****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
In Bara Tooti Chook, the ideal job has kamai, pay, and azadi, the ability to walk off anytime. Ashraf, our primary informant, Lalloo and Rehaan work as what translates as casual labor. In the morning the potential foremen line up and recruit the workers for the day. There are levels of pay, responsibility, and skill. Ashraf likes to get enough to buy as much alcohol as he wants, food, and tea. He also wants enough time to enjoy them. Ashraf is a slippery man to interview. He is an older guy and has a long history in any number of jobs and cities, but he is impervious to the need for a timeline. Our narrator, the author, spends his time with these men, but finds that their preferred alcohol, made in India, makes him feel embalmed.This is the world of old Delhi. It is a world the authorities are determined to put an end to. The year of this interview, 2009, over 800,000 people had been displaced by the leveling of slums. Vagrancy is illegal, but one can prove your profession by the calluses and discolorations of certain professions. Everyone comes to Delhi with a plan to get rich. One woman who runs a semi-legal bar has done so. The rest are reliant upon the eventual ownership of a motorcycle and two phones; a goat; or a pair of pigs. Dreams drift through the drinking sessions in the evenings.I was hesitant on the first page, piqued by the second page, and enthralled by the third page. Despite the constant problem of a coherent life story, these characters acquire real dimensions. Sethi becomes an additional character as he struggles with the role of interviewer. And the Chook, or employment market becomes yet another character of its own. This is a different side of the story, short of many of the ennobling stories that often accompany a story of a slum in India. Yet the stories are noble in their own right. Give it a try. It is a different world.
