tethered bird was enough to start the fight—that and a carefully prepared diet of powdered dry fruits, raisins, and chopped papaya.

‘I had one really beautiful fighting bulbul; he won every fight. Then he died.’

But today Rehaan doesn’t want to reminisce about his childhood; today he wants to discuss a plan that can make him a very wealthy man—and it involves goats.

‘Yes, goats—bakri. I’m telling you, Aman bhai, if you buy a goat the day a daughter is born in the house, in eighteen years you will have enough for her wedding, jewellery, clothes, and dowry. All from one goat.’

The goat in question is the long-eared Jamuna Paari goat, not to be confused with the beak-nosed Totapuri, or with the variety of mango of the same name.

On the day your daughter is born, walk down past Daryaganj to the river and buy a Jamuna Paari laila for three hundred rupees. In about eight months, around the time that your little girl is taking her first tentative steps and gurgling, your laila—now a fully grown doe—should have between two and four kids. Keep two and give the other two out on batai.

Batai—which literally means to divide or share—is when you ‘lend’ someone your goat in return for his feeding it. It isn’t just for goats, but equally applicable for any livestock—cows, pigs, even chickens. Feeding farm animals is an expensive proposition, so by lending them out, the borrower looks after the goat in return for the milk, and the kids—when the goat births—are equally divided.

By the time your daughter is two years old, you are the master of a modest tribe of between eight and twelve goats. The does can be given out again on batai, while the rams can be fattened and sold to the butcher around Eid, when the rates are high. In time, your daughter can help out—occasionally taking the flock out to pasture, ensuring that the batai goats are well looked after, and on the joyous occasion of the wedding, at least the guests won’t complain of a shortage of mutton.

‘Wah, Rehaan, wah!’ The goat scheme sounds perfect—a vivid illustration of the benefits of the geometric progression of goats compared to the arithmetic progressions of daughters.

Pleased by my effusive reception of his idea, Rehaan leans over conspiratorially. ‘The bakri plan is great, Aman bhai, but what I really want to get into is pigs.’

‘Pigs?’

‘Yes, pigs. My father won’t have anything to do with them, but that’s where the real money is. Pigs and sugar mills.’

While the connection may not seem obvious to most, pigs and sugar cane go back a long way. Uttar Pradesh for instance, where Rehaan comes from, produces a fourth of the country’s sugar and is home to about a fifth of all its pigs. Rehaan’s plan involves inheriting his piece of the family land, which could take some time, and promptly shifting from their current mix of wheat and vegetables to sugar cane and then, if the family lets him, getting into the pig business.

The process of converting sugar cane juice to crystalline sugar sounds simple and profitable.

Extract juice from sugar cane and slow-cook over a low fire till thick and syrupy. Now add the trunk of the jungali bhindi plant (soaked overnight in a vat of water). The plant acts as a bleaching agent and removes any fibrous residues, and can easily be filtered out. Cook the sugar syrup some more, pour into a chakkar or mill, and occasionally sprinkle with water using a pichkari or sprinkler.

The sugar will crystallize in a few hours, leaving behind a viscous fluid called seera. Don’t throw the seera; it is often fermented and used to make a local alcohol much loved by the UP jats. Don’t throw the jungali bhindi residue either—it is perfect for feeding pigs.

‘If you have enough residue, you don’t need to feed pigs anything else.’

The concept behind pig rearing is the same as for goats—but the numbers are far greater. If Rehaan is to be believed, an adult sow gives birth to ten piglets at a time twice a year. That’s twenty piglets a year! A large male pig can be sold to a butcher for up to five thousand rupees, and so within a year of spending five thousand rupees on the sow, you could earn almost one lakh rupees. And then you buy some more pigs; and then in a year, buy some more land and plant some more sugarcane and feed some more pigs—all the while making more and more alcohol from the seera. If all goes as planned, in about five years, one could own a large field, a sugar mill, a sprawling piggery, and a distillery.

‘So why don’t you do it, Rehaan? Let’s go buy a pig today!’

‘You forget, Aman bhai—my father is a devout Muslim. He’ll disown me if I so much as mention a pig in his presence.’

Forbidden from chasing his dream of raising a piggery or starting a distillery, Rehaan is trying to build a future right here in Delhi. The plan is to start a business of some sort, but for that you need punji, or capital; and to raise punji in a wage market as depressed as Bara Tooti, you need to work very hard.

With his massive chest and bulging biceps that make him look a bit like a chicken that Ashraf plumped up with hot water, Rehaan works harder than anyone else at the chowk and has cut deals with several contractors to be part of their teams.

Most contractors take one look at his incredible physique and offer him work almost instantly. Rehaan isn’t particularly tall, but he has serious ‘mass’: dense, bulky, heavy muscles that fibrillate imperceptibly when he chooses to flex them.

Back home in Sitapur, most mazdoors look like him. But no one at Bara Tooti really gets around to eating enough to sustain a body like Rehaan’s. In the city, the mazdoors are much smaller, with stringy, rope-like muscles and slightly sunken chests.

‘But don’t look for strength in the arms, Aman bhai,’ Rehaan explains. ‘The back is the most important muscle. It provides a base to lift and carry. You can have giant biceps but without the back, you will not be able to pick up a newspaper.’

The key role that Rehaan plays in any contractor team is of the load bearer or palledar. For heavy loads, Rehaan says, the upward thrust has to come from the hamstrings; so your back essentially functions as a mast connecting your legs which give thrust to your arms which support the weight. With a straight back, you can channel the force from your legs right through to the weight on your arms. ‘You bend your back and you could twist your spine,’ says Rehaan, making a disconcerting ‘snap’ sound with his fingers.

Despite the strenuous work, Rehaan likes being a palledar—it gets him into a surprising number of places. Rehaan has strolled through the circular walkways of the Parliament, haunted the fire escapes of the Mantralaya building from where the chief minister of Delhi runs the city, and skulked in the landscaped lawns of the Imperial Hotel at Janpath where the rich and powerful hold conferences.

‘There were white girls at the Imperial yesterday,’ he announces one day. ‘White girls in tiny panties and colourful bras, taking in the sun while we patched up a leak in the swimming pool.’

Distracted as I am by the image of semi-naked girls cavorting in a pool, particularly on a summer afternoon as ghastly as this one, I am more interested in Rehaan’s experiences in Parliament—an edifice that many have tried to breach, but almost always without success.

After the attack of 13 December 2001, in which Parliament was stormed by armed gunmen, the Indian government spent close to a hundred million rupees on upgrading the building’s security.

But two years later, a stout, middle-aged man with an unfashionably thin pencil moustache, oversized aviator frames, and a complete lack of identity papers, accomplished what five well-trained and heavily armed gunmen had failed to do. On 8 August 2003, Balbir Singh Rajput strolled into the Indian Parliament, walked about the lawns in full view of the security guards, chatted on his cellphone, and walked out untouched, unharmed, and unchallenged.