KARACHI, Pakistan April 24—There was joy in Karachi this week at the news that shipments of betel leaf, the Pakistani equivalent of chewing gum, would be resumed soon from East Pakistan.

Pakistan International Air lines used to fly 30,000 pounds of the leaf daily from East Pakistan to West Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of people chewed or sucked it mixed with spices and other condiments wondrous to the Western tongue.

But shipments of the leaf, called pan, have stopped during the crisis in East Pakistan. The price of a good chew has soared here, and pan sellers have had little to sell because virtually no pan is grown here in the West.

“Sheik Mujib was a fool,” said a pan wholesaler named Abdul Rahim. “He raised this cry of Bengal independence and ruined himself and ruined our business in the process.”

“But the pan will come now, you will see,” he said, stroking his beard excitedly. “In one week it will begin again.”

Pan sellers here say that last month Sheik Mujibur Rahman, the East Pakistani leader, urged his followers to stop the shipping of the succulent, heart‐shaped leaves to West Pakistan. And Pakistan International Airlines has flown no commercial freight out of East Pakistan in the last few weeks.

The events in East Pakistan have also disrupted shipments of paper—particularly newsprint—and tea to West Pakistan, but this has had no impact yet on the average citizen.

But now the Government says life is returning to normal in the East and an airline freight executive at the Karachi airport said happily, “The pan will start coming in again any day now.”

Pan leaves grow on a creeper, similar to a pepper vine. They are plucked when they are about five inches long and, in peaceful times, rushed to chewers in both the East and West.

In former times, pan leaves were brought by rail or ship to West Pakistan, where the relatively dry climate is un suitable for pan growing. But in recent years they have been coming in by air.

Speed Is Important

Speed is important because with time pan leaves dry out. The leaves are flown in 40‐ pound baskets to Karachi and Lahore and then trucked to wholesale centers. In Karachi, the center is in the working class Manakwada quarter, and there Mr. Rahim sat in his empty office, watching retailers argue over a few baskets of pan in the square outside.

‘If you had a suitcase of pan you could sell it for $150,” he said hopefully.

Demand has fallen, Mr. Rahim said. “Many people in Karachi have given up eating pan in sheer disgust at Sheik Mujib,” he said sadly through an interpreter. Yet so much demand remains that the usual wholesale price of pan, about $3 pound, has soared by 20 per cent and more.