A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (12 page)

16:23 hours: Perched in their eyrie-like offices above the platforms, the high officials of the Indian Railways peer out at the chaos unfolding on Platform 3. The engine driver’s visit has not gone unnoticed. Package Babu ruffles his feathers, Signals Babu stretches out his wings, TT Babu smiles wickedly and one by one they prepare to wing down silently to Platform 3 where the Amrapalli Express lies beached with her engines heaving and her innards spilling out onto the platform.

16:25 hours: ‘This train was scheduled to leave two minutes ago, Babulal. TT Babu will be very upset if it gets any later.’ Package Babu smiles even as he attempts to keep a straight face.

‘Sahib, it shall leave immediately. Just give me two minutes.’

‘But immediately is not in two minutes, Babulal. Immediately is right now.’

‘Sahib, you tell me what I should do.’

Package Babu raises himself onto the balls of his feet and rocks back onto his heels; he continues this giddy motion even as he looks down at the pointy toes of his shoes. They are scuffed. Package Babu is not happy. Northern Railways has tasked him with ensuring that the train leaves the station on time, which it won’t. He also wants shiny-tipped shoes, which his aren’t. ‘I need new shoes,’ he remarks.

‘And TT Babu?’

‘I will handle TT Babu. His shoes are fine.’

Babulal reaches into his pocket for more tattered notes; their raggedness is his silent protest.

16:29 hours: The train is now officially late. Fortunately there is only one more crate to go. If they can make it by the twenty-fifth minute, they might be able to stave off TT Babu; he only comes down past the seven-minute mark. Package Babu’s walkie-talkie crackles. TT Babu is getting impatient.

‘Tell Babulal the price is rising.’

‘Don’t worry, TT sir. The train is leaving immediately. The train shall leave in one minute.’

‘Immediately is not in one minute. Immediately is right now.’

16:30 hours: The bolt slides home with a bang. Babulal fits on his lock; his colleague at Katihar will have a skeleton key of his own. The faulty delivery has meant that the team has moved eight tonnes in twenty-five minutes. Package Babu barks out a command into his walkie-talkie. The engine driver blows his whistle. Signals Babu changes the lights from red to green. The Amrapalli Express pulls out of Old Delhi Railway Station, rolling smoothly on wheels greased by Babulal and his team.

The team loads the six crates onto their modified wheelbarrows and wheels them off down the platform towards the godown. Rehaan waves to me as the mazdoors leave the platform. There is no hurry now; the Amrapalli is the last train of the day shift.

•

I can’t help but feel worried for Rehaan—not that he needs my concern. He seems too young, too full of hope to survive a place like Bara Tooti. I keep thinking of telling him to go home to his family, his goats, and his fighting bulbuls, but Rehaan seems to be enjoying the thrill of living in a city like Delhi and the occasional visit to the swimming pool of the Imperial Hotel.

‘Rehaan is a good boy, but he has it all wrong. There are easier ways to make money than to spend one’s time in the company of farm animals or working like a mule. Raising punji is the easy part. A man has to have a business-type brain.’ Ashraf and I are talking again, on the condition that certain topics are off-limits. ‘Look at Kalyani, she makes money night and day—even as she sleeps, money finds its way into her pockets. And look at us. This is what happens if you stay too long in Delhi.

‘When you first come here, there is a lot of hope, abhilasha. You think anything is possible. You have heard all the stories of people who have made it big in the city. Slowly, as time goes by, you start wondering what you are doing. One year, two years, three years, and you are still on the footpath. But people say, have faith, bharosa—something will happen. But slowly you realize, nothing will happen, and you can live the next five years just like the last three years, and everything will be the same. Wake up, work, eat, drink, sleep, and tomorrow it’s the same thing again.

‘So you start fantasizing about returning. You think of the lush green fields, the cool, pure water, the healthy food. You suddenly decide that you were wrong all along; there is money to be made in the village, especially for a man with your experience. But one morning you wake up to realize that living isn’t so much about success as it is about compromise—samjhauta. A samjhauta with life, where you stop wanting to be anything at all. After enough time in Delhi, you even stop dreaming—you could go crazy if you think about it too much.

‘This is a brutal city, Aman bhai. This is a city that eats you raw—kaccha chaba jati hai. For you, all this is research: a boy tries to sell his kidney, you write it down in your notebook. A man goes crazy somewhere between Delhi and Bombay, you store it in your recorder. But for other people, this is life. There are pimps lurking at every corner, waiting to spirit you away if you so much as talk to them. Behind Jama Masjid, there used to be an organ market—anyone could go and offer to sell anything. I’ve heard of people selling their eyes, kidneys, bits of their liver—practically anything. Once they get into Delhi, people see the roads, the crowds, the cars, the madness; people lose their balance in this city.

‘At Koria Pull near the railway station, young sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old boys are sold like cattle to be worked on fields in Punjab. Do you know that?

