It is Market Day

Random House

Pages: 223

Rs 399

History is a bit of a joke at Bara Tooti Chowk in Sadar Bazaar,one of the oldest markets in Delhi. Shopkeepers point journalists to the tree that Indira Gandhi once stood under,but questions about who installed the 12 taps that give it its name,Mughals or British,draw sniggers. Given that there is no trace of them,the running joke is that they must have been installed by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. The absurdity of the contemporary is far more interesting,if far more bruising,in Aman Sethis A Free Man,about life at the labour mandi of Sadar Bazaar,written with great skill,humour and empathy.

Sethi spent five years researching the lives of the men who gather at the chowk every morning like mannequins in a shop window and wait for work to find them safediwallahs and mazdoors,beldaars and mistris. Men with impermanent homes and wildly hopeful schemes,and clothes lined with special pockets to protect the haggard lineaments of their identity. Every mazdoor is a walking album panelled with money,paper,phone numbers,and creased photocopies of ration cards. Sethi turns into a character in the story,sharing joints and jokes with the lafunters,as his friendship and frustration with the protagonist of his book,Mohammad Ashraf,grows.

Ashraf is a safediwallah with the small build of a mazdoor. But he is not a typical labourer. Hes been to school,attended a year in college,and even sliced rats in a zoology lab,before the chanciness of a poor mans life blew him from his mentors airy home in Pataliputra Colony,Patna,to the streets of Delhi. He is a man of wit and wisdom,a free man. He works for a week at a time,and then spends another week in leisure,downing glasses of Everyday whiskey. Azaadi,Aman bhai! Azaadi! It is the freedom to tell the maalik to fk off when you want to. The maalik owns our work. He does not own us. When his pockets are empty,he brings out from his bag of tools a lucky charm,his kandome: a broad,heavy brush with long,thick bristles encrusted with paint,and a bright red handle that instantly impresses possible employers. Its the most useless brush,though. Its just like a kandome,Aman bhai. On TV you may stand next to Shabana Azmi and promise to use it,but you know you never will.

The strength of the book is that Aman bhai lets Ashraf bhai speak,without weighing him down with a predetermined narrative though the latter is often a difficult,moody subject,evasive when it comes to reconstructing a timeline of his life.

A Free Man is also interested in the various kinds of labour that moves the wheels of a megalopolis the palledar who enters the Parliament complex to repair and remove air conditioners,or the kasai who knows how to cut,skin and dice a whole chicken in two minutes. A bravura scene takes place at Old Delhi railway station,where Sethi watches head foreman Babulal do the impossible task of loading and unloading tonnes of cargo off a train in under half-an-hour: lithe men relying on a combination of skill and physics to manoeuvre the boxes into place,daintily flipping hundred kilogram crates using their shoulders as fulcrums and their hips as pivots.

The city map a man carries in his head depends on who he is,and what he is willing to see. A lot of current writing on contemporary India often curiously ignores a vast hinterland of stories the great human drama of thousands of poor people who course into cities in search of work. Sethi bears witness to this. For that alone,this is a book to be read.