A large city has streets full of stories, of all kinds too. Now, some people like to lord over them — the streets — some end up on them tragically, some mingle with the paraphernalia, some guard, some terrorise, and some, like Yusuf Khan, come to turn it into a highway to a different life, a life of their choice and making.

Khan came to Calcutta from Baruan, a small village in Jajpur district of Odisha, with a fellow villager. Qayoom was an employee at a leading confectionery shop — there were not many those days — in central Calcutta. It was 1974. Those were harsh days for people living in coastal Odisha. Frequent floods had devastated the farmlands. Poverty was widespread. People had to struggle for a square meal a day.

Khan had two brothers, one five years older, the other five years younger. His tall and burly father was in possession of nothing but a small strip of land and that plot was barely cultivable. Grinding poverty and hunger forced Khan to leave for Calcutta. Why him and not one of the other brothers, one cannot say. Those who could throw light are not around any longer. But there he was, all of 13 and raring to venture out. Khan’s mother reposed a lot of faith in Qayoom, but even so, her heart trembled as she handed over her precious son to his care.

Khan arrived in Calcutta with an urgent need to earn money. He started working in a small teashop on Collin Lane, a narrow stretch sandwiched between central Calcutta’s Marquis Street and Maulvi Lane. He would serve tea to the shops in the neighbourhood, earning barah annas or 12 annas a day (an anna equals 1/16th of a rupee). And oftentimes, if he was lucky, he earned an anna or two as tip from his customers. Out of his total earnings, he spent four annas on food every day — a little bulky since childhood, he had a big appetite — and the rest was kept aside for home.

Khan worked round the clock and at night he slept like a log on the footpath near the teashop, as did the others who worked at the various small shops and eateries of the area. Work and the junoon to keep earning consumed him the next many months. For two years, he did not return home to Odisha.

Nothing and no one expressly stopped him, but the boy did not want to go back to the floods, the afternoons so full of hunger, the peech or leftover rice water for dinner, which too the hungry brothers and sisters had to share. Later, of course, he would say there was a pride in working in Calcutta, earning a living and shouldering responsibilities.

His mother, however, was upset, distraught even. Whosoever travelled from the village to Calcutta, she would send with him some barley for her son and a plea to return home — for some days at least. After several such requests Khan relented. He returned, not just two years, but a whole childhood later.

That year, his elder brother, whose education he had been funding, passed his matriculation examination. Khan felt proud and at the same time regretful for not completing his own education.

But living on Calcutta’s streets and negotiating his way through its lanes was an education no less. Khan now had an idea of the city and how things worked here. He had a clear distinction between the wrong and the right and the consequences thereof. Tobacco, gutka, paan, he tried them all at some point of time or the other, but they didn’t entice him. But yes, he couldn’t get over his love for fried beef, from Collin Lane’s Teghiya Hotel.

Those days, there used to be patrolling vans that would pick up people bathing on the streets and put them in the lockup. Once, bathing at one of those municipality taps, Khan too was picked up. He got out with Shauqat’s help.

Shauqat was a friend and a brother. By now Khan could afford a roof above his head and he and Shauqat shared a single room in a three-storey building in Misri Gali, adjoining Collin Lane. Shauqat was also from a village in Odisha. He was older than Khan by a couple of years and worked as a cook at a local eatery, but eventually landed a job in a company guesthouse close to Camac Street.

Days passed and after a couple of years Khan started working for a milk shop nearby. M.N. Pure Milk, as it was called; the owners paid him well at Rs 60 a month. Khan used to measure and serve milk to customers. He also picked up the tricks of the trade — how to make curd, paneer, kalakand, rabri. He would also deliver milk to households on a cycle. It was obvious to the shop owner, Haji Sahab, that this young man was honest, motivated and hardworking. And not just that, Haji Sahab was also impressed with Khan’s arithmetic skills. He could calculate really fast and in time was made cashier of the shop.

In these 15 years away from his village, making a living, Khan had taken on all the financial responsibilities of his family, big and small. His elder brother, who completed his polytechnic degree, bagged a job at Rourkela Steel Plant. The family’s days of hardship were clearly over. Khan now shifted focus on his younger brother.

For eight years, Khan fulfilled his increasing responsibilities and, perhaps unknown to all, he nurtured a dream. He wanted to open his own milk shop. In 1988, when he told Haji Sahab this with some trepidation, the old man was not surprised. He was a kind man too and promised to help Khan as much as he could.

With generous help from Haji Sahab, Khan opened his first shop — Pure Milk Emporium — in south Calcutta’s Beckbagan area. With so many years of experience in his kitty, Khan had garnered enough contacts to help him with labour and other small details. He didn’t have too much difficulty getting a couple of big clients either and their orders helped him kickstart his business.

It was a success. Over a couple of years, Khan’s shop made a name for itself in the area. Next, he wanted to open another outlet on Shamsul Huda Road, since a lot of the orders were from that area. His reputation and finances grew day by day. And in 2004, he opened a confectionery and snacks shop, after a couple of years of planning.

Back in Odisha, in his beloved village in Jajpur, Khan was now a hero to all who knew him and of him. He came to be known as that guy who had made it past all odds and managed to become a “bada aadmi”, a great big man.

Whenever a less fortunate relation or villager approached him for help, Khan did whatever he could. But one thing he could not bring himself to do and that was return to Odisha. He cannot live anywhere else but Calcutta, he tells his family, stolidly, to this date.

A moderately religious man, not a day goes by when Khan does not thank the Almighty for the food on his table. He remembers his mother and the pains she took to bring up her children. He remembers and recounts the teachings of Collin Lane.

At 57, Yusuf Khan is far from done. He has watched his acquaintances and his elder brother retire, but such a life is not for him. He seems to believe that the day he becomes idle, he will also cease to be.