The boys will walk out of the train with nothing—just a bundle of clothes and a few beedis. A man will walk up to them, give them food and a place to sleep, and next morning he will say, “There is this theka in Noida, just get onto the truck.” You get onto the truck and that’s it—khatam! You wake up in Punjab and a sardarji puts you to work in his fields and that’s where you stay for the rest of your life.’

‘Doesn’t anyone run away?’

‘Lots of people try; but they have no money. No one in Punjab gives you any money—you get food and clothes and that’s it. Finally, how much can you run, Aman bhai?’

7

I
t 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. ‘It’s the rickshaw’s hard plastic handles. The skin first blisters, then the blisters become calluses and the calluses form little ridges.’

‘They also have big, bulging calves,’ Sharmaji adds as an afterthought. ‘And some of them sit funny.

‘Mazdoor hands are different from beggar hands. They have calluses too—but their nails are scuffed from handling bricks and sand. You won’t see a rickshaw puller with scuffed hands. Safediwallahs tendy to be tall and lanky and are usually sprinkled with paint dust. Carpenters are Muslims and usually carry tools. Never, Aman sir, never trust a man who travels without his tools.’

Sharmaji, raiding officer for the Department of Social Welfare and the source of these ethnographic insights, has rather soft hands himself—the sort that might be subjected to the occasional massage of Pond’s Cold Cream. But he has strong fingers and well-rounded shoulders: the anatomy of a man used to grabbing people and shaking them about.

‘Beggars don’t have any calluses. How can they if they never work? Also, a working man—no matter how poor he is—will always look you in the eye when he talks to you. But beggars? No, they can’t look me in the eye.’

‘Now take you, for instance.’ He shakes my hand vigorously, somehow managing to point at me with my own fingers. ‘No one will mistake you for a beggar even if you dress up as one.’

I try and imagine if I would look Sharmaji in the eye. He reminds me of a particularly feared mathematics teacher from school—a man who appeared reasonable at most times, but could be moved to violence by completely innocuous acts. My teacher too had a habit of grabbing students by the shoulder and jerking them about, an experience I found intensely disorienting.

This should be a period of frenetic activity for Sharmaji and his team; the minister heading his department has promised to make Delhi ‘beggar free’ in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Sharmaji’s department has deadlines to meet, beggars to deport, and cases to file. The target for the year is at least five thousand beggars. But the reception area is empty, save for the two of us, as are the small courtrooms.

Sharmaji’s raid vehicle has broken down, making it impossible for him to drive around the city chasing beggars. The wheels of the Delhi government do not move any faster for its own departments and so Sharmaji has been told that a new vehicle will arrive ‘in some time’.

‘Right now, the only beggars we have are those rounded up by the Delhi Police. But they don’t know how to read hands. The police can’t tell a beggar from a beldaar.’

Suddenly I am very afraid for my friends.

‘The police don’t even know how to catch them.’ Sharmaji is disconsolate. ‘There is a special technique. You can’t just stop anywhere and run at them. Now where would you go to catch a beggar?’

‘I don’t know. A traffic light?’

‘Wrong!’ he says with some satisfaction. ‘Correct but wrong. Don’t worry, it is a logical mistake to make. You may
find
them at a traffic light, but you cannot
catch
them at a traffic light. You see the difference?’ He grabs my wrist again.

‘We all know that beggars stand at traffic lights, but if you try and catch them, they often run off straight into traffic. The result? Accidents, traffic jams, and the public also gets upset.’

Instead Sharmaji and his team stake out at the major temples in the city. ‘It is the fault of our culture. If people spend lakhs of rupees in feeding the beggars, why would anyone work? All they do is sit and wait to be fed. This is not how you give discipline to the nation.’

At temples, the beggars tend to be more docile and less likely to escape through rush hour traffic. ‘Temples, train stations, bus stands. Here you will not only find beggars, but also be able to arrest them.

‘It is best to arrive after they have been fed. Mid-afternoon to late evening, when they are drowsy and there aren’t too many pilgrims around.’

Unsurprisingly, Sharmaji also has a photographic memory. ‘I never forget faces—never. I will never forget your face. It is stored in my brain’s computer.’ Since the Begging Act prescribes ‘Not less than one year and not exceeding three years for first time offenders. Ten years for repeat offenders,’ raiding officers like Sharmaji are often asked to testify if they had ever arrested the person before. ‘Obviously nobody gives the same name twice. So we have registers and registers of the same people—only stored under different names and addresses.’

Most departments would have buckled under the weight of such voluminous and apparently useless data, but not the Department of Social Welfare which has already begun to computerize its registers. Equipped with the latest advances in biometric technology, the Beggar Information System or BIS 2.1 is ‘like our own passport office’. The machine is designed to store the details of every single person arrested by Sharmaji’s team: name, date of birth, place of birth, photograph, and biometric fingerprint. Once registered, the information is stored ‘forever’, implying 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. Once arrested, the beggars will be marched off to the registration room, photographed, fingerprinted, and presented before the court. If convicted, they are taken to one of twelve prisons set aside for beggars and locked up for a minimum of one year and a maximum of three.