Yusuf Ali

Yusuf Ali set up his three feet of footpath on Nala Road in 1953, when the road itself was still more nala than road, and has not moved from it since except for the two years the municipality dug up the drains and made everyone's life, in his words, a very great tamasha. He learnt the trade from his father, who had learnt it from an uncle in Amritsar before Partition sent the family southward with little more than a toolbox and a habit of not complaining.

The tarpaulin roof over his stall has been patched so many times that it is now, by any honest accounting, entirely patch, held together with a geometry only he understands and would be offended to have questioned. Beneath it his spanners and levers lie in a row that looks careless to the stranger and is in fact a precise map, assembled over four decades, of what his hand will need next and in what order.

Every boy in the lane learns, sooner or later, that a punctured tube can be brought to Yusuf-chacha for nothing, or for whatever small coin the boy happens to have, which amounts to the same thing in practice. Their fathers have long since stopped offering to pay properly, having learnt that the offer causes him visible discomfort, as though decency were an accusation he must deflect with tea.

In the communal troubles of 1993, when a curfew sat over the town for the better part of a fortnight and certain lanes became unsafe for certain families overnight, Yusuf gave over the back room of his own house to two Hindu families from three doors down, cooked for them from his own stores for nine nights, and never once mentioned the matter afterward. It is other people who tell the story now, in careful voices, and Yusuf, if he is present when it is told, will interrupt to say the account has grown in the telling and would everyone like some tea.

He married late, at thirty-one, a schoolteacher's daughter named Zubeida who kept the household accounts with a precision he never applied to his own affairs, and together they raised three children in the two rooms above a cousin's shop, sending the eldest all the way through a diploma in mechanical engineering on a combination of Yusuf's daily earnings and a discipline about spending that the neighbours found almost comic.

His regulars are legion and largely nameless to outsiders — the postman's cycle, the fish-seller's cart, the school peon's ancient Hercules that has been declared dead and resurrected more times than anyone can count. He remembers each machine's particular complaint the way a doctor remembers a patient's history, and greets returning cycles with something close to affection.

There was a season, some years back, when a large showroom opened two lanes away selling shining new bicycles on easy instalments, and everyone predicted the end of Yusuf's footpath trade. The showroom is now a mobile-phone shop. Yusuf is still on his footpath, a fact he mentions only when pressed, and even then with a shrug rather than a boast.

His own cycle, the black one he rides home each night at nine past the shuttered shops, has carried a wobble in its front wheel for six years that he has never once corrected, a small and curious exception in a life otherwise spent putting other people's wheels perfectly true, and when this is pointed out to him he laughs and says a mechanic's own machine is always the last on the list.

So the tarpaulin stays up through another monsoon, and the row of spanners stays exactly where it has always lain, and somewhere on Nala Road a schoolboy is even now walking a flat tyre toward the one man in the district who will look at it, sigh with theatrical exasperation, and mend it for nothing at all, calling it, as ever, nothing special.