A Free Man A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (19 page)

This morning, Raja appears close to expressing genuine warmth. He is reconciled to the fact that Ashraf is here to stay. ‘I keep telling Ashraf bhai not to worry,’ he says conspiratorially while Ashraf has gone to buy some beedis. ‘We are all here to look after him.’

‘Ashraf, are you sure you can trust these guys?’ Ashraf and I are squeezed together at the back in a local train. Raja and an associate are standing by the open door, smoking cigarettes. Ashraf nods silently. Shorn of his Delhi swagger, Ashraf is a worried man: unsure, tentative, and at the mercy of a man who has changed a great deal since the time he called Ashraf his closest friend.

The house is going to cost us six hundred rupees a month. It’s a straw hut about an hour outside Calcutta, with nothing—not even an electricity connection—but Raja insists it’s the cheapest option. ‘Stay here for a few months and maybe later you can find something better.’

Ashraf looks to me for advice; I can tell he is getting pinned into a corner. I can put down money for the first month, but there is no way he can afford a place like this. ‘What do you think, Aman bhai?’

‘I don’t know, Ashraf bhai, you tell me. Do you think you will manage?’

‘I’ll take it,’ he says simply, his voice low and nervous. ‘If I can’t manage, I’ll find another place.’

On the train journey back Raja tries to sell Ashraf a set of used tools ‘at a special discount rate. A friend of mine no longer wants them, they are as good as new.’ Ashraf beats him back, Raja sulks all the way back to the bazaar.

Raja invites us over to his house, ‘to celebrate Ashraf bhai’s return’, but Ashraf declines. ‘Come,’ he says, taking my hand in his, ‘let’s go home and watch TV.’

Ashraf wakes up early next morning—his eyes burnt red by the TV screen—and drags me downstairs for a chai and cigarette before he leaves to look for work at the Raja Bazaar chowk. ‘Might as well start as a safediwallah,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll see if anything good comes along.’

We sit at the same tea shop as yesterday. Ashraf tells me a story about a house he once painted where the home owner was a holy man who had six students—each of whom turned out to be a ghost. I tell him about the time I interviewed a gangster who had a soft spot for badminton. We both pack our bags, and Ashraf sets off towards the market. ‘I’ll spend the first night at the chowk, and maybe move to the house tomorrow.’

I leave the hotel at noon and go down to Park Street, buy a book and have my first decent cup of coffee in a week. I check my email at an internet café, bump into an old college acquaintance, and have lunch.

Ashraf calls as I am boarding my train, his voice already sounding like he is far away. We exchange notes, I offer him advice, he assures me he will be careful—particularly around Raja. He asks me to give his love to everyone at Bara Tooti; I assure him I will.

And then he tells me a story.

4

S
he was sixteen when he married her. It was a union borne out of circumstance. When he looked back at the time in which it was formalized, it almost seemed like an elaborate conspiracy hatched by the Almighty.

He had told his mother he was not interested in marriage, much less in marrying someone from her immediate family, and certainly not the daughter of a first cousin. ‘But that makes you second cousins,’ she countered. ‘A second cousin is twice removed.’ But despite his protests, he did accompany his mother to her cousin’s house to look at the girl, and he did look into her eyes and smile when the girl offered him tea and a plate of glucose biscuits.

He spent the length of the overnight train ride home convincing his mother of the unsuitability of this match.

‘Does her mother know what I do?’

‘She knows you, my son, that you have done some schooling, and that you can support a family, and that is enough.’

‘But does she know what I do now?’

‘You are running a successful business; why should you be ashamed?’

‘Her mother will object.’

‘So let her.’

In the end, he did succeed in buying more time.

‘Our son is still young,’ dictated his mother to the letter writer who sat under a balcony in the main bazaar. ‘Though by god’s grace his business is growing rapidly, he still needs a year to establish himself. I wish your daughter the very best.’

