On the small mezzanine floor, the thing that stands out is the horse carved out of marble, placed on a long table. Across the table where he sits, there is a big poster of horses running.?“To you, they are horses but, to me, they are my vanity vans. They are unstoppable,” says Shaukat Khan, 62, who owns a fleet of 36 vanity vans and wants to own more.

The location of his office is a mall in Jogeshwari in Mumbai. The office itself is modelled after a vanity van—glossy, with a fake mandarin orange plant. Khan hails from Nagpur. He ran away from home after watching the last screening of Jeetendra’s Himmat. He was 12 at the time. At home, he wasn’t allowed to watch films but he was fascinated by them.

Khan took a train from Nagpur and landed at Kalyan. At midnight, he didn’t think he could return home so he boarded the train and lived and worked in a photo studio in Haji Malang shrine. “I wanted to see Jeetusaahab and someone had told me that the star comes to Haji Malang,” he says.

From Kalyan, he went to the shrine of the saint in hopes of seeing the star. “It is all because of him. I didn’t become a star but at least I served them,” he says. From a life lived on footpaths to an airconditioned office, it has been a life that probably could make a plot masala Hindi film.

Khan worked odd jobs at first and then ended up as a taxi driver. Then, he got into real estate for a while but when the business started to
flag, he began to look for something that might click for him. That’s when he saw a vanity van parked somewhere in the city. He spoke with the drivers and figured this could be his next gig. The rest is history.

He got into the vanity van business and his fleet grew over the last decade or so. It has been a profitable business for he knows that vanity drives Bollywood stars. He still is a fanboy of Jeetendra. “I dared and therefore I am here,” he says.

(This appeared in the print edition as "If Vans Were Horses")