Sometime in the late 1950s, a barefoot artist with a long-flowing beard would suddenly appear at a popular tea shack opposite Ahmedabad’s landmark Sidi-Saiyed-ni-jali. He would spend hours sipping tea and chatting with people amid the graves that dotted the roadside shack floor.
On November 25, 2004, the regular tea-sipper — though not as young, but now an internationally acclaimed celebrity painter Maqbool Fida Husain — walked into the same grave-dotted tea-joint now metamorphosed into a thriving restaurant and known as ‘Lucky Tea Stall’.
The relationship that started during Husain’s visits to the Saraspur graveyard to pay homage to his ancestors reached a climax on that night as Husain gave a specially made painting to the shop owner.
City-based art dealer and Husain’s friend, Anil Relia says, “He made the painting in my house; I had accompanied him when he gifted the painting to Lucky’s owner.”
After Mohammadbhai passed away, the stall was ran by Kutti Nayar, who kept his promise to Mohammadbhai that he would never sell the painting. “It’s a gift from an old friend,” says Nayar.
As a customer he never missed an opportunity to have a cup of tea accompanied with bun-maska. “I have been working here since 1970 and was then introduced to Husain saab by our late first owner, KH Mohammad. They were the closest pals I had ever seen. Back then, Husain saab, like any other customer, would sip tea and relish his bun-maska on the wooden bench in front of the counter over the graves”, Lucky Tea Stall manager, Siddiqui Ansari (60) recalled.
“He would come barefoot to our stall, sip tea, have his snacks, and if people recognised him and approached him to chat, he would do that too. In the four decades that Husain saab visited Ahmedabad, he never missed a chance to visit us. The tea would be parcelled to his hotel room if he could not make it owing to other commitments,” Ansari added.
Having seen three generations of the Lucky family, Husain could not refuse the then owner, who had asked him to paint something for his walls. “He gifted this painting made on November 25, 2004, to our owner at 11.30 in the night. He apparently also showed him where to set it up and that is how we have his masterpiece. As a memory we have clicked many photographs of him with our staff,” Ansari recalls.
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