Decades have rolled by but the incident is still fresh in the memory of Jain, a cloth merchant in the old city. He had accompanied the Sharmas on that memorable day. "Khushilalji declared then and there that Shankar was destined to go places," he recalls. Apocryphal? Maybe, but nobody disputes that Sharma had it in him to rise from the patiyas —the roadside addas where he honed his politics—to become the nation's Rashtrapati."
Yehin se politics shuru ki thi doctor sahib ne ," says the President's younger brother, Ish Dayal Sharma, also a practising vaidya, pointing to a corner of their freshly-whitewashed home in gali Gulia Dai. But for the lone armed policeman outside, the narrow lane with its cramped houses gives no inkling that this was where the President had his upbringing.
An old woman mixing herbs and shrubs, making small tablets and selling purias of medicine for as little as one or two rupees, it turns out, is Sampat Bai, the President's stepmother who helps Ish Dayal continue the family vocation. Khushilal passed into the ages long ago but his legacy lives on.
As does the brahminical order in which he brought up his sons. While Ish Dayal takes pride in that he is still an active member of the Brahmin Sabha, locals say the President always stuck to his upper-caste roots in spite of his education abroad. Sampat Bai recalls a letter he wrote from London saying that he was living on boiled potatoes and onions as garlic-free vegetarian food was not easily available.
However, nobody doubts the President's secular credentials. His friendship with Abdul Alim Khan, who went on to become the state's education secretary, is part of local lore. The childhood chums studied together in Agra and Lucknow universities. Even so, Sharma never gave up the ethics he had grown up on. Remembers Khan's widow Razia Sultana: "Once he (Sharma) began crying when his British warden offered him khichri . Alim sahib had to explain to the warden that Shankar wouldn't eat."
Despite his strong orthodoxy, though, Sharma was always sporting. Khan once targeted the symbol of his brahminical roots: his long tuft of hair. He asked the barber to chop it off steadily. Sharma did not realise the game till it was too late and even then, his far from getting angry, he laughed it off. The friendship only grew stronger, with Sharma even revealing his deep, dark secrets to Alim. Before leaving for London in 1945, Sharma wrote to Khan: "I have been admitted to PhD at the University College....Now I do not need 'Gapolia'. I need a large number of coloured shirts.... Do not tell anything about my affairs to my father."
Although Sharma had deep respect for his father, he did not hesitate to cross swords with him when he decided to remarry. "But that is a thing of the past. We all protested against it, raising slogans, throwing stones," recalls Sharma's childhood friend, B.L. Sharma.
As a person, the President retains enormous goodwill in his home city. But as a politician, there are mixed feelings. There are many who compare him to a banyan tree under which no other plant grows. Sharma, say the Bhopalis, did not let a second rung of leadership grow under him.
