Extra! Extra! Read all about last newspaper hawker in Paris

Boston Globe

3 days ago

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Such is Akbar's renown that President Emmanuel Macron recently awarded him a Légion d'Honneur, the Republic's highest order of merit. It will be conferred at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace in the fall.
'Perhaps it will help me get my French passport!' said Akbar, who sometimes has a withering take on life, having seen much of its underside. He has a residence permit, but his application for French nationality is mired in Gallic bureaucracy.
Akbar moves at startling speed. A sinewy bundle of energy at 72, he clocks several miles a day, selling Le Monde, Les Echos, and other daily newspapers from around noon until midnight. Dismissive of the digital, he has become a human networker of a district once dear to Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernest Hemingway, now overrun by brand-hungry tourists.
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'How are you, dear Ali?' says Véronique Voss, a psychotherapist, as he enters the Café Fleurus near the Jardin du Luxembourg. 'I worried about you yesterday because it was so hot.'
Heat does not deter Akbar, who has known worse. He thanks Voss with a big smile and takes off his dark blue Le Monde cap. 'When you have nothing, you take whatever you can get,' he says. 'I had nothing.'
At his next stop, an Italian cafe, Jean-Philippe Bouyer, a stylist who has worked for Dior, greets Akbar warmly. 'Ali is indispensable,' Bouyer says. 'Something very positive and rare in our times emanates from him. He kept the soul of a child.'
Born in 1953 into a family of 10 children, two of whom died young, Akbar grew up in Rawalpindi amid rampant poverty and open sewers, eating leftovers, sleeping five to a room, leaving school when he was 12, working odd jobs, and eventually teaching himself to read.
'I did not want to wear clothes that reeked of misery,' he said. 'I always dreamed of giving my mother a house with a garden.'
To advance, he had to leave. He procured a passport at 18. All he knew of Europe was the Eiffel Tower and Dutch tulips. A winding road took him by bus to Kabul, Afghanistan, where Western hippies, most of them high, abounded in 1970 — but that was not Akbar's thing. He went on by road to Iran, where he said, 'the shah was an omnipresent God.'
Eventually, he reached Athens, Greece, and wandered the streets looking for work. A businessperson took pity and, noting his eagerness, offered him a job on a ship. Akbar cleaned the kitchen floor. He washed dishes. He was faced with aggressive mockery from bawdy shipmates for his refusal, as a Muslim, to drink.
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In Shanghai, Akbar abandoned ship rather than face further taunting. The world is round, and around he went, back to Rawalpindi, and then on the westward road again to Europe. His mother deserved better; that conviction drove him through every humiliation.
Visa issues in Greece and eventual expulsion landed him back in Pakistan a second time. His family thought he was mad, but, undaunted, he tried again. This time, he washed up in Rouen, France. It had taken only two years. After working there in a restaurant, he moved on to Paris in 1973.
'By the time I got to Paris I had an overwhelming desire to anchor myself,' Akbar said. 'Since I began circling the planet, I hadn't met many people who didn't disappoint me. But if you have no hope, you're dead.'
He slept under bridges and in cellars. He encountered racism. He lost his virginity, and in so doing, he says, encountered the phrase 'Ça y est!' that became his moniker. He spent a couple of months in Burgundy harvesting cucumbers. There, he ceded to wine and pork, forbidden by Islam.
'That was a turning point in my life,' Akbar wrote in a memoir published over a decade ago. 'I still believed in God but I had concluded that eaters of sausages were often better people than Muslims with the strictest practices.'
At last, in 1974, Akbar found his calling when he ran into an Argentine student hawking newspapers. He inquired how he could do likewise and was soon in the streets of Paris with copies of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and Hara-Kiri, now defunct. He liked to walk, enjoyed contact with people and, even if margins were small, could eke out a living.
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Fast-forward 51 years, and Akbar is still at it. Because St.-Germain is the home of intellectuals, actors, and politicians, he has rubbed shoulders with the influential. From François Mitterrand to Bill Clinton (who told him Pakistan was 'dangerous'), and from actress and singer Jane Birkin to author Bernard-Henri Lévy, he has met them all.
None of this has gone to his head. He remains a modest guy with a winning manner. His main newspaper is now Le Monde, which he acquires at a kiosk for about $2 a copy and sells for almost double that. He makes around $70 on an average day; he rarely takes a day off.
Newspaper reading remains ingrained in France. Friends may buy two or three copies and slip him 10 euros or invite him to lunch. He has no pension, but he gets by — and his mother got a Rawalpindi garden.
From an arranged marriage with a Pakistani woman in 1980, Akbar has five sons, one of them autistic, one with various physical ailments. A sixth child died at birth. Life has not been easy, one reason 'I have made it my business to make people laugh.'
Some 50 years later, Akbar remains on the move. Lose sight of him for a second, and he's gone. But then comes the cry: 'Ça y est! Marine is marrying Jordan!' — a reference to far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her young protégé Jordan Bardella.
His jokes are a sales pitch; they also reflect a yearning for a happier, simpler world.
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