Book review: 'A Free Man'

Book: A Free Man
Aman Sethi
Random House
224 pages
Rs399

If newspapers and magazines were all that you read, you could end up thinking your city was built by builders, run by administrators, and inhabited only by people who work in offices and live in ‘societies’.

This is to be expected in a culture dominated by advertising-funded mass media, where telling stories about the bottom 30% of the population is not a commercially viable proposition. As a result, India’s vast working class — mistrys, beldars, karigars, mazdoor, rickshaw-pullers, plumbers — has largely been rendered invisible. They are everywhere you see, and yet, nowhere seen.

In A Free Man, Aman Sethi illuminates the lives of a few of these invisible men. As he does so, he doesn’t try to keep himself in the shadows either. The light falls where it will, without the forced pretensions of ‘journalistic objectivity’.

The main subject of this remarkable work of reportage is Mohammed Ashraf, a 40-year-old safediwallah (painter) and construction worker. Sethi, a journalist with The Hindu, first encounters Ashraf while working on a story about construction workers. Subsequently, when he needed a labourer for a research project he’d taken up on “the life of the labourer”, he goes back to Ashraf.

Sethi’s narrative is held together by his attempts to interview Ashraf. Over a period of time, he forms a bond with Ashraf and his labourer friends — the crazy Lalloo, the muscular Rehaan, the dying Satish, Kaka the tea seller, and many others. He smokes with them, drinks with them, gets stoned with them, and becomes more involved in the lives of his subjects than a journalist might be expected to, something that is impossible to avoid when professional interest develops into a human relationship.

Sethi, a South Delhi youth on his way to an American university, wants Ashraf to tell him everything about his life — when and where he was born, who his parents were, where he grew up, how he ended up as a daily wage worker in Delhi. But Ashraf is too ebullient a character to comply meekly with his demands. Sethi wants to pin Ashraf’s life story down with a ‘timeline’. But the ‘free man’ of the story is as elusive as a butterfly, and refuses to be fitted into the reporter’s notebook.

What we get instead are revealing vignettes of a daily wager’s life — from the secret pockets stitched into their clothes, to their unconventional banking arrangements, to their vulnerability to the kidney mafia.

In what is perhaps the most surreal section in the book, Sethi describes his encounter with Sharmaji, a raiding officer for the Department of Social Welfare. Sharmaji’s job is to catch beggars and have them tried and punished at the Beggars Court in north Delhi. And he is under a lot of work pressure because his department has to make Delhi “beggar free in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010.”

Sharmaji is proud of his department’s latest acquisition in biometric technology, the Beggar Information System or BIS 2.1. The machine will store the details of every beggar ever arrested by him — name, place of birth, fingerprints, etc — so that “recidivists will no longer fool the judge by claiming that they got off a train in Delhi, were robbed of all their possessions, and were begging to get enough money to go back home.”

But sadly, the BIS 2.1 has some serious flaws, such as its scanner, which, “as befitting any high-tech gadget — was extraordinarily sensitive to dust.” It worked best when recording images of clean thumbs. “‘But these beggars,’ the exasperation in Sharmaji’s voice is palpable, ‘their hands are so dirty, so filthy, that the scanner just cannot pick up the image.’” So they started washing their hands before registering and fingerprinting them. But that took too long. “The department also tried bathing them — but, after a bath, the beggars look ‘just like anyone else’. How then can the judge make the decision?”

It might come as a surprise to many, but Ashraf, ‘just’ a construction worker, has all the complexity of a character in a Henry James novel. He has had a troubled past, doesn’t always know what he wants, and works against his own interest on the few occasions life gives him a chance. It is to Sethi’s credit that he manages to write about a man like Ashraf without seeking to explain him away.

Strangely enough, the most poignant passage in the book appears after Sethi has extracted from Ashraf what he had wanted right from Day 1 — the ‘timeline’ of his life. By then, five years have passed. Ashraf is now in a TB hospital, weakened by the disease, exhausted by the treatment.

Having surrendered the timeline, the labourer tells the journalist, “That’s it, Aman bhai. Now you know everything about me — sab kuch. Like a government form: name, date of birth, mother’s name, place of residence, everything. Our faces are pasted in your notebook, our voices are locked in your recorder — me, Lalloo, Rehaan, Kaka, JP Pagal, everyone. Now you know everything. What will we talk about if we ever meet again?” By thus foregrounding the underlying instrumentality of the journalist’s interest in the labourer, Ashraf retains his dignity even when all has been taken from him.

About 93% of India’s working population belongs to the unorganised sector, and people like Ashraf would figure close to the bottom of this 93%. Indeed, the labourer class exists in the consciousness of the country’s elite more as statistic and subject of policy debates, than as living people with names and even lives. The achievement of Sethi’s book is to extract a person from that statistic and paint his life in all its tragic, funny, and moving humanness.