She was standing there, a bit numb and yet her eyes were moving. She had come in, but she did not know what to do after. I had watched her tentatively make her way into the store. She had been walking very purposefully on the road, when she happened to notice this shop. She slowed, and then slowly turned towards the store and stopped. I could see her clutching some rupee notes in her hands. I realized that she was out for ‘ shopping ‘. Well the shopping is ‘ shopping ‘ because she was not a financially 'well-off' woman from any nearby residential colony. Rather she was a labourer, maybe a migrant who was in some very ordinary attire. Just a faded sari, thrown over her slim but strong body, a dash of sindur in her hair, a couple of bangles in her left arm and oh yes, she was bare footed.
This lady had just stepped into a supermarket. Now what is interesting here is that – Labourers do not shop in supermarkets !!!
Labourers generally go to these 'Mom & Pop Shops' across the street. They generally buy low-cost stuff and do not go for brands. Now this is obvious to anybody. There are also shopkeepers who thrive on catering to such migrant-class, who do not remain in that vicinity for a long period of time. The way in which these customers are handled is truly a sight to watch. In Gujarat where I grew up, I had seen such migrant labourers come to the flour mill to get their grains turned to flour. Generally they used to get daily wages and then with that daily earning, they would go and buy some grains ( wheat, bajra, jowar or something else) Then they would come to the flour mill and give it to be grinded into flour. While this took some time, they used to sit nearby somewhere and chit-chat or pick out the stones from the rice or the next day’s grains. The whole psyche of the shopkeepers who used to cater to these customers and also to middle class blokes like us, was a thrill to watch . They were quite rough & tought with those labourers, but were quite nice to people like us. This always amused me back in my childhood when I was treated like a King when i went to get our household flour and yet, a 45 year old labourer who was there to buy the same flour, was treated with indifference just because of the fact that his legs were exposed due to his knee length dhoti and he was emanating body odour.
Invariably all these poor people showed tremendous amounts of patience and reticence while all this was dished out to them. And its been universal. Some people had that inferiority complex and hence were quiet, while some people had a lot of realism running through their veins , that kept them from loosing their calm even under a barrage of abuses from all and sundry.
Well, to get back to our lady now - this was the first time I had seen some 'poor' step into a supermarket and this amazed me. Our lady took some tentative steps into the store and was bathed in the neon and bright lighting of the store. The brilliance of the woman’s countenance just brought a smile of my face. Even in this tentativeness, her face was showing tremendