'A Free Man' by Aman Sethi is smallish and compact, much like its protagonist Mohammed Ashraf. The book comes encased in an elegant white dust jacket that to me cried out to be picked up. And once I turned a few pages, I found I couldn't put it down easily, for 'A Free Man' is big, both on form and substance, and is easily among 2011's more rewarding reads.
Mohammed Ashraf is a mazdoor. He lives and works with his friends on a roadside by Bara Tooti Chowk in Sadar Bazar, one of Delhi's oldest and busiest markets. Since it doesn't have the 'poverty tourism' allure of next-door Chandni Chowk with its crumbling havelis and monuments, Sadar Bazar lies off the beaten track.
Ashraf has a sly sense of humour and a taste for absurd conspiracy theories: "If you had studied psychology, you would know that if you sleep without washing your feet, you get nightmares." Very much the untypical mazdoor, you'd think.
But wait. If Ashraf is untypical, what then is a typical mazdoor like? Nobody who isn't one knows. And Ashraf, it turns out, is not really a mazdoor or casual labourer at all. He turns to mazdoori when he doesn't have the job he is skilled at, which is to be a safediwallah, or painter. And his friends Laloo and Rehan are not typical mazdoors either, and they all have distinct & fascinating back-stories.
It is thus that Sethi peels away layer after layer in a bid to get to the core of what constitutes Ashraf and his friends.
Sethi chooses to tell his tale through colloquialisms. He is himself described by Laloo as "a nice angrezi murgi" and as Rehaan adds, "an AC-type murgi". This may be problematic for non-Hindi-speaking people to understand, be they Indian or foreign. But Sethi doesn't compromise, refusing even to italicize words like mazdoor, dehadi, lafunter, etc. Not being a native Hindi speaker myself, there were some words I didn't understand, but the book itself doesn't suffer for it, and if anything, the language lifts 'A Free Man'. Take for instance, Ashraf's story of how he quit a particular job: 'A slap like that, Aman bhai, that's a full stop. Once you get slapped like that in front of everyone, you can't work in there again. Your izzat is gone...'
Sethi's style has been described as the 'new journalism' in at least one review. Yes, Sethi is conspicuous in his presence in large parts of the book, though he doesn't distract from the narrative. Somewhat incongruously (and delightfully) you find that he is one of Ashraf's friends.
So much for the language. Despite its narrative style, or perhaps because of it, you are never in doubt as to where the heart of the book lies, which is in presenting a snapshot of the life of the mazdoor to people who may never come close to understanding how life treats them, and how they in turn treat life. There are no attempt to pronounce judgements on Ashraf and his ilk. Is Ashraf happy? Has he found fulfillment? Do we even dare to conceive a scenario in which to apply such questions? Consider then, Ashraf's approach to the ideal job: "'The ideal job,' Ashraf once said..."has the perfect balance of kamai and azadi.' Through the course of his life, a working man may experiment with as many combinations as he can before discovering the point where these counteracting forces offset each other to arrive at a solitary moment of serenity - a point when he is both free and fortunate...Alas, it is bliss that few, like Ashraf, attain."
So Ashraf finds bliss only occasionally, a point that might even be made about the well-off. Does this mean then, that there is not much difference between Ashraf eking out a living out of hard labour, and a white-collar employee sipping cappuccino in his cubicle? To his credit, Sethi makes no attempts to answer such questions, but by the end of the book, the answer is obvious.
'A Free Man' presents other gripping vignettes as well. There's Sharmaji, a man tasked with catching beggars; who is both proud that he has a computer with Beggar Information System (BIS) loaded on to it, and ashamed that it doesn't work. There's Satish, an itinerant labourer who is consumed by TB, and who is taken from hospital to hospital by Sethi. There's Rehan, who wants to raise pigs because they're easy money, but can't anyway since his father is a pious Muslim.
Of course, there's Ashraf himself, as Sethi tracks his life over the roughly 5 years it took to write the book. You're worried about what will happen to him as the pages hurtle by, and in the end, you're disappointed that it got over so quickly.
Title: A Free Man; Author: Aman Sethi; Publisher: Random House India; Genre: Non-Fiction; Pages: 226
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