A Dharavi scrap dealer who collects the treasures of time and history

Forty-nine-year-old Shirish Jani has 8,000 stamps collected over 39 years, from over 15 countries, and not a single one purchased by him. By profession, he’s a paper scrap dealer. By vocation, he is a philatelist. Sitting put in Dharavi, in his cramped 70 square feet office, which looks onto another 160 square feet of godown space that hoards mounds of used paper, Jani rattles off names of at least 15 different types of used paper that his business buys from firms, factories and local raddiwalas; just as adeptly, he points to various stamps in his brown plastic folder, naming their countries of origin. Jani’s shop is relatively larger than others in the area, and he says, he and his elder brother are lucky to have inherited the space from their father who started their paper scrap business in Dharavi in 1962. [caption id=“attachment_123325” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Some stamps from Jani’s collection. Arlene Chang/Firstpost”]  [/caption] Located in the Sanaullah compound, Jani’s godown sat amid the daily bustle of the narrow alley — walking across, one could cover its width in six steps — the squalor and the hustle of constant activity outside. While the dash and the grunginess stay, the shops on the other side of Jani’s office have given way to an open space thanks to civic sanitary infrastructure being put in place by the authorities. Even as two of Jani’s workers are sorting out paper waste, he is lovingly pouring over a small part of his stamp and postcard collection for the _n_th time. A First Day Cover for Children’s Day in 1960 gets him visibly excited and he explains that first day covers were limited editions envelopes released by the postal department and were thus much sought-after. “When I started collecting stamps and postcards, we didn’t have the money to spend on things like that,” he says, adding, “So, when I got my first limited edition envelope, I went and showed it off to my brother who also collected stamps at the time.” Ask him how he got hooked onto collecting stamps and postcards, and he reminisces. “I always had a penchant for old, antiquated things. When I was in school, I used to go to the stationery shops to just look at charts that had pictures of stamps from across the world. They made me feel like I was seeing the world,” he said. Then one day, while playing in his father’s Dharavi office, he found a discarded envelope, which was from abroad. He looked closer and there was on it stamps that looked just like the pictures of what he saw in the stationery stores. Thereafter, Jain examined sacks full of used waste papers each time he visited his father’s shop and his collection of stamps only increased. Jani says he has built his stamp collection solely from what he found on envelopes that were discarded and eventually landed up at his father’s shop as waste. “I have never paid for a single stamp I have. All the stamps that I have are from the scrap that we got in our shop, most of which were from company correspondence that was discarded and some from domestic households,” he says. Continued on next page Jani’s love for stamps, gradually led to collecting postcards that were thrashed by people and he now has over a hundred postcards. For Jani, there’s a romance in them. He says that like stamps, postcards make him feel he is seeing the world — only, through the eyes of others. “They tell me stories of love, friendship, family — and also expose me to different facets of familial, business and social dealings,” he says, “It’s voueyeristic in a way, but it’s also amazing to feel like you know a human being you have never seen, met or know.” [caption id=“attachment_123327” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“A postcard from Jani’s collection that dates back to 1922. Arlene Chang/Firstpost”]  [/caption] Jani’s collection of postcards date back to the early 1900s, some as early as the 1920s. His stamp collection — which includes stamps from Tanzania, Helvetia, Espana, Belgium, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Great Britian, Italy, China and Japan among others — dates back to the 19th Century. So, does he prefer the nostalgia and romance his stamp collection elicits or the harshness of practicality and running a business? Jani does not have a this or that answer. But, he conveys the message. “The thousands of kgs of scrap paper we buy is good for business, but what I’ve collected painstakingly for all these years — my stamp and postcard collections — are priceless. It’s been my love for more than 3/4ths of the lifetime I’ve lived,” Jani says. To have spent 39 years of ones 49 years of existence collecting stamps, must indeed be love. We concur. Shirish Jani is more a philatelist — believing in the idea of nostalgia, the power of romance and the virtue of correspondence that one can touch and be touched by.