KARACHI, Aug 3: Fifty-five-year-old Allah Wasayo is still unmarried. He complains his relatives turned down his proposals of marriage fearing that he would eat up his wife.

To be fair to them, their fears were not entirely unfounded. Mr Wasayo munches tube lights and teacups and consumes huge quantity of food with equal ease.

A Sindhi-speaking Qambrani, Mr Wasayo hails from Pingrio village in the Badin district. He worked as a labourer till the age of 30. But then his appetite got the better of him and he started to place bets with friends about the amount of food he could eat at one go.

Mr Wasayo went for lunch to a five-star hotel on Tuesday. It was a buffet lunch, but he sat on a chair and, brushing aside the knives and forks on the table, asked the waiters to put food in his plate. Also, he evinced little interest in the bill of fare.

"All eatables taste the same to me. I eat carpets, cups, saucers, pieces of glass, pulao, chicken karahi and grass with the same fervour," he explained. The waiters attending on Mr Wasayo began to smile amusingly when he went for a seventh helping.

Too polite to ask him why he was eating so much, they concluded that he was one of the gluttons who made a pig of themselves at buffet lunches. Their faces started to wear an apprehensive look when he asked his plate to be filled for the 15th time.

A high-ranking official of the hotel management said that in the past 24 years that he had been working at the hotel he had never seen anyone eat so much. Mr Wasayo claims he's never had stomach-ache.

According to him, he's never had problems digesting whatever he eats. "My stomach has also been X-rayed but nothing wrong or abnormal was detected. And despite the fact that I eat so much, I don't have a paunch," he said.

After having a "hearty" meal at the hotel, Mr Wasayo munched tube lights and broken pieces of teacups at another place. He said his lips had never been cut by the sharp-edged things he ate.

"I think I've made a world record by eating all these things. But my well-wishers will have to help me find this out. Sadly, some leading showbiz personalities took me on world tours but afterwards forgot to pay me for my performances," he regretted.