Tau Shambhu Ghosi’s milk shop was the oldest in a Walled City locality, or so everyone said. Shambhu was born in 1878, when the second Afghan war was raging, his father at the time of the first Sikh War in 1846-1847 and grandfather in 1816-1817 during the Pindari War, which means three generations born in wars. The family originally belonged to the outskirts of Mathura, bordering present-day Haryana, from where it moved to Agra and then to Delhi before the 1857 Revolt. Short, bald and paunchy, Tau probably hadn’t bathed for years and the accumulated muck made him look much darker than he actually was. His son Punno Khalifa sometimes threw a bucketful of water on him as he sat outside the shop, bare bodied and irritated by the summer heat. In winter he just wore a crumpled-up kurta above a knee-length dhoti but no shoes as his feet were full of aching corns, which made him walk with great difficulty. A hoary figure enjoying the honorific Tau (father’s elder brother).
Eyes full of rheum, teeth seldom cleaned, and a month’s stubble on his face, he squatted at the shop before a half empty cauldron of milk, which was in demand only when the others shops had run out of it. His curd was sour and rabri too watery, but the gur rebris he sold drew a lot of customers, mostly children who found an anna’s worth enough to last them till they reached school, half a mile away. He was mostly silent but sometimes, quite unexpectedly, started telling tales from the past, like the one about a Protestant Bishop, a big-built man of British origin who was interested in wrestling and trained many Yadav youths (including him) to fight in the akhara. When one of his protégés floored a noted pehalwan from Hissar, the Bishop lifted him upon his shoulders and ran around the wrestling pit shouting “Hurrah, hurrah”.
Then Tau, sitting before the chulha fire, would recall how the population was confined to the Walled City and to go to out of the way places was risky at night, with people collecting at his shop and moving to their destination only when there were five or six of them, all armed with lathis. Besides vagabonds and thieves, there were also hyenas and wolves and in the rainy months snakes and jackals, some of whom became rabid and very dangerous to passers-by.
Once Shambhu Tau (as old as Sarojini Naidu and Jim Corbett) related the story of an Englishwoman who had fallen in love with an ice-seller of Turkman Gate. She found the water insipid and would buy a lot of ice every day to cool it so that it became more drinkable in the hot months. After many visits, the ice-seller, some 10 years younger, became a love attraction for her. She found him very virile and, spinster as she was, took him home in the afternoons as they could not meet at night, when her nephew was around. Also, the ice-seller had his wife to look after. But defying odds the two quietly got married at a shrine and the ice-seller, Shamshi fathered two children with her. The woman told acquaintances that she had adopted the twins. But few believed her story and finally the truth was out and the memsahib vanished, taking the kids, along, with her lover going into depression for some time. Young as he was, he got over the separation but his ice sales were not as good as they used to be when the Englishwoman was patronizing him.
Tau, going senile, would also talk about a nun who had befriended the butcher who used to supply meat to her convent school. The butcher named Qureshi already had two wives and was much older than the white nun. But undaunted he eloped with her, causing a big scandal. After some time the two returned, with the nun, half-a-head taller, wearing a burqa and accepted as “Sister Biwi” by the two wives. God knows how far the tale was true but Nanhe, one of the two sons born of the union, with blue eyes was a sort of testimony that the story was not after all untrue. Tau used to say that in middle-age the nun returned to the convent and was transferred to Madras, much to the relief of her sacred order. At Dussehra, Diwali and Holi Tau’s son, Punno and grandsons, puny Rammo pehalwan, gentle Shyam and rowdy Tarro would take over the shop, which was then stacked with sweets and Tau made to sit in a corner as a helpless spectator. But festivals over, he regained control of it and slept in peace at night on a broken string charpoy.
Eventually Punno sold the shop to Moti, whose grocery store was just adjacent, and poor Tau, declining to retire to his ancestral house in Brahmin Gali (which he had left after the death of his wife 50 years ago), kept sitting outside, with tears in his eyes, cutting a sorry figure and passers-by shaking their heads at his plight until he died, after a heart attack during the 1965 Indo-Pak conflict aged 87. Few remember him now but it was rumoured that he left behind a hoard of Queen Victoria silver rupee coin in a rag-filled “matka” or chatty which helped Punno Khalifa to marry off his sons and daughters in Vrindavan. Alas, with little thanks to the poor, miserly, unkempt Tau of the 1878 war.
The author is a veteran chronicler of Delhi.
