In his first book, A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in
Delhi, award-winning journalist Aman Sethi delves into the lives
of homeless laborers in Bara Tooti Chowk, a labor market in Old
Delhi.  What motivated you to write about the lives of the
homeless laborers in Delhi?  When I started as a reporter in
2005, I was surprised by the lack of [coverage] on Delhi’s
working class. The city had just won the bid to host the 2010
Commonwealth games, and the government had begun a massive
program of urban renewal in which hundreds of thousands of homes
in slums and working-class neighborhoods were demolished to make
way for new infrastructure. I wrote a three-part series on
“Working Delhi” to explore the lives—and capture the oral
histories—of the workforce. The first part documented the lives
of homeless laborers, and that’s how I met Ashraf, Lalloo, and
the other characters in my book.  How did the homeless house
painter and construction worker, Mohammed Ashraf, become the
book’s main narrator?  Ashraf was,