The Sufi poet Amir Khusrao depicts in exquisite verse the paradigmatic protagonist of the Southasian street, the paanwallah – or seller of paan. Paan exists in a culinary category of its own: simultaneously a dessert, a stimulating narcotic, a post-meal palate cleanser and a herbal digestive. Its fresh, peppery, bitter, sweet-spicy flavour has refreshed Southasian mouths for a millennium.
The culture of paan manifests as a leaf-wrapped comestible, as red-stained streaks of spittle and as ramshackle stalls on street corners. The skilled producer of this complex victual, the paanwallah, is an omnipresent figure on bustling pavements, on the silver screen and in the entanglement of the lives that populate the Indian subcontinent. The paanwallah has always captivated me: during my childhood, when my father and I queued up at his stall to cleanse our mouths after a spicy meal, and now, as an observer with an ethnographer's curiosity and a student's homesickness.