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A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. By Aman Sethi.

“The past is done, Aman bhai. In the future, we will only talk about the future” (217). It is not giving too much away to say that this is how A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi ends. Mohammad Ashraf thus counseled Aman Sethi, the raconteur who delivers Ashraf’s story in A Free Man. The two men met where the opposite ends of the spectrum of opportunity in Delhi wrap around: in an encounter between a journalist and a source. Sethi, who comes from the opportunity end of the spectrum, guides the reader through the city to reveal the ways that people at the opposite end manage the persistent challenges of making it in the city. Mohammad Ashraf is Sethi’s subject, but Ashraf observes Sethi almost as closely, and the net effect is that A Free Man is actually the story of two men, negotiating their freedom with different expectations, different tools, and different outcomes. Ashraf was a mazdoor, a laborer in Delhi’s Bara Tooti Chowk, when Sethi met him. After a brief first encounter, Ashraf’s way with words drew Sethi back, and over the course of five years, Sethi researched and wrote Ashraf’s story. There is persistent tension between the two: Sethi wants a timeline of Ashraf’s life, but Ashraf tells his own life story, as and when it strikes him, and even as he continues to narrate, he refuses to submit it to the structure of Sethi’s “research project.” Even as the timeline becomes a running joke, the way that Ashraf reveals his experience shows us how he has reckoned with the intense competition for scant resources that characterizes the urban centers of the global south. In the end, Ashraf disappears into the sunset, and it is the reader who feels the loss. Sethi is less affected, sure that because Ashraf has his number “written on every piece of paper in his sling bag ... Ashraf will find us when he wants to” (223). Sethi can be found through a mobile phone in his pocket, a fixed home address. Still, perhaps through living them during the five years of research, Sethi has come to accept and understand the vagaries of a life lived on the street, its hardships and vacillations: sometimes he loans Ashraf five thousand rupees to start a new business and then ends up needing to borrow ten for a cigarette and a cup of milky tea. When Sethi gets his wallet stolen, Ashraf digs into a