A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (4 page)

Dr Hussain waved his hand as if to silence Ashraf; his grip on Ashraf’s hands slowly slackened and a perfect stillness filled the room.

Dr Hussain was buried in a quiet ceremony in Patna. There was no close male relative in the family, and so the body, which had to be washed as per custom, was bathed by Ashraf. The last rites were completed in the presence of the local maulvi, the shrouded figure was lowered into the grave, and laid on its right side in the direction facing Mecca.

A few days after the funeral, a policeman accosted Ashraf on the street. ‘Taneja has not forgotten the firing. Be careful, Ashraf, there have been a lot of car accidents lately.’

A month later, Mohammed Ashraf packed his clothes, his books, and his dissection kit and left Patna.

‘What about college, Ashraf bhai?’

‘What about college, Aman bhai? I was so stressed that I forgot to register for my second year exams. Then, the house got sold. I said to myself, “Forget college, Ashraf. We need a roof over our heads.” My mother found a house in the jhuggi, I needed a job, so I dropped out.’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Ashraf looks uncomfortable. Rather than quelling my curiosity, the story of Ashraf’s childhood has prompted a barrage of questions: How old were you? How did you get admission? Couldn’t you re-enroll? What did your mother think?

On and on, I fired away till finally I made my first big mistake.

‘Are you sure you are talking about going to college and not school, Ashraf bhai?’

‘What do you think? I may be a mazdoor, but I can tell the difference between school and college. I have sliced open frogs with my own hands.’

‘No, not for a minute am I suggesting… All I am saying is…’ But it is too late. Ashraf is very annoyed.

For many weeks thereafter, Ashraf would intersperse his conversation with me with the occasional nugget of trivia. ‘This cigarette you are smoking, the active ingredient is nicotine. Nicotine is also used as pesticide. It is very bad for your health.’

‘Thank you, Ashraf.’

‘It’s fine. Your tea has—what was it?—coffee? No, no, caffeine. Too much caffeine is not good for your health either.’

‘That’s great, Ashraf bhai.’

‘I just remembered a lesson from my first year biology, that’s all. Funny how you remember these things all of a sudden.’

4

O
n a blazing afternoon in June, Ashraf and his cohorts retired to one of the shady alleyways surrounding Bara Tooti. It was too hot to work, too hot to drink, too hot to sleep, and since there is little else to do at the chowk, mazdoors sat around swapping stories in a desultory, disinterested manner that went something like this:

‘It’s so hot, yaar…’

‘This is nothing. Once I was travelling between Lucknow and Kanpur in the month of May… That day it was so hot the floor of the bus was chaka-chak with sweat…’

‘Lucknow? I didn’t know you were from Lucknow…’

‘I’m not, I’m from Meerut…’

‘It must get really hot in Meerut…’

‘Not as hot as here…’

‘God, it’s so hot…’

Most stories are travellers’ tales, beginning with a bus, truck, or train ride and ending with, ‘…and then I came to Bara Tooti, and it has been the same ever since.’

Ashraf tells me one of his favourite stories—that of his first night in Delhi, when, for him, the city was still a mysterious place of freedom, camaraderie, and possibility.

‘I arrived on the late night train from Surat, Gujarat, around half past nine, at Old Delhi Railway Station. I had nothing on me. Absolutely nothing. One bundle of clothes and maybe two or three beedis.

‘On the train someone had said that in Delhi, the police harassed those who slept on railway platforms, so I thought I would sleep outside Jama Masjid. But the guard told me that the masjid was closed for the night. I slipped into one of the lanes near the masjid and I saw some people playing cards.

‘You should always ask permission before approaching a group of card players because if any money goes missing later, they will always blame it on you. So I said, “Bhaiya, I’m new to this place. Can I sleep somewhere around here?” They looked up. One of them said, “Have you eaten?” I shook my head. He pressed a five-rupee coin into my hand and pointed me towards a stall.

‘I ate, bought some beedis, unrolled my sheet, and fell asleep right there on the pavement.’

When he awoke the next morning, the city was already wide awake. Last night’s card players had disappeared, as had the food stall, the beedi seller, and even the security guard. Only Jama Masjid remained where it had been last night, its onion-shaped domes reassuring in their solidity.

