A Free Man
A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Every morning in Sadar Bazaar, one of the oldest markets in Delhi, a gang of men gather looking for work in the building trade. For five years, Aman Sethi shared their lives, and in particular that of Mohammed Ashraf. Ashraf is a mazdoor, an itinerant house-painter, but he's not a typical labourer - he's studied biology in college, and after college learnt how to repair TV sets, cut suits, and slice chicken. He lived all over India, but now he finds himself in Delhi: the second most populous city in the country. The morning will bring hangovers, whisky breakfasts and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf. How did he get here? Why is he the way he is? And is there a way back home?
One of the very best young journalists in India, Aman Sethi brings Ashraf vividly alive and illuminates the lives of countless others like him. Wry, humorous and insightful, A Free Man is an unforgettable portrait of an invisible man in his invisible city, and an extraordinary human story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sethi, an award-winning journalist for The Hindu, delivers a moving and irrepressible work of narrative reporting that captures the lives and voices of the homeless laborers in the Bara Tooti Chowk in Old Delhi. The chowk is literally a labor market where every alleyway, lane, and dead end has a story. Sethi focuses on a homeless middle-aged house painter and construction worker, Mohammed Ashraf, who finds jobs by waiting in the early morning on Bari Tooti's main road. Before coming to Bari Tooti, Ashraf was a biology student, then a butcher, a tailor, and an electrician's apprentice. He once had a wife, a home, and two children, whom he hasn't seen in decades. Ashraf's life story unfolds through a series of vignettes as the author accompanies him and others to various haunts: Kaka's tea, the Old Delhi Railway Station, a secret illegal bar everyone knows made of "interlocking sheets" of cardboard and plywood, and the TB wards of the city hospital. Delhi is a frenzied city "splintering under the strain of fundamental urban reconfiguration," where 800,000 slum dwellers, including Ashraf, were violently displaced when their settlement was bulldozed. Ashraf's voice acerbic, bombastic, and philosophical makes for wonderful reading, and Sethi's remarkable prose and impeccable sense of timing renders his subjects with pathos and humor.