AMONG the MPs now packing their bags to return to their home-towns is B. Akber Pasha, recently humbled in the Vellore constituency of Tamil Nadu. There is some irony to his having done time in the 10th Lok Sabha, the Lok Sabha that wrung its hands impotently as brick by brick the Babri Masjid came down to the strains of the two sadhvis, Rithambara and Uma Bharati, singing their notorious duet, Ek dhakka aur do... . For Akber Pasha first came to public notice when he stood for election to the post of president of the Presidency College students' union in Madras. Nothing remarkable about that in itself. What was remarkable is that he stood in the year 1947. The month was September, weeks after the vivisection of Bharat mata into India and Pakistan. All his relatives thought he was mad to even think, as a Muslim, of standing. In the event, he won an overwhelming victory. Which is the kind of thing which makes us Tamilians pretty smug about our not being infected with the communal virus. But now that the BJP has won its first-ever seat in the Tamil Nadu assembly and come within a whisker of winning the Nagercoil parliamentary seat, once held by Kamaraj himself, perhaps watching Akber Pasha leave his Meena Bagh residence is like watching the fade-out of the Last of the Mohicans.