Ashraf spent the first week exploring the city, searching out work and places to sleep. ‘And then I found Bara Tooti and it has been the same ever since,’ Ashraf concludes with a wry smile.

‘But if Delhi is such a boring place, why does anyone even come here?’ I ask.

‘It’s hard to say, Aman bhai. Everyone has their own special reasons, personal reasons, family reasons, emotional reasons. You can’t just go around asking people why they are here.

‘There is something Delhi can give you—a sense of azadi, freedom from your past. Everyone knows Delhi. Delhi has Qutub Minar, Red Fort, Old Fort. For every person who makes a bit of money in Delhi, an entire village arrives in search of work. So if you are leaving home, you might as well come to Delhi. Where else would a runaway run away to?’

One summer afternoon, I met a painter called Idris who claimed that he came away to Delhi after he shot someone with a country-made pistol.

‘Did you kill him?’

‘No, that was the biggest mistake. He survived and now he wants to kill me.

‘There are just two types of people here,’ he said, pulling me close. ‘Those who pull the trigger, and those who survive the shootout. Goli maar ke bhi log aate hain. Goli kha ke bhi log aate hain.’

I looked past him at the gaggle of mazdoors fanning themselves in the heat. If only each one of them was a gunslinging mercenary on the run, I thought wistfully.

•

J.P. Singh Pagal is a man who tells Delhi stories better than most. He is short, slender, and hyperactive, with enormous eyes that constantly goggle, as if he were seeing the world for the first time.

J.P. appeared one day at Bara Tooti, weaving through the crowd of exhausted mazdoors, pulling furiously on his chillum, exhaling plumes of bittersweet marijuana, interrupting conversations, pushing, shoving, joking, bitching, shouting, and laughing his curious ascending laugh.

Tales of unexplained disappearances, stories of amazing good fortune, whispers of a strange dark creature that prowls the eastern borders of the city—J.P. Singh knew them all and had seen them all. ‘Watch out, it’s the half-man-half-machine-half-monkey-fully-dangerous Monkeyman. I was there, beedu, I saw him and I screamed! Just like the lady who dropped her pallu in fright; just like the man who killed his sister and threw her body in the gutter. I saw them all, haha, HaHa, HAHA!

‘And what’s this? A recorder? Gathering evidence?’

‘No, no, I’m just a reporter.’

‘You say you are a reporter. I say you are a policeman. Haha, HaHa, HAHA!’

Nonetheless, he sat down beside me and reduced my cunning interview technique to shambles.

Aman: So Ravi bhai, would you say that building a house is more art than a craft?

Ravi: Er…

J.P. Singh: Tell us, Ravi—you son of a randi. Is it an art or a craft? What are your views on quality versus quantity? Tell us, tell us, you chootiya. Did you know they found a condom in a Pepsi bottle? A used one! Haha. I put it there. And the fire in Meerut? I was carrying the matches. The woman whose clothes fell off in the Fashion Week, the bomb that went off, the film with Dino Morea and that londiya—I always forget her name…

A: You made it?

J.P.: (in all seriousness) I made it.

My recordings from that day are littered with J.P.’s comments on me, my work, and everyone I met. He followed me around for hours as I walked the chowk asking undeniably boring questions. For instance, this clip on ‘How to build a house’:

A: How do you pass time while building a house?

Mazdoor: We work.

A: But you think of things while you work?

Mazdoor: Everyone does.

A: What do you think of?

Mazdoor: I think of work when I work.

J.P., in the meantime, provided background chatter, humming around my ears like an irate wasp. As I sought new insights into the condition of labour, he distracted my subjects by passing on news—‘Dino Morea’s new movie is called
Raaz
. It’s a hit!’; handing out insults—‘Arre chootiya, answer the question;’ and spreading paranoia—‘You see those security cameras over there? There, you chootiya
,
up there. It’s recording your every move, it has a microphone that tapes what you say. You see that small shop behind it? That’s where the riot police lie resting. A word from the control room and they will burst out with sticks and guns to hit you and shoot you and beat you into pulp.’

Elsewhere, when I asked a man about his favourite building:

J.P.: You know of the Taj Mahal?

Mazdoor: Yes.

J.P.: Did you know Shah Jahan cut off the hands of everyone who worked on it?

M: No.

