Delhiwale: In search of lost time

In his late 70s, Mr Prasad is visiting the city from his village near Ayodhya, in UP. His sons live in the suburbs. He himself is not new to Delhi. “I spent 50 years of my life here, as a paan seller.”

He’s looking like an emissary from a different world — partly because of his dress. Sitting on a sidewalk in central Delhi’s Connaught Place, grey-haired Jagdamba Prasad is attired in a cotton dhoti and a khadi jacket. Looking around him, at men dressed in pants and shirts, he mutters, “I have never worn these kind of clothes.” Not that the elderly man is dismissive of western dressing, but “I have always been in dhotis and kurtas,” he explains, adding that his sons though have taken up “pant-bush shirt.”

He left for his village a decade ago, but still feels a strong connection to the city because of his friends. “One sells clothes here, and one runs a paan stall as I used to.” (Mayank Austen Soofi)

In his late 70s, Mr Prasad is visiting the city from his village near Ayodhya, in UP. His sons live in the suburbs. He himself is not new to Delhi. “I spent 50 years of my life here, as a paan seller.”

He left for his village a decade ago, but still feels a strong connection to the city because of his friends. “One sells clothes here, and one runs a paan stall as I used to.”

The gentleman talks of how he never wandered around Delhi during the many decades he spent here. But now, in the city for a medical treatment, he is strolling about and “spotting places that were once familiar to me.”

Earlier in the day, for instance, he walked past a hotel outside which he used to sell paan “until I was kicked out from that spot during the Emergency (in late 1970s).”

Reflecting on his Delhi years, Mr Prasad confesses that his time in the city was superior to his present life in the village. “Money brings happiness, and in Delhi I was earning well.” While in the village, in farming, “either your crop gets ruined by too much rains, or by unexpected hailstorms.”

The idea of him returning permanently to the city is not viable though, “because you can’t start all over again at my age.” He shall take the bus back to the village in a happy mood, he says. Showing the label on the collar of his jacket, he says, “it’s new. I got it just days ago, from Khadi Bhandar in Connaught Place.”

He now gets up and crosses a zebra crossing, heading to Janpath. He wants to see if the building outside which he used to set up his stall for a time still exists or not.