“In Dilli there is azadi, but there is also a lot of akelapan.” Sethi’s reportorial integrity in writing about this inner no-man’s-land makes this book truly original, says journalist Supriya Nair.

A Free Man is one man’s story. It is the story of Mohammad Ashraf, who loses his job, drinks up his earnings and still doesn’t let go of the little freedoms he enjoys in a hierarchical, structured society. The author, while reporting on a story about health insurance for construction workers, meets Ashraf, and then meets him again six months later during a research on the life of a mazdoor. The result is A Free Man.

But Ashraf doesn’t always entertain him or feed his curiosity: “Fuck your timeline,” he says, after Sethi makes yet another attempt to record a chronological account of Ashraf’s “piecemeal, hardscrabble life”. “For you, all this is research . . . But for other people, this is life.”

The book won the 2011 Crossword Book Award. “Aman Sethi’s task was a delicate one,” the citation for the award states. “It required tactful choices: How do you convey a sense of a life without intruding? How do you make someone’s life available to others without degenerating into vicariousness? How do you convey a sense of another life, distant from your own, yet at the same time not make the mistake of creating the illusion that you have made your subject fully transparent. Sethi exercises these choices well… Simultaneously disturbing and compelling, it deserves to be read, and re-read.”

A Free Man takes readers on a journey and into lives they might never otherwise experience. Awful things happen in it. But there are no promises and no gory sentimentality. There is no happy ending either.

And yet it delivers something that’s genuinely rewarding: it shows things exactly as they are – sometimes raw, sometimes affectionate, but always real. This book also won Sethi the Yuva Puraskar by the Sahitya Akademi for the best English book written by a young author.

Published in 2011.