SHARFUDDIN Siddiqui or �Sharfubhai� as he is famously known in Aurangabad, is a large, bedouin-like man who moves around in a white kurta-pajama and who wears a white turban to protect himself from the sharp Aurangabad sun. Thirty-three years ago he started what was to become one of Aurangabad�s most talked about places, the Tara Pan Centre or TPC in Osmanpura. He is fond of repeating the story. Sharfubhai, after his education, could not get a job, so decided to go into business for himself with Rs. 700 which was all the capital he had. His mother, who was a gutsy woman, and who was a pan addict, told him to start a pan business. �I will help you make the katha,� she told Sharfubhai. Katha is the katechu juice that lines the inside of the pan and Sharfubhai swears his mother made the best katha in India. So, mother and son started Tara Pan Centre, she making the katha and he selling the pan. �I took zaffran, amber and musk from food for their fragrance and introduced them in pans and this clicked,� Sharfubhai says. �My pans got popular.�

Today the business is roaring, it starts at 8 a.m. and continues till 2 a.m. next morning. �Officially, I am supposed to close by 11 at night, but people keep coming, what to do, there are some days when I hardly pull down the shutters,� says Sharfubhai grinning and revealing pan-stained teeth. He has 20 helpers in the shop and four members of his family working around the clock. Occasionally, when media people and television channels come to do a story on TPC, Sharfubhai gets behind the counter and on top of a pan station and personally makes pan for customers with a skill born of long practise. The TPC sells 56 different varieties of pan and Sharfubhai claims he can make all 56 of them himself. His pans come from Rs. 5 to Rs. 3,000. The Rs. 5 one is a Gulkand pan and the Rs. 3,000 is TPC�s speciality, the Raja-Rani Pan, meant for newly-married couples and elderly people. Shyly he reveals it is an aphrodisiac and contains kasturi, agar, itar, musk and zaffran. �We sell about 30 of these in a day and about 4,000 other pans,� Sharfubhai says.

When he was starting the business 33 years ago, Sharfubhai travelled across India to explore all the cities where pan was consumed and see how to run his operation. He went to Delhi, Benares, Hyderabad, Pune and Bombay and when he was satisfied that he could create a market in Aurangabad, he threw himself into the business. From all these cities, he picked up something, and his repertoire includes a Calcutta Pan, a Madrasi Pan, a Banarasi Pan and other regulars like the Meetha, Kapoori, Maghai, and Teensau Eksobees Pan. Today, he is willing to travel again when people order his pan in bulk for wedding receptions and other parties. Sharfubhai will travel with his team and set up a stall at the venue with himself sitting in attendance to make the pans. �Pan is my business, I will do anything for it, it is associated with happiness and sadness, pan is had at weddings and funerals, and everybody from nawabs to the man on the street is fond of pan,� he says matter-of-factly.