J.P.: Do you know if it still happens around here?

M: No…

J.P.: Trust me, it happens.

When I finally gave up, we sat down for a smoke: me with my cigarettes—no more beedis; after a year in Bara Tooti, I realized being one of the boys is an experiment fraught with peril—and he with his chillum. Time passed. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and lit another. I felt I should ask J.P. a few questions—he would be great for the book—but I couldn’t bring myself to. But what if I never saw him again? Suddenly I was exhausted.

J.P. Singh leaned over and handed me a photograph. Shot in a studio, it captured a young, dashing J.P., astride a stationary motorcycle arranged against a painted backdrop that seemed to be whizzing past. He looked happy; a shapely feminine hand rested on his shoulder. From the angle of the handle, I deduced she must be sitting sideways ‘ladies-style’, also facing the camera. I ‘deduced’, as the photograph had been neatly torn in two, excising J.P.’s companion (and the rear wheel of the bike) from the frame. When I asked him about the photograph, he snatched it from my hand. ‘The world changed, and so did we,’ he sang mournfully and slipped away into the evening’s gathering darkness.

J.P. was right; the world was changing, an imperceptible hysteria was pulsing through the city. For as long as I can remember, Delhi looked like a giant construction site inhabited by bulldozers, cranes, and massive columns of prefabricated concrete; but the rubble has masked the incredible changes and dislocations of factories, homes, and livelihoods that occurred as Delhi changed from a sleepy north Indian city into a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower. Working class settlements like Yamuna Pushta, Nangla Machi, and Sanjay Amar Colony were flattened by government demolition squads to make way for broader roads, bigger power stations, and the Commonwealth Games.

Before he settled down on a footpath in Bara Tooti, Ashraf lived in Sanjay Amar Colony, a settlement on the western bank of the Yamuna river.

‘When I arrived in Delhi, I did all kinds of work—I worked in a meat shop, I travelled to Punjab with a construction crew, I did mazdoori at Bara Tooti. I did anything I could find and slept wherever I found space.

‘Then one day, I found work with a Masterji who stitched sports sets. Some company gave him pre-cut pieces of cloth which we stitched into shorts and vests.’

It was a big company that outsourced its stitching to hundreds of workers across Delhi and exported the finished products to Dubai. Every month a company representative would come to Masterji’s tiny two-room house-cum-workshop, pick up the stitched garments, and drop off fresh supplies for the coming month.

‘There were just two of us with our sewing machines, Masterji and I. For two, maybe three years, we lived together, ate together, and worked together. The work was easy, my clothes were always neat, clean, and well tailored. It was great.’

Then in 2004, a bulldozer drove up to Sanjay Amar Colony and razed it to the ground.

‘We had heard of demolition drives across the city, but we never thought it would happen to us,’ Ashraf says. In the first drive, more than 150,000 homes were demolished. Eventually, about 350,000 houses would be levelled as part of a beautification drive launched by a cabal of government agencies.

‘The demolition ruined Masterji. He didn’t have a title for his land and so never got any compensation. Two days after the demolition, he packed his bags and went back to Bengal. I gathered my clothes and came to Bara Tooti.’

‘Was this the first time you came to Bara Tooti?’

‘No, no. I had lived here intermittently for many years before I started work with Masterji. When he left, I moved here full-time.’

Ashraf says that despite its name, Sanjay Amar Colony was a largely Muslim settlement. ‘That’s why it was one of the first to go. That year, 2004, was an election year and the BJP was in power. They knew that the basti would vote for the Congress, so they thought, “Let’s demolish the Muslim areas first.”’

It didn’t work, the Congress still came to power, but for Ashraf, and thousands like him, it was little consolation.

‘The BJP just lost the elections. We lost our lives.’

The violent displacement of 800,000 slum dwellers received surprisingly little attention in the national press that described the process as a necessary and painful part of urban renewal. But occasionally, the working class city would force its way into the daily news in bizarre and mysterious ways. From 2000 onwards, there were a series of unlikely incidents—the appearance of fantastic creatures, the rise of serial killers like West Delhi’s Hammerman, and a mysterious masked motorcyclist who dressed in black and prowled Delhi’s streets by night—that could just have been made up by J.P. Singh Pagal but were reported in national dailies.