Delhiwale: Portrait of tomorrow’s Mumbaiwale

A street hawker plans to quit the city for another town

The cotton candy man is wavering like a pink kashti (boat) in this fast-moving grey stream of Sadar Bazar gentry in Gurugram. The wooly plastic-wrapped pink and yellow candies he is holding by a wooden ‘danda’ on his right arm seem unnaturally cheery for the solemn expressions on his face. His eyes are cast downwards even as the busy shoppers are going about him, not noticing his candies.

Moving towards the side, he explains in a murmuring voice that he is planning to leave Gurugram.

“I’m thinking, I’m in tension,” says Nahar Singh.

Moving towards the side, he explains in a murmuring voice that he is planning to leave Gurugram. “I’m planning to go to Bambai,” he says, referring to the city by its former name.

In his 20s, Mr Singh has been selling candies in Sadar Bazar for about half a dozen years “but now the business is no longer as it used to be.” He says he manages to earn about “only ₹15,000 every month, which is barely enough to support the family in the village.” Initially, the young man almost decided to go back home for good. His village is close to Tundla, a town near Agra in UP. “But then I thought that might finish my future permanently.”

To be sure, Mr Singh was never ambitious. He had arrived in the so-called Millennium City without any pushy determination to transform his life. He had simply followed many of his cousins and acquaintances who too carry on with the same cotton candy business in this city (they in turn had followed the footsteps of their circle’s previous generation). In fact, most of the cotton candy sellers in Sadar Bazar happen to be from Agra and neighbouring districts. Mr Singh lives in a rented room near the bus stand with a group of such hawkers. Every morning each of these men makes his own cotton candies before hitting the streets.

Mumbai seems more promising to Mr Singh and “it’s not that I will be taking a big risk (by going into the unknown).” He is familiar with the metropolis. He has some Tundla cousins, too, there selling these same candies. He himself worked there for three months some years ago—and didn’t stay longer “because it was so far from my home town.” Now he feels that “better sense” is prevailing over him as “Gurgawa is not the right place for me.”

Absentmindedly ringing the brass bell that many Sadar Bazar hawkers like him carry in their free hand to catch the attention of distracted shoppers, he says, “I might soon leave for Bambai.”