Living on the brink

To write this book Aman Sethi, a journalist for the Hindu, spent five years hanging out with the casual labourers of Bara Tooti Chowk in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, who live and die on the streets. ‘Why,’ asks one of them, ‘are you spending all this time and money getting drunk with lafunters like us? What can we teach you?’ He explains that he is trying to write a book. Who would want to read it? ‘I don’t know. I suppose my friends will buy it and maybe a few people interested in Delhi.’ But the lafunters have taught him a lot, and for its observation, sympathy and humour A Free Man deserves a far wider audience.

Most popular

Rory Sutherland

Why the restaurant world hates beer drinkers

I still don’t know exactly what a lafunter is — or, for that matter, a chootiya, masjid or pallu. A glossary would have been helpful, but all the unitalicised and untranslated vocabulary serves to heighten the immediacy of the milieu.