by Vani Viswanathan
[box]Young Jillu was once taken to the ration shop by her mother to buy sugar. This got her thinking and questioning her mother on a number of things. Vani Viswanathan tells the story.[/box]
I was around nine or ten then. It was a scorching summer afternoon, and I was moving from room to room in the house, bored, following my mother around as she shuffled between chores. My cotton chemise – it was all I was wearing, even a frock seemed like a burden – fluttered in the hot wind the fan churned out. Eventually, she asked if I would accompany her to some shop. It was her day off – a rarity, she was the headmistress of a school, and I was desperate to spend any time I could with her.
So I put on a thin yellow cotton frock, a pair of flowery canvas pumps (or cut shoes, as they were know then!) and walked hand-in-hand with mother. We walked through the shaded street and took a right turn when we reached the end. The road perpendicular to our street, at the back, was lined with huts. The one perpendicular on the front side was one of the city’s busiest roads. I was surprised we’d come to the ‘other’ side.
“Where are we going, Amma?”
“To buy some sugar.”
This was strange. We usually bought everything for the kitchen from the fancy supermarket on this busy road. I loved it when my father took me along to that supermarket – it was something to see rows of chocolates, chips and biscuits of all kinds lined up. Supermarkets were still pretty new then, most people were still buying from the annaachi kadai (local mom-and-pop stores), so I was proud of the fact that my family shopped at a supermarket.
“We’re not going to KG Supermarket?”
“No, we’re going to the ration shop.”
Ah. I knew about this, they showed them in movies: people I thought were villagers queuing and fighting with each other and the man selling the stuff.
“But isn’t it only for people who live in villages?”
“No, they have them here too.”
We had reached the ration shop. There was a queue of people. Bright coloured sarees, pale yellow veshtis, patchy shirts. Sack bags, yellow cloth bags with bright red letters in Tamil. Jerry cans. Mother had brought a bag too. We joined the queue, and I stood on tiptoe and craned my neck to see how long the queue was – it was long.
Five minutes later, I was wiping sweat off my forehead with the back of my palm and getting restless. My mother pulled the pallu of her cotton saree and wiped her sweating neck and sighed loudly. I looked around for something to do, and found a few stones that I tried juggling – unsuccessfully, for I ended dropping them on the feet of an old lady standing before us in the queue.
“Jillu! Stop doing that right now!” my mother chided.
The old lady only smiled, though. She had two shiny nose studs on both sides of her nose, and her hair was silver and curly. A few paces ahead I saw a board with things written in Tamil. I walked up to it and started reading.
“Arisi. Roo three”Rice, rupees three.
“Thu dot Paruppu. Roo two”
“Amma!” I yelled out from where I was. “What is thu dot paruppu?”
“Thuvaram paruppu…” she called back.
“Oo dot Paruppu?”
”Ulutham paruppu… now, Jillu, will you please stop shouting and get back here?”
I wandered up to the front of the counter and saw sacks of food grains. Rice, big yellow dal, a smaller kind of dal. Some white grainy powder. Some other sacks, one of which I recognised had sugar. A man went in and brought liquid in a blackened kettle-like vessel that he poured into a jerry can. The liquid smelled nice, like petrol. I drew a deep breath and took the smell in. Like petrol, I somehow knew smelling this was forbidden too.
A good few minutes later, mother came to the front of the line, and I stood beside her. She asked for three kilos of sugar. I saw her run her hand on the rice, pick up a few grains and drop them back into the sack. I did the same. White powder stayed on my hands. I felt bolder and did the same with one of the yellow grains. It was dusty too, and I found a few specks of black. A few tiny bugs were crawling in the white powder in another sack. That can’t be good, my mind reasoned. Why were we buying sugar from this place?
I asked mother.
“It’s not for us, I’m buying it for Meena,” she said. Our maid.
“You mean she has to eat this stuff? With the dust and the bugs?”
“They are poor, they can’t afford to buy what we buy at supermarkets…”
“What if they fall sick eating this?”
“They won’t, they have better resistance…”
“You mean even Chitra has better resistance than me?” Chitra was the maid’s five-year-old to whom my clothes and toys went after I had gotten bored with them.
Mother didn’t say anything.
I was unhappy. I understood poverty – I saw beggars, children in tattered clothes and people walking barefoot in the scorching sun. And I knew hunger too, but there was something deeply disturbing if one had to eat bad food just because they couldn’t afford to buy cleaner food. It was another thing if they couldn’t cook clean food in a good way, but starting out with bad raw materials was not nice.
“Ok, we can afford to buy the clean food from the supermarket. Why don’t you buy that for Meena?”
“We already pay her a salary! Do you even know how much grains cost in the market?? At least this way Meena is getting some sugar. She can’t even afford it otherwise, with all the other expenses she has to handle!”
I stopped asking questions. My mother claimed she was doing a good thing by getting the maid sugar from this dirty shop. That meant things were wrong in ways I couldn’t fathom. After that day I noticed that every once in a while Meena did get her sugar from the ration shop with money my mother gave her. Soon, we moved to another city, and I forgot all about the grains in the ration shop. Until over a decade later, one evening after work, I happened to stroll into a ration shop while waiting to meet a friend.
Things looked the same, although the food didn’t look as dusty or dirty. There were still as many or more people queuing up to buy food grains at heavily subsidised prices. I didn’t know whether to be happy that there was at least an option for them to buy these grains given their poor incomes, or sad that things were still so bad that they couldn’t afford to buy it at seemingly better places, or feel disturbed that there was still much that one could take for granted because one had more money than others. That money was so intricately linked with something like food still continued to disturb me. What did I do about it? Nothing much, except asking my old cook to prepare a little extra, for her to take home everyday.
Pic : http://www.flickr.com/photos/antwelm/
Vani Viswanathan is often lost in her world of books and A R Rahman, churning out lines in her head or humming a song. Her world is one of frivolity, optimism, quietude and general chilled-ness, where there is always place for outbursts of laughter, bouts of silence, chocolate, ice cream and lots of books and endless iTunes playlists from all over the world. Vani was a Public Relations consultant in Singapore and decided to come back to homeland after seven years away to pursue a Masters in Development Studies. Vani blogs at http://chennaigalwrites.blogspot.com
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