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Delhi's good old Boxwallah
THE BOXWALLAH has become extinct in Delhi but there was a time when he made his presence known far and wide. Right from 1865 the Boxwallah was a prominent entity up to 1948 surviving in some pockets till the 1950s and in the hills till a decade later. That was nearly a 100 years of his active existence. Now one doesn't see him at all and those below 55 don't even know that such a character actually walked the streets of the Capital.
It was Rudyard Kipling who celebrated the Boxwallah, though H. Rider Haggard was aware of him too, and Lafcadio Hearn, C.A. Kincaid and lately Ruskin Bond mentioned his presence in their writings. Hickey's Journal in the late 18th Century was the first to mention the Boxwallah in Bengal. That would take his ancestry back another 70 years or so. And he is said to have made his appearance in Bombay too about that time in the form of Parsi peddlers. Memsahibs and Babalogs in Delhi's Civil Lines particularly looked forward to the arrival of the Boxwallah, who was essentially a wandering merchant, appearing in the same area once a week at least. As he entered the compound, the cry of "Boxwallah" rent the air. The refrain was picked up by the Boy and the Miss Babas, who echoed it in the drawing room, where the Memsahib sat giving instructions to the butler. But she soon got rid of him and received the man with a round cap, wearing a coat and tight pyjamas or a dhoti, who finally announced himself as "Boxwallah". After him followed his servant carrying the huge box which he with assistance from his master, placed near the door. As the lid was opened it seemed as though the whole treasure of Ali Baba was on display. Only the peddler did not utter the words "Simsim Khul Ja". He just waved his arm towards the articles he was going to bring out one by one.
In some homes this gesture was akin to the opening of a Pandora's box, for the ladies present would start grabbing things and querulously claiming precedence in examining or buying them. There were all sorts of items silken cloth, cosmetics, semi-precious jewellery, ribbons, combs, trinkets, needles, shawls, scarves, bangles, lace and anything else that you can buy from a general merchant's shop now. It was a wonder how so many items fitted into the box. The arrival of the Boxwallah in one compound heralded the fact in all the bungalows in the Cantonment or Civil Lines, and the women in them waited anxiously with their list of items to be bought. In the Kashmere Gate area Albina Bua, Biddi Behen, Rudy Aunty, Rehmat Bua, Natalia Aunty and the three Babus of the Kothi were the favourite customers of the Boxwallah, along with Jailor Sahib's wife and the widow of Darogaji. Their main grouse against the Boxwallah was that he had sold the best stuff at the convent to the Sisters and only jaded things were left for which he was charging high prices.
Megdalene and Martha, the two girls who studied in the convent, were there to lend support to the contention of their elders, with further testimony from Dolly, their junior classmate. But the Boxwallah was not to be cornered so easily. He had the natural tact of dealing with women and could spin juicy stories of how be hoodwinked the convent inmates by passing of Bombay stuff as part of a consignment of imported Italian goods. His knack of catering to their vanity stood him in good stead when Rehmat Bua got married to Asghar, the Daroga from Etawah and Naini Amma bought a lot of stuff from the Boxwallah. His smooth tongue extolled the high standards of Delhi as compared to distant Etawah, bordering the badlands of the Chambal, where dacoits ruled the roost.
One remembers Kanhaiyalal and Roshan Lal Sutel, the Boxwallahs who visited the Walled City in the pre-partition years. While in Civil Lines, Delhi, it was Somnath and Rewatilal. Kanhaiyalal was thin, wearing a coat and dhoti with his round topee, a stick in hand, which he waved as he walked ahead of the box carried by his Man Friday. His nostrils flared up at the slightest altercation with his clients but he was a favourite with the convent nuns, whom he visited first.
Roshan Lal was fat and fair, wearing dhoti-kurta but no coat, though he wore a cap all right. Unlike Kanhaiyalal, who sounded like a neo-colonial sympathiser, Roshan Lal gave vent to his nationalistic feelings at the slightest encouragement. He dreamt of a golden Bharat. After 1950 he stopped his rounds and joined politics but Kanhaiyalal lingered on a little longer. Now one just has hazy memories of the ubiquitous Boxwallah and of the Chinese cloth peddlers and Pathan bakers selling pastries, who came during the World War-II years.
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