Everyday at around 10 to 10.30 a.m., as soon as Tipu ‘Mirchi’, a vendor, is seen crossing the railway line, which separates Mangalpet from Bidar Old City, a cry goes out among the children of the neighbourhood in Bidar.
They come running and surround him, holding out their hands eagerly and with good reason too: he sells mirchis, bondas, and other eatables for ₹1 each.
Some children pay him by the number of friends in their group. “ Yeh dekho Tipu , we are six, and here are six rupees,” says Shashikanth Chandrappa, who has been waiting for Tipu, after playing gulley cricket near the PWD office.
The basket full of fried goodies is empty in a few hours and as Tipu walks back to his house, children and housewives ask him when he will be back. “I will be back in half an hour or so,” he says, to their delight.
In a day, he sells goods worth around ₹1,000 and he remembers doing this for the last 10 years, inherited from his father.
“My father Sheikh Mehboob used to sell these items every morning. He died in 2006 and now my elder brother and I are doing it,” he says.
The 26-year-old school dropout shrugs away the question of how does selling items for ₹1 work out. Instead he defers the query to his mother Karima Bi, the catalyst of it all. Hailing from Chitaguppa, she married Sheikh Mehboob, who was a labourer in Bidar, in the 70s. Thanks to her entrepreneurial skills, he became a mirchi vendor. “Forty years ago, we started selling mirchi for five paise a piece. Things have become so costly that we had to raise the price to ₹1,” she said.
When her youngest son was born in 1991, she named him Tipu after the television series The Sword of Tipu Sultan, which was airing at that time. She has four sons and a daughter. The eldest works as a construction worker.
The family lives in a one-room house behind the graveyard in Mangalpet on Hyderabad Road. Six of its members, including Tipu and Karima Bi, wake up at sunrise and begin work. Karima Bi, who has difficulty in walking, directs the others from inside. “All this hard work for a rupee,” she laughs.
They keep the cost down by buying vegetables in bulk from the wholesale market on Hyderabad Road. “I have some old contacts in the grain market who sell me dough and oil on credit. I pay them back once every two months or so,” she says.
The family’s kerosene supply was cut last year. Since then, cooking is done with firewood. Though officials promised to get Tipu an LPG stove, it is yet to happen. “Officials in the tahsil office said we would get a LPG stove. We are yet to get it,” says Tipu. However, he does not plan on increasing the price of his goods. He says, “We are known as the family that sells mirchis for ₹1.”
