One of the one percent in 13 million.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The spot under the short spindly tree on Connaught Lane in Central Delhi marks citizen Maidul’s anda-bread egg stall. Every evening, this tiny portion of the capital’s real estate becomes the middle-aged man’s corner in the big wide world. To reach this place, he had to shift his bases many times over, across the country.

Some forty years ago, a young Maidul left his village in Bihar’s Katihar to find a new life in the unfamiliar megapolis of Delhi. There was just no promising future in the village. His landless forefathers had exhausted their lifetimes as hired farmers.

In Delhi, Maidul started as a waiter in a small eatery, close to the spot where he today administers his egg stall. After the eatery’s closure within a few years, he moved to Mumbai, and found work in “labourgiri.” Maidul would haul construction material. The megapolis did not agree with him. The earnings were too meagre to sufficiently support the family (mother, wife, five children) in the village. Nor was he able to find any better prospect. “That city is not friendly to new people,” he notes sombrely, chopping onions. “But those men who manage to stick in Bambai stay there for life.”

Maidul left Mumbai in two months, catching the train for a UP town. In Saharanpur, he again worked as an eatery waiter. Months later, he gave up, making a reverse journey to the village.

“I left many kaam over the years…. never because of my employers, they have always been nice… it is the senior-log already working in those places, their hostility would made my life unbearable.”

In the village, Maidul had no option but to be a hired farmer. Soon enough, he again made that old journey, travelling back to Delhi, and found work as a labourer in neighbouring Gurugram. This stint too was short-lived, obliging him to pick up work as a waiter in a Delhi eatery. Finally, his life stabilised, until six years later, “when the owner died, and the place was shut.”

And then Maidul founded his anda-bread stall. That was 25 years ago.

Now, a group of formally-dressed men walk up to the stall owner, asking for anda toast. See photo.

[This is the 611th portrait of Mission Delhi project]