A Farewell to an era and The Man in White!

By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD In the passing away of Mr. Sadiq Ali, the proprietor of Ali Brothers, last week, our city has perhaps lost one of its most long-standing icons, because his shop is one of the few shops that have stood almost unchanged, over the longest period of time, in the front façade of our iconic Devaraja Market building. Out of the nearly seventy business establishments that stand in that row, only about a dozen still stand unchanged and because of my own long-standing familiarity with that place, I can name almost all of them and in the right order too. And, if I have got my observations right, while all the good old, surviving shop owners that I knew of there, slowly stopped showing up at their shops over the years, with the passage of time and passing away of their own good health, Mr. Sadiq Ali was the only shop owner there, who was present in his shop every day, the longest. He once told me how his father had first started the shop in Mercara and later established the present shop here as a branch and how the original one was wound up later, due to the difficulty the family faced in managing it. Although I stopped visiting his shop many years ago because of the severe parking problem in the Devaraja Market area, I used to meet Mr. Sadiq Ali quite regularly at the meetings of the Alumni Association of the St. Philomena’s College where we both studied, although two full decades apart. He would never miss any of these meetings and over the past many years, he would be proudly introduced as the oldest alumnus showing up at them! Riding his trusted blue and white Lambretta, he would be among the first persons to make an appearance at the auditorium and be among the last ones to leave, after shaking hands with all the others there. A most humble and soft-spoken man, he was so soft-spoken that you had to strive hard to hear him. But he stood out most for his two very unique attributes that remained unchanged, all through his life; his attire and his smile. He was always dressed in pristine white and he could never be seen without his disarming smile! As far as I am concerned, I can safely say that I have known him all my life and I say this because my mother must have carried me in her arms into his shop while I was an infant, until I began to walk in there myself, holding her or my dad’s hand. That is how old my association is, with the man I’m writing about today. He was so close to our family that just a few months ago, he had come home to meet my mother and spend some time with her. Ali Brothers was the place where we, like most other Mysoreans then, used to do almost all their shopping for soaps, toiletries, cosmetics, chocolates, greeting cards and some condiments too. Being an agent for vehicle insurance, until the advent of online insurance, Mr. Sadiq Ali was the man who used to manage all our vehicle insurance renewals. He was so meticulous that he would maintain a record of the renewal dates of all his customers’ vehicles and he would call them up well in time, to seek their consent for renewal, which he would do and then personally deliver the policies to them. Until a very similar store, Mohan Bhandar came on the scene across the road, in the year 1963, all the goodies, dear to my heart then, could only be found at Ali Brothers and nowhere else and these included Cadbury’s chocolates, Parry’s toffees, Kissan jams and tomato sauce, Polson’s butter, corn flakes and most of all, the Planter’s and Cocktail brand of salted cashew-nuts that came in a sealed tin, that had to be opened with its own key, soldered on its top! In a most interesting arrangement, this slotted key used to peel off a narrow band of metal from around the tin that would leave its top as a very useable lid after the can was opened. We still have a couple of those cans lying around in our estate house, as relics and memories of the good old days, gone by. While my parents used to keep coins in one of them, in the other, I used to store my spare stock of the carefully selected, round pebbles for the omnipresent catapult, that I would always have around my neck. And mind you, at that time, this contraption was not just omnipresent but my most omnipotent weapon too! At the end of the day, when it was time for me to be put to bed, my dad had to take it off my neck and place it under my pillow along with its red ammo bag, before tucking me in and beginning his reading of that day’s bedtime story, from my huge collection of Read Aloud series of story books, which I have carefully preserved to this day! It is a different matter that my state of wakefulness would never ever last through the full story, which invariably had to be continued the next day! Falling asleep was so easy then, while I was a child and I often ponder over this blissful time, during the times when I lie tossing in my bed, on the few occasions when sleep eludes me now. That is when I am reminded of Shakespeare who in Henry IV, says; O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, that thou no more will weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness? e-mail: [email protected]