Rameswar Baishya at his paan shop on Gauhati University campus. Telegraph picture

Nov. 28: Seventy-year-old Rameswar Baishya remembers the spirit of the then AASU leaders during the Assam Agitation and muses on the present day scenario when some AGP workers and leaders got into a brawl after a party worker criticised their leader Prafulla Kumar Mahanta during their executive meeting here today.

Once upon a bygone era, when many of today’s AGP leaders, then leaders of All Assam Students Union, used to hold meetings at secret places, Baishya was the only one in the university who was privy to the locations.

Baishya, a paan shop owner, said these leaders were very close to him when most of them were AASU leaders and used to buy betel nuts and other things from his paan shop on the Gauhati University campus during the Assam Movement.

“I have seen the setting up of the head office of the All Assam Students Union and the days of Assam Movement. I used to keep the key of the door to the AASU office and conveyed information like when and where their (AASU) secret meetings would be held,” he said.

“Leaders like Prafulla Mahanta, Chandra Mohan Patowary and Bharat Narah know me well. When they meet me they treat me very well,” he said.

“I have known them closely — they were always very spirited,” Baishya said, referring to today’s incident.

Near the university’s arts canteen is the small paan shop run by 70-year-old Rameswar Baishya, who has always been Baishyada for the students for the past four decades or the khura for many of late, to provide a right place to pass a few minutes.

Before the university campus turns abuzz with the presence of students, Baishyada raises the shutter of his shop, crouches into it, continues his daily activity of selling articles and drops shutters only when the university campus becomes silent around 8pm.

He has been doing it for years since the day he started his shop in 1968.

However, when the university organises any programme or function in the evening he keeps his shop open till midnight.

Not to earn a few bucks more, but to ensure that the university fraternity need not to worry about betel nuts or chips when his shop is there.

“I do not want to see my shop closed. I always open it so that nobody misses a betel nut from my shop,” Baishya said.

Batches of students have come and gone but Baishyada’s shop remains where he, then a 16-year-old boy, who had just passed the matric examinations, opened it.

Inside his little shop, Baishya remained a witness to the gradual changes of the university over the years.

And, he is determined to run the shop till death “enjoying love” from the university fraternity. “When I started the shop, construction of the university auditorium had just started and the canteen was not here. I have seen the size of the university has grown and number of students increased. They call me as Baishyada or khura,” Baishya, a father of two sons and five daughters, said.

After passing his matric examination, Baishya, a resident of Barinibari Supaterbari village in Nalbari, came to meet one of his maternal uncles, an employee of the university, and it is how he got introduced the university which remained his home. The university has given him quarters to stay.