The shelf of fiction about Delhi resembles an airport lounge; the city has more often been there in the background, a starting point for arrivals and departures, than a character in its own right. Bombay seems to draw great fiction out of its writers; Delhi is more elusive.
For the right kind of writer, that makes Delhi – especially today’s metropolis, so much more menacing and contradictory than the city William Dalrymple chronicled in City of Djinns – fresh, unclaimed territory, despite its long fictional past. The Old Delhi that Ahmed Ali and Krishna Sobti captured at the turn of the century and in the aftermath of Independence has shifted into the past.
In the first few pages of Aman Sethi’s non-fiction narrative work, A Free Man, he draws a distinct dividing line between historical Delhi – the city of monuments and tombs – and the city as it is today, pulsing with what he diagnoses as an imperceptible hysteria. “For as long as I can remember, Delhi looked like a giant construction site inhabited by bulldozers, cranes, and massive columns of prefabricated concrete; but the rubble has masked the incredible changes and dislocations of factories, homes and livelihoods that occurred as Delhi changed from a sleepy north Indian city into a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower.”
This has now become the acceptable, guidebook definition of Delhi — the city permanently under construction, a city of constant reinvention where your family’s three generations of history can be destroyed in a weekend of slum clearance, but also a city of possibility. What makes A Free Man such a compelling and powerful read is that it creates an intimate, personal biography of the city through the biography of an itinerant labourer, Mohammed Ashraf.
Mr Sethi is a journalist; he meets Ashraf in the course of following a story on construction workers. He returns, wanting to understand the “mazdoor ki zindagi”, and over the next five years, he and Ashraf develop an unusual relationship, defined but not contained by the boundaries of journalist and subject. Ashraf explains succinctly what Delhi has to offer: “A sense of azaadi, freedom from your past. … For every person who makes a bit of money in Delhi, an entire village arrives in search of work.” But the migrant story, familiar as it is, has an unspoken caveat that Ashraf will discover: you cannot leave your village a mazdoor and return a mazdoor. There has to be more.
Perhaps it’s Mr Sethi’s humility and professionalism that makes A Free Man such a brilliant book; an honest biography, but also a merciless portrait of the city. Perhaps it’s the many interviews, the conversations with Ashraf, J P Singh Pagal, doctors on TB wards, senior officers at the Beggars Court, other construction workers, that give this book its depth. Mr Sethi’s understanding of the city is hard-won, and sharply different from what his predecessors in Indian English fiction have been able to make of the city.
The Delhi of journalists and hijras that Khushwant Singh caricatured in a crude, lumbering novel was an insider’s city, and perhaps that is part of the problem of writing about the Capital. Some writers got it right. Nayantara Sahgal’s early political novels set in Delhi captured the impatience, idealism and inexorable corruption that seeped into the corridors of power perfectly. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children may be a Bombay novel, but Mr Rushdie’s swift and deadly description of Delhi in the Emergency years is unmatched. Other writers stumbled over Delhi’s notorious insider-ness. There is a sub-genre that might be called the Lodi Garden novel, easily recognisable from the characters (drawn from South Delhi’s 400 drawing rooms) and the plot (drawn from the Hindustan Times headlines and the India International Centre’s daily programme schedule).
For years, a writer friend spoke wistfully of the Great Barsati Novel: a mythical beast that would do for Delhi, presumably, what Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City had both done for New York. But the road to the Great Barsati Novel has been paved with failed attempts, and perhaps Delhi will find its chroniclers in non-fiction rather than in fiction.
A Free Man is moving in its portrait of Ashraf, and the ending, ambiguous and discomforting, may make you weep. Mr Sethi’s insights into the world of masculine friendships and work and financial uncertainty that Ashraf inhabits are sharp, and hard-won. He is not romantic about Delhi, no more than another writer, Rana Dasgupta, working on his own Delhi biography, is likely to be.
As Mr Sethi writes, analysing a spate of hysteria and self-inflicted injuries in the wake of reports that a Monkeyman was stalking Delhi’s citizens, this is a troubled city. “….A city of the exhausted, the distressed, and the restless, struggling with the uncertainties of eviction and unemployment; a city of twenty million histrionic personas resiliently absorbing the day’s glancing blows, only to return home and tenderly claw themselves to sleep.” A Free Man is much more than just a Delhi biography; but while it meets its larger ambitions, it will also be remembered for being one of the great city biographies.