But the girl was still unmarried a year later; her mother was still interested, and, much to his annoyance, so was his. Arguments at home followed a familiar script of him explaining how he was not ready for so grave a commitment, and his mother gently sobbing about the years she had worked tirelessly to bring up her three children. ‘What about me?’ she asked. ‘Don’t I deserve even a little rest in my old age?’

The matter was finally resolved by the untimely, yet well-timed, death of his elder sister in childbirth. She left behind three young boys who were promptly disowned by her husband who had always been a good-for-nothing anyway. Exhausted by her years of child rearing, his mother threw up her hands at the prospect of raising another three children. What was required was a young bride who would uncomplainingly fulfil her household duties.

And so a date was fixed, a ceremony conducted, and a marriage solemnized. As he had predicted, her mother was horrified to learn—‘Far too late,’ as she was fond of saying—that her daughter was being married off to a mere butcher, and with his mother maintaining that the girl was lucky to be married at all, the marriage started on a fractious note. The poor girl was also horrified to realize that she was, at the age of seventeen, expected to look after a household that comprised not just a controlling mother-in-law and a boisterous brother-in-law, but three young, wailing children as well. She often ran home to her mother’s place in Calcutta, and he would arrive home after work—smelling of blood, guts, and meat—to find an absent wife and an enraged mother. ‘Bring her home,’ she would scream, even as she struggled to feed the three orphaned boys. ‘Filthy butcher,’ his mother-in-law would shout when he showed up hot, sweaty, and tired after the night-long train journey. ‘How did I ever let my daughter marry such a man?’

It is true that it was a gory job, but certainly not one to attract the kind of contempt displayed by his mother-in-law. It was his business; he had built it the old-fashioned way—starting from scratch with a minuscule punji and building it up day by day till he was doing several hundred rupees worth of business every day. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to run a family in some comfort. He liked to see himself as a businessman in the meat and chicken line, but to his mother-in-law he was always a filthy butcher.

She would relent after a few hours and let her daughter return; he, for his part, would promise to treat her better and look after her every need. ‘She will never feel any lack of anything ever again,’ he would declare, but a few months later she would run away once more.

In time, however, they began to understand each other, and then one day he could say, with some honesty, that they were in love. Not a heady, overpowering passion, but a quiet and tender love that was cemented by the birth of a chubby girl followed by a skinny boy three years later.

Knowing that her mother disapproved of her husband, his wife attempted to placate her by surreptitiously sending money to prove how well he was doing. After a few months of missing his money, he caught her taking it out of his work shirt. No amount of explaining could recover the situation. He accused her of trying to ruin his business—‘Because your mother never approved of it anyway.’ She tried to explain, but gave up when she realized that the love, so carefully built on compromise, was irrevocably lost. The next day he came home drunk for the first time, after which it was only a matter of time till she left for her mother’s place once more.

This time she took their children along. This time he refused to fetch her. Two months later he received a letter from his mother-in-law informing him that another, more suitable husband had been found for her daughter. The man was a rich widower who had agreed to look after the children. After eight years of marriage, Mohammed Ashraf sold off his business, paid off his debts, and tied his belongings into a large cloth bundle. Whatever money remained he handed over to his mother, and left on the first Delhi-bound train that arrived at Patna Station.

‘But when did you find the time to get married, Ashraf bhai?’

‘Between Bombay and Delhi. I told you I went home to Patna for a while.’

‘By a while I thought you meant a few months. Not eight years. What happened to the children?’

‘I don’t know. I never saw them again.’

‘Do you think of them often?’

‘No, just sometimes.’

•

Dear Aman bhai,

God willing this letter finds you and your family safe and sound. Here in Calcutta, I am working hard and doing well. Unlike Delhi, there is plenty of work here in Calcutta, especially for painters like me. There are not so many safediwallahs in Calcutta.

The next time you go to Bara Tooti, can you please buy me some paintbrushes—they are much cheaper in Delhi. Here, it is almost five hundred rupees a brush. Lalloo will know which brushes to buy.

Please give my love to your parents and sister.

Your brother,

Ashraf

The blue inland letter lay on my desk for many days. It was swept up with the trash and retrieved; three months after I received it, I finally wrote to Ashraf.

Dear Ashraf bhai,

Sorry for this late reply to your letter. I have been travelling and couldn’t find the time. I haven’t bought the brushes since I don’t know how to send them to you. Nonetheless, we can go shopping when I next visit Calcutta. I am happy that you have found work. Please keep working hard and try not to drink too much.

Write back once you get this. My family sends their love.

Inshallah, we will meet soon in Calcutta,

Your brother,

Aman

Ashraf never wrote back but a year later I visited Calcutta. I was leaving to spend the year in New York, the book was nearly complete, and I wanted to meet him before I left.

5

I
couldn’t find Hotel Medina, but found something similar in the vicinity of the main mosque for two hundred rupees a night. This time there is no television, and no Ashraf, but I wake up early with the call to prayer and walk down to the same chaiwallah and smoke a cigarette in solitude.

I am tempted to talk to Raja about Ashraf’s wife. Raja is one of Ashraf’s oldest friends; with his help, it would be easy to track her down. But should I?

I often toy with the idea of verifying Ashraf’s stories. Maybe make a trip down to Patna to 207 Patliputra Colony to see if it really existed, if Dr Hussain had ever lived there. Maybe search for Taneja’s shop on Exhibition Street.

But why should I? How would that change anything between us, except convince Ashraf that I mistrust him and that his story is more important to me than he is?

But his wife can probably give me an insight into a certain phase of Ashraf’s life that no one else can. I decide not to ask Raja, but to gently suggest to Ashraf that I might be interested in interviewing his wife. If he freaks out, I will drop the subject forever.

I do not have an address or a number, but I find Raja Bazaar quite easily and Raja’s house is just down the road from there. Raja has grown fatter and lost some more hair, but I recognize him sleeping on a charpai outside his house. Moments after we order the mandatory cup of tea, it is apparent that he and Ashraf aren’t talking any more.

Ashraf is selfish and ungracious and refuses to acknowledge everything that Raja has done for him. He assumed that Raja owed him a favour simply because he had left him half the stone-polishing business twenty years ago. ‘That business is dead, I sold it off ten years ago. There is no stone polishing any more. Everyone has machines.’

Just because he has come from Delhi, Ashraf thinks he’s better than everyone else, and finally, he drinks too much and curses loudly when he does, and as a respectable man with a wife and family, Raja simply cannot tolerate it.

He pauses for a breath. When Ashraf fell ill, Raja had spent hundreds, no, a few thousand rupees, to get him medicines, but Ashraf refused to repay him. Now Ashraf has run off to Tangra and Raja never wants to see him again.

How can I find him?

‘I don’t know. But he has started drinking again—at Debiji’s vend near the Goru Kilkhana. Ask around there.’

Debiji’s theka is not the seedy desi sharab shack I had expected; it turns out to be a red multi-storeyed house with a handsome nameplate announcing its owners. Debiji is not the proprietor of a liquor vend; she is a wholly respectable married lady, who fortunately isn’t home when I arrive.

‘Debiji’s’ is an illegal operation run out of the basement by her useless younger brothers—Prabhu and Veeru—who buy illegally distilled alcohol and sell it for a fraction of the market price of licensed liquor. Ashraf had become close friends with the brothers and with his voracious appetite for alcohol, is, I can imagine, presenting them with a bit of a golden goose problem.

He is, by far, their best customer, one who can quite happily spend an entire week’s earnings in a night of heavy drinking; but the more he drinks, the less money he earns.

‘I never let Ashraf drink too much,’ says Prabhu, a thin, reedy man with a liking for solemn declarations. ‘Just one glass in the mornings when he picks up his tools and a bit in the evenings after work. I tell him he has to stay in control.’

To safeguard their client’s interests, they even keep his tools in their shop overnight—lest they be stolen from the pavement where he sleeps.

Ashraf himself has aged considerably in the past year. His movements have lost some of their fluidity; his hands tremble as he takes his beedi to his mouth. ‘I’m a bit ill, Aman bhai,’ he says with an apologetic smile. ‘How did you find me?’