One of the one percent in 13 million.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Socks are stacked in neat piles atop a small folding table. Black, grey and white pairs fill every inch of it. Riyaz, known in this Central Delhi market as Bablu Bhai, is standing behind the display. His forehead is lined, his hair partially grey. His face does not belong to someone who has spent his working life selling just one thing.

Bablu Bhai is from Muzaffarpur in Bihar. His father spent his entire life farming the family’s tiny plot of agricultural land in the village. Today Bablu Bhai sells socks in the national capital. His only son installs air-conditioners in Dubai. One son-in-law sells frocks on Delhi’s paves. Another runs a ration shop. The third trades in coal in Bihar.

Bablu Bhai left the village 25 years ago. He had started his career by making “lah” bangles in his home district, but that work would bring him negligible money. He recalls constantly feeling mayoos (disappointed) in his early youth. He decided to leave for some big city. Patna and Calcutta were closer to home, but he chose Delhi because relatives were already here. A “tau-ka-ladka” who worked in a computer shop in Nehru Place found him a job at a pakodi stall in the same commercial district.

For eight years Bablu Bhai fried aloo pakodis, mirchi pakodis, and pyaz pakodis in somebody else’s stall. At long last, he saved enough to open his own stall. A handcart, a gas cylinder, a stove, three patilas, one karahi, a knife and two ladles were the elements of his roadside establishment. Every day he sold pakodis to the Nehru Place office crowd.

Then the Delhi Metro reached his part of Dilli.

The construction of Nehru Place metro terminus took away the spot where he worked. Opening a pakodi stall once again was not easy because he could no longer find another place for it. “Such a stall needs a fixed space,” he says. He had to sell his handcart, stove and utensils to a junk dealer at a low price. Later, for some time he sold, in succession, children’s frocks, hand-held electric fans, sunglasses, and toy cars. “Main bhatakta raha,” he says. He kept drifting.

Five years ago he settled on socks. He calls them zurab.

Living in North-East Delhi’s Seelampur with wife, Tabassum, Bablu Bhai says he no longer worries about changing his occupation one more time. “I have done all that I had to do. I am content.”

[This is the 635th portrait of Mission Delhi project]