Three decades on,still helping strangers

He is a man of habit. A section of the form asks the applicant’s eye and hair colour. Despite the applicants’ protests,Khan types “black” for everyone. “It’s an unnecessary detail,” he quips. He judges the applicants by profession and tells them why they will or won’t get the visa.

A farmer’s son from Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh,Khan graduated in English literature from Aligarh Muslim University,taught mathematics and science in a school for a year and then moved to the city when his sister married in Delhi. “I was jobless in the city. Between 1979 and 80,I kept hunting for a job and didn’t know what to do,” he says.

Khan decided it was “worth it” to go job-hunting in Pakistan as an uncle of his had done it years ago and “ended up with a lot of money in Dubai”. It was then that he noticed the long queues of people lining up outside the Pakistan High Commission and started helping them with filling out their forms. “I went to Pakistan that year and spent three months there. I didn’t like it at all. I decided I will go back to my own country and live there whether I have to beg or steal,” he says.

“The MLA in Bulandshahr was known to me. He said he would give me money to start a tea stall but I refused that,” Khan says. He couldn’t find a suitable job and decided to set up his shop outside the High Commission in 1981. “I started helping illiterate people who looked helplessly at others to fill their forms,” he says.

Khan is not unfamiliar with Indo-Pak politics because “it affects business”. “Kashmir is the bone of contention between India and Pakistan,” he says.

“Love,wit,virtue and genius” are the values he lives by. Of his 10 children,Shakeel accompanies him to the High Commission everyday. Ask him why and Khan quickly remarks,“He decided not to study beyond Class X. I could not have studied for him.”

At noon,he folds his chair,wraps up his typewriter and retires to his house in Hauz Rani — the counter has closed,and his day is over.