A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi by Aman Sethi

Author:Aman Sethi [Sethi, Aman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-10-21T21:00:00+00:00

7

It takes a chat with Lalloo to make sense of Ashraf’s moody outburst. Two drinks down Ashraf can coldly describe the two of them as ‘medium-type friends’, but the truth is that Lalloo is Ashraf’s only friend in Delhi. Ashraf is articulate, witty, and occasionally brilliant; but after three days of drinking, it is Lalloo who finds ten rupees for him to buy tea, take a shit, and get back to work. It is Lalloo who pulls Ashraf back from confrontations with the police, arguments with Kaka, and fights with other mazdoors at the chowk.

Ashraf maintains that he is a peaceful drunk, but that is largely due to Lalloo’s calming influence. Ashraf had introduced Lalloo to the safedi line and for that alone Lalloo will stand by Ashraf—till the day one of them vanished.

‘Because people vanish all the time, Aman bhai. One day they get onto a train or jump into the back of a truck and you never see them again; you never know what happened to them. Maybe they got lucky and became rich; maybe they went to jail and are still there; maybe they had an accident and died. But no one looks for them, because no one really misses them any more. It’s been ten years since Ashraf spoke to his mother, Aman bhai; he’s terrified there will be no one to look for him when he’s gone.’

As I find out, people didn’t just lose themselves in transit; in Delhi, people are picked up off the street in broad daylight, incarcerated for years, and never seen or heard of ever again. The man behind many of these disappearances turns out to be a thickset man in his early forties: stocky, greying, fit for his age, clad in the nondescript brown favoured by government employees, unremarkable save for a pair of shiny white Campus sneakers.

Sharmaji is a senior officer at the Beggars Court at Sewa Kutir, in Kingsway Camp in North Delhi. His job is to catch beggars and have them tried and punished in court. Begging in the national capital is a serious offence, and under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959, the Department of Welfare can arrest all those ‘having no visible means of subsistence and wandering about, or remaining in a public place in a condition or manner, [that made] it likely that the person doing so exists by soliciting or receiving alms’. It isn’t just the alleged beggar; the law also has provisions for sending the family and dependants of the accused off to a remand home if the court feels they might turn to begging.

None of the men I know at Bara Tooti have any visible means of sustenance. If I saw Ashraf lying drunk on a pavement one evening, I wouldn’t know what to make of him. So how can Sharmaji tell a beggar from a working man who is merely poor?

‘You can tell by looking at the hands. The rickshaw pullers, for example, have rough calluses here.’ Sharmaji grabs my hand and points to the arc where the fingers join my palm.

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