A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (3 page)

‘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

H
e 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 Hussain 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.

‘But people also told us he was an honest man who would be a good tenant. People will say anything that comes into their heads.

‘People are chootiyas,’ he concludes.

Of course, Ashraf knew all along that Taneja was not to be trusted. Because Ashraf knows everything. ‘I told Dr Hussain when they made out the lease: never trust Punjabis. But no one listens to me.’ Except for me it seems. I have been listening to Ashraf for two hours this morning, and haven’t got a word in edgeways.

‘Taneja was a smuggler. He ran an auto parts business out of a showroom on Exhibition Street, but he simply bought fake Chinese parts from the Nepal border and sold them at the same prices as the real thing. Once he got into Dr Hussain’s house he was never going to go away.

‘If I thought like you presswallahs think, I would probably say Taneja was the reason I ended up at Bara Tooti. He would probably find it really funny that after all these years, you and I, sitting here in Delhi, are talking about him.

‘Yes, he would. He was that kind of chootiya. Before I met Taneja—I was a good boy, studying first year biology at Magadh University, hoping to become some sort of officer. But Taneja didn’t send me here. Maybe I was coming all along; I just needed something to show me the way.’

Ashraf first mentioned Taneja many months after I began plotting his route from Patna to Delhi.

‘So why did you leave Patna?’ I would ask with admirable persistence.

‘Kuch ho gaya tha, something happened,’ he would say dismissively before suddenly turning my attention to something else. ‘Look at that man negotiating with a contractor—that contractor is a very big man; some say he almost became a minister in Madanlal Khurana’s sarkar.

‘See that tree near the corner? That one with the poster? That’s Indira’s tree. I’m sure of it.’

‘Why did you leave Patna, Ashraf bhai?’

‘Something happened. See that man using that fine chisel—we call that an asula…’

And so it would continue: me pointing my recorder at Ashraf and asking questions, Ashraf deflecting them by distracting me with chowk trivia: ‘You know why rickshaw pullers are usually Biharis? Because no one else can afford to be one; Biharis can live more cheaply than anyone else. I’m a Bihari, I know these things.’

Occasionally, Ashraf would reward my persistence with a straight answer.

‘Taneja! Taneja, Taneja, Taneja… Taneja wanted Dr Hussain’s house. You may not know this, but in many towns there are people—harami types—who keep an eye out for houses like Dr Hussain’s: a house where a retired person’s middle-aged son has unexpectedly died; someone’s children have left for another city; a wife of fifty years has a heart attack. So the old man will say, “What will I do alone in this big house?” and that’s when they strike.’

Taneja appeared one morning, soon after Dr Hussain’s only daughter and her husband had left for Hyderabad. By the afternoon he had convinced Dr Hussain to take him in as a tenant. In the evening, Ashraf was sent along to buy stamp paper to formalize the lease.

‘Bas, in two months Taneja refused to pay rent, and in the third month he tried to throw Dr Hussain out of his own house. That’s when the aasmani firing took place, when I fired the gun in the air.’

In the fourth month Dr Hussain took Taneja to court.

In the seventh month a car suddenly veered off the road and knocked Dr Hussain down when the old man was out on his evening walk. He was rushed to the Holy Family Hospital, but the doctors were pessimistic about his chances.

‘Even there he was surrounded by Punjabis—one Dr Bhatia. Taneja was also a Punjabi. All these Punjabis in Bihar—they were all united. One Punjabi will never cross another Punjabi. You should know… The moment I saw him, I knew he would try something—and he did. He stopped Dr Hussain’s heart medication.

‘How can you do that? You tell me, Aman bhai, would you stop his heart medication?’

‘No, Ashraf bhai. No, I wouldn’t. Also, I’m only half Punjabi. My grandfather insists he is actually Pathan.’

‘Hmm. You certainly look somewhat Pathan.’ But he isn’t going to forgive me just yet. ‘Sethi! What kind of name is Sethi?’

‘Well, it’s a Punjabi name, but my family…’

‘Sethi is a Punjabi name!’ he interrupts. ‘Deep down you are all Punjabis.’

‘An entrepreneurial race,’ he adds as an afterthought, ‘but very cunning. Not like us Biharis.’

On the fourth day after the attack, Ashraf received a frantic phone call urging him to come to the hospital immediately. Dr Hussain had refused to take his medicines. Ashraf arrived to find a grimly determined Dr Hussain fending off all efforts to feed him. Ashraf held Dr Hussain’s hands and coaxed him into accepting a bowl of cornflakes. The old man sat up in bed for the first time since his admission and clenched Ashraf’s hands tightly—as if to ward off a spasm. Ashraf stood by the bed, talking as fast as he could in his most reassuring tone.

‘Cornflakes, Doctor saab—cornflakes and milk, warm milk. Cornflakes and warm milk, with sugar—just a little sugar. For energy, sugar gives us energy.’

Talking faster and faster he wiped away the milk that had dribbled out of Dr Hussain’s mouth, assured him that the medicines were already working, that Dr Hussain was already looking much stronger. ‘I checked; your passport is still valid. Once you get out we’ll leave this place and go for a holiday to America. But for that you need to eat, Doctor saab, please eat. You need to swallow these pills, you need to drink enough water, you need to…’