Shafik called to me as I was walking home from the Internet café one night earlier this week. “Tea? You want tea?” he yelled to me.
Shafik is the younger of two brothers that run a small grocery store on our street. Their business is nothing more than a low wood hut with a roof of corrugated tin. Crates of vegetables sit out front—tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, okra, beets, and cabbage. Pungent bouquets of bananas hang perpetually from the roof’s rusting eaves. Inside, in a cloistered square of activity, stand shelves of dry goods and overflowing sacks of grain—rice, millet, and lentils. A decaying aroma of old produce perfumes the place.
Shafik’s older brother Anwar runs the store. He’s the one that arrives at dawn to open up, and he’s the one that coordinates the daily deliveries of foodstuffs, dropped of by rushing lorry drivers. Both Shafik and Anwar are in their twenties, but Anwar has the air of someone much older. He is courteous and helpful but always business-minded. Every time I have been in the store, he is busy doing some task like restocking shelves or helping a customer weigh their items on a small scale.
Shafik, on the other hand, is more gregarious, teasing regular customers and shouting out to neighborhood kids as they pass by on their bicycles. He has engaged me in conversation before, asking the typical questions of where I am from and what I am doing in Tirur. At other times, he has suggested certain items to me. Once, with a hankering for something sweet, I had taken out a small cup of ice cream from the store’s lone freezer. Shafik saw me and hurried across the store to where I was standing, shaking his head.
“No, no, no,” he said. He grabbed the ice cream cup from me and put it back in the freezer and withdrew two neon-colored tubes of frozen ice. “These: much better. Only 2 rupees.” The frozen ice was a sugary concoction of sweetened milk and fruit flavoring. One tube was orange and the other strawberry. I ripped off the tips with my teeth, just as Shafik showed me, and enjoyed the sticky, quickly melting treat inside. I now get one of those tubes of frozen ice at least a few times every week.
On this day, though, Shafik was not in the grocery store. He was next door, in another narrow stall, standing languidly with three other young men. I crossed the street when he beckoned. Away from the store—apart from any of his duties—Shafik seemed even more relaxed. He bobbed around, balancing on the balls of his feet, shifting his momentum from one leg to the other. He joked with his friends, slapped them on their chests when he made a joke, and called out to other passers-by. He seemed to be in his element.
“Tea? You need tea. Maumuti!” he cried. An old man across the street, with a crumpled rag spun across his head in a makeshift turban, looked up. “Chai-ah!” Shafik yelled. Maumuti nodded and smiled, two black teeth sticking out from his upper gum.
“Maumuti…our tea guy,” Shafik said, smiling. Shafik’s friends smiled and nodded. We were all standing in a tiny, open-air store that had the appearance of a long-neglected garage. Shelves stacked to the ceiling were piled with dusty, mildewed electronis—blenders, microwaves, old stereos from the tape deck era, internal car parts. It looked like a scene from one of the Terminator movies. Grime and grit covered everything. A distinctive smell of oil and rust filled my nostrils.
Shafik saw me looking around. “This is Anshawd’s shop,” he said, patting the back of one of the young men standing in our little group. Anshawd wore trousers and a plaid shirt, wrinkled and grime-covered. His hands were stained black. He nodded and smiled, a prominent gap between his front two teeth. He turned away and began fiddling with a circular contraption on a rickety wooden table.
“It’s a water pump,” Shafik said, gesturing to the item. Several rubber hoses projected from it and spiraled towards the ground. “Very important he fixes it,” Shafik said with a chuckle.
Maumuti had crossed the street and was now distributing small glasses of milk tea to the group. I reached in my pocket to pay and Shafik intervened: “No, no, no. My treat,” he patted Maumuti’s arm. “You want something to eat?” Shafik said, turning back to me. “Banana? Puri?”
“What’s puri?” I asked. This was some sort of signal to Shafik, a determinant in his mind.
“Ahhh,” he said, eyeing Maumuti. “Get him puri,” he said, and Maumuti nodded, shuffling back across the street.
“You like Kerala?” one of Shafik’s friends asked, as we sipped tea, a cool evening breeze fanning our faces.
“Of course. Everyone: friendly. Weather: nice,” I said. This had become my stock-and-trade when talking to the citizens of Tirur. Single words spaced together by ellipses in fragmented sentences. My point was usually taken, though.
Shafik’s friends nodded. The one who had asked the question was named Rafi, and he had long, gelled hair and stylish jeans. The other friend was named Munir. He seemed a bit more quiet, but the others teased him constantly.
After one such bout of joking, Shafik said: “We call him ‘Elephant’. You know…elephant?” I nodded, unsure how to ask him the origin of the nickname. Maybe I did not want to know. It’s at times like these, though, that I wish I could speak Malayalam.
Maumuti came back and handed me a ball of fried dough wrapped in newspaper. It was slightly bigger than an egg and had the weight and density of an especially heavy doughnut hole.
“Puri!” Shafik said. “Rice flour, banana, sugar. Fried,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
I bit into it. The soft, warm dough inside breathed hot steam onto my nose. Despite it being fried, the puri did not drip grease. It stayed compact and fluffy as I continued to bit into it. A tinge of cardomom mixed with the dominant banana and sugar flavors.
“Excellent!” I said.
“Maumuti…” Shafik said, gesturing with his chin back at the old man who had again crossed the street, “he has had a tea stall here for 30 years.” Shafik’s voice took on a tone of reverence. His friends Rafi and Munir nodded in assent. “Thirty…years,” Shafik repeated.
I wondered now if Shafik—an operator of a small business himself—was not promoting another’s local operation. Maumtui’s tea stall was not even that. It was a bent wooden cart, with chipping red paint, propped up against the wall of a low-slung concrete building. The cart was outfitted with a glass display window where he kept treats like fried bananas and puri. A giant iron pot was kept perpetually boiling on a set of small gas grills at the cart’s center.
Maumuti must have felt pressed for business ever since a new bakery opened up at the end of the block. Jenna and I had been several times to the new store, called Zain, to eat shwerma (meat slow-roasted on a stationary spit) and sample their large stock of pre-prepared treats. Zain was not a corporate enterprise either, but its operation had a Walmart scale compared to Maumuti’s humble cart.
Now, here was Shafik, blithely playing host to me and treating me with Maumuti’s wares.
“How long has your store been here?” I asked.
“More than twenty years. My father started it. Now, he is too sick to run it. So, Anwar and I have taken over,” he said. The street now began to take on a new dimension for me. Maumuti’s tea cart. Anwar and Shafik’s grocery stand. Anshawd’s electronics store. All these guys were in league together. Not just a league of businesses, building off each other’s mutual customer base, but in a league of friendship that led to lazy night’s like this, sipping tea as the night cooled their overworked bodies.
Suddenly, the lights on the block went out—a regular occurrence. The street was plunged into a haunting blankness.
“Ahhh! This is my India!” Rafi barked and the others laughed. I could not see their faces, and the dark outlines of pedestrians passed in ghostly perambulations further up the street.
Anshawd had stopped his tinkering, and the clinks and bangs of Maumuti’s tea stall had momentarily solemnized. A hush went over the street, the honks of distant cars bleated far away.
Then, as soon as they had gone off, the lights went back on and the street quickly stirred back to life. I downed my tea and got up. “I’ll see you around,” I said.
“Of course. We will be here,” Shafik said.
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