SITTING on the ground floor of his 150-year-old, three-storied ancestral home in Varanasi’s Ghasi Tola, Upendra Vinayak Sahastrabudhe says his best memories of Mumbai are of the times he spent hanging out at Banarasi paan shops in the city. “Khar Road, Andheri, Versova, Shivaji Park, Sayan and Luxmi Bai Chowk—all of them had Banarasi paan. I would happily chew paan all day and let my family do the rounds of our Maharashtrian relatives,” says Sahastrabudhe, an astrologer and Sanskrit scholar.

At 50, Sahastrabudhe has other memories too—like of the time, 20 years ago, when he met Bal Thackeray at a Jagatik Marathi Parishad meeting organised by the Shiv Sena. “I told Balasaheb that it’s Maharashtrians outside the state who preserve its cultural character.” Sahastrabudhe, who regularly contributes articles to the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna, started the Sarvajanik Ganesh Utsavs—on the lines of the Mumbai Ganesh Utsavs—in Varanasi nine years ago. He also got women priests for the Ganesh Utsavs. Through all this, Sahastrabudhe remained a true Banarasi—he loved his paan and made sure he didn’t miss it even while in Mumbai. “I represent the ninth generation of the Sahastrabudhe family in Varanasi. We come from Vai district in Maharashtra. Though my mother tongue is Marathi, I take pride in being a Banarasi.”

Given a chance, Sahastrabudhe would like to tell the Sainiks that. As the Sena (in this case, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) plays the Mumbaikar vs outsider card again, Sahastrabudhe wants them to know that just as he is a “khanti (quintessential) Banarasi” who happens to speak Marathi, Mumbai’s ‘outsiders’ are probably more Mumbaikars than Mumbaikars themselves.

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