“Ek sunsaan rasta hai,
Raat mein bachche baithe hain
Pet mein bhook hai pr,
Wo ye nahi jaante ki aaj ya kal khana milega ya nahi!
Aur yahi ek kalpana ki koi aayega, mera haath thamega
Aur mera bhagya sudhar jayega…. Isi tarah main story writing ki orr badh chala!”

“There’s a deserted road,
Children sit under the night sky,
Their stomachs are empty, yet
They don’t know if they’ll get food today or tomorrow.
And it’s this very imagination that someone will come, hold my hand,
And change my fate… That’s how I was drawn towards story writing!”

These are the words of Pintu Pohan, aka our Paanwala Author, who spoke to The Better India over the phone while he must have sat in his wooden paan shop, attending to customers in between.

Pinto Pohan, who got highlighted across social media for being the Paanwala with 10 published books and two in writing, has his shop in Kolkata’s Behala Street. While speaking to him, we realized that though life has tested this man at various points, his will to never give up couldn’t be shaken!

Pintu’s life story is a reality of thousands of slum dwellers who cannot afford two meals a day, live in dilapidated houses that flood during monsoons, and for whom education is a distant dream. But what is different in Pintu’s approach is his undying belief in education being the key to one’s upliftment.

So when The Better India reached out to Pintu, he reiterated one thing, “Dreaming and working towards making a dream come true are two different things and I strive for the latter. I have always believed in actions, even when the circumstances are not in my favour. I believe that consistency and perseverance are keys to being successful and this success should be your merit — incomparable and self-motivating.”

Floods of change: Early writing days and struggles

“When I was a child, there were floods in Madanmohantala slum. This was back in 1989, if I recall correctly when I was in class 4. The water levels kept rising, so we had to vacate. We went to my uncle’s place to live for a while. I was an introvert, so I wanted to read something, and I used to live in my world of imagination. While I was taking a stroll outside the house, I found a book under a tree. It had dust on it, and the corners were damaged. This book was a collection of short stories, and I started reading them, one after the other. And that is when it occurred to me that I wanted to be a lekhak (writer),” says Pintu, who asked us to wait for five minutes as he was applying choon on some betel nuts on the other side of the phone.........

© The Better India