The True India Book

Non-fiction in the country comes of age with Aman Sethi’s book about life on the margins of society

‘Why are you doing this, Aman bhai?’ asks Ashraf, the free man in the title of this book.

‘Doing what, Ashraf bhai?’

‘Why are you spending all this time and money getting drunk with lafunters like us? What can we teach you?’

‘I’m trying to write a book.’

‘But who will want to read it?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose my friends will buy it and maybe a few people interested in Delhi.’

I can only hope the eventual readership of this book far exceeds this limited number. Ever since the publication of Basharat Peer’s (disclosure: a friend and former colleague at Tehelka) Curfewed Night, it has seemed that the one genre that can overcome the limitations of Indian Writing in English is well reported non-fiction that is specific to a time and place. This genre does not include the ‘India’ books produced by Patrick French or Anand Giridharadas, with their share of unsustainable generalisations, or the polemical essays of Arundhati Roy, with their overarching conclusions unsupported by the journalism that serves as the pretext.

This book by Aman Sethi, arriving as it does at the same time as Rahul Pandita’s (disclosure: a friend and colleague at Open) Hello, Bastar and shortly before Siddhartha Deb’s (disclosure: a friend and former colleague at The Indian Express) The Beautiful and the Damned, is a sign that our publishers may be finally waking up to this fact.

It is a book about Mohammed Ashraf, daily-wage safediwallah at Bara Tooti in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar. Ashraf is ‘short and stubby, with a narrow but muscular chest and small, broad hands balanced on strong, flexible wrists. He is built just like a mazdoor—short, stable and perfectly suited for lifting and carrying. But Ashraf does not grudge the throw of dice that has made him a safediwallah with a mazdoor’s body… A small man carries the ground close to him wherever he goes, even as he hangs along the side of a building three storeys high… A short man knows the limits of his body, the extent of his reach, the exact position of his centre of balance. Unlike the tall man, he holds no illusions regarding his abilities or his dimensions; he will never overreach, overextend, or overbalance.’

Neither does Aman Sethi. The book is a result of the months he has spent in Ashraf’s company, observing and detailing his life. Ashraf does not make it easy, sometimes irascible, sometimes cooperative, but always impatient with the structure Aman Sethi wants to impose on their interviews. And Ashraf is not the only stumbling block. Characters like JP Singh Pagal, ‘short, slender and hyperactive, with enormous eyes that goggle’, wander in to disrupt his efforts.

‘And what is 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 building a house is more art than a craft?

Ravi: Er…

JP 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…

Through these digressions, Aman Sethi manages a feat that I had come to believe was impossible in Indian Writing in English: fully realised characters who do not belong to the English-speaking world, who inhabit a setting that barely intersects with the privileges of this class. If only Aravind Adiga’s Balram Halwai had a touch of Ashraf in him, The White Tiger would have been worth the Booker.

This, though, is hardly the aim of Sethi’s book. The book works because Ashraf is a fascinating man, educated in Patna and somewhat literate in English, someone who has succeeded and failed time after time, but one who, for a brief while, has found space in Bara Tooti to live, invisibly and inconspicuously, the life of a free man.

“Kamai is what makes work work. Without kamai, it is not work, it is a hobby. Some call it charity; others may call it exercise—but it certainly isn’t a job. A job is something a man is paid to do—and his pay is his kamai. Many of us…” Ashraf paused to stand up and take in the tea-sipping mazdoors, the gossiping mistrys and the lazing beldaars in a smooth arc of his arm. “Many of us choose jobs only on the basis of their kamai. Six thousand rupees a month! A man could get rich with that kind of money! But they forget a crucial thing. What is that crucial thing?”

“Azadi, Aman bhai, Azadi,” he continued without waiting for an answer. “Azadi is the freedom to tell the maalik to fuck off when you want to.’’

In the midst of his azadi, Mohammed Ashraf is surrounded by others who are compelling characters in their own way. His friend Rehan works as a mazdoor, sometimes at Parliament where one day he is summoned to clear an illegal construction inside the complex only to find ‘mountains of files, piles of files, cupboards full of files, shelves weighed down by stacks of files wrapped in alternating bright red and dull green cloth’. Kalyani, the woman who runs the only illegal bar of Sadar Bazaar, sells desi liquor at marked-up prices at any time of the day, right on the pavement behind sheets of cardboard and ply that serve as camouflage. And then there is Sharmaji, a senior officer at the Beggars Court who can tell a beggar by his hands— ‘Beggars don’t have calluses. How can they if they never work?’

In the end, though, most of them find that this freedom of the streets is only a limited freedom, constrained in its own way. A few months after Aman Sethi begins visiting Bara Tooti, he finds himself ferrying a young man to his death at the Rajan Babu TB hospital.  It is a death that foretells a certain kind of future for these men.

For us, it is enough that Aman Sethi has allowed us a sense of the lives we have taught ourselves to ignore. It may have started out as a book about Delhi, about lives lived on the margins of the city invisible to us, but in doing so, Aman has written a book that is not just about Delhi. In the specificity of Bara Tooti, it is a book about India in a way any book starting with that ambition could never be. It is simply the best book I have read this year.

Aman SethiIndian writingnon-fiction