In conversation with Aman Sethi

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian) 

Aman Sethi starts explaining the finer points of the migrant labour situation in Delhi, and promptly cuts himself off. He’s not happy with something he has just said. “Terrible way to start a sentence...” he says. To be honest, it did not feel terrible and Sethi’s nothing if not compelling with his arguments. But you understand where he’s coming from. His debut book A Free Man, published in September last year has its paperback edition out on 3 August and is marked by its obsessive attention to detail, its unflagging quest for precision.

One of the most distinguished works of non-fiction in recent years, A Free Man follows the life of Mohammed Ashraf, an itinerant labourer at Delhi’s Bara Tooti Chowk. A Free Man has been termed ‘novelistic’ by certain reviewers, something which Sethi takes with a pinch of salt. “The moment you try to write a halfway decent sentence, your book is deemed to be ‘novelistic’, which is neither correct nor fair. I wasn’t trying to write a novel, I was just trying to make sure the writing was good.”

The book is also notable for its unwavering focus on the lives of Ashraf and his friends at Bara Tooti Chowk, avoiding the quote-unquote Big Narrative; a sweeping, wide-angle view of the socio-economic mechanisms of a city. (Think Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City or Peter Ackroyd’s London) Another recent book which shares this microscopic approach is Katharine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about the Annawadi slum area in Mumbai. “Katherine Boo and I actually have the same editor, Chiki Sarkar at Random House. So we ended up reading each other’s books; I reviewed Behind the Beautiful Forevers for The Hindu. It’s a brilliant work, a book which was just waiting to be written,” says Sethi. “Ever since the start of the New Journalism movement of the 60s, unconventional techniques have been used by writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, but for some reason this hasn’t really been explored in Indian writing.”

The linguistic style employed by Sethi in A Free Man is certainly unconventional, a freewheeling mixture of English interspersed with the vernacular tilts of Ashraf and his fellow labourers. At one point, Ashraf says, “There is something Delhi can give you- a sense of azadi, freedom from your past.”  In another sequence, Kaka the tea-seller of Bara Tooti exclaims angrily, “It’s because of you bhenchods. All day long you chootiyas smoke ganja and then complain that the chai is pheeka!” Sethi explains his decision thus: “When I started speaking to Ashraf and the others at Bara Tooti, I saw that their Hindi was flawless. So on one hand, I had this great, evocative vernacular stuff, which I didn’t want to lose out on, but then I couldn’t really write an entire book in Hindi. And I feared that if I left out the vernacular elements completely, it’d be impossible to distinguish Ashraf from Lalloo or Kaka- They’d all sound like me!”

A Free Man does not take the formally easy path that non-fiction books take all too frequently; a philosophy which can be summed up in a line: ‘This is what’s wrong, and here’s how we can make things better.” Instead, it tries, in the author’s own words, “to capture the texture of lived reality.” According to him, this was an easy call to make. “I thought it would be better to think about Ashraf’s world and try to capture it as accurately as possible, rather than self-flagellate as a member of the elite middle-class. The initial drafts of the book were full of rage, but I realised that me feeling bad did not interest even me anymore.”

So is a work of fiction in the offing anytime soon? “I don’t think I’ll be writing fiction right now,” says Sethi. “I actually had a sort of late introduction to the canonical works of fiction. I haven’t really read a lot of Indian fiction, but somehow it seems to me a way of retreating from the real world. And why would I want to do that? I find the real world to be a fascinating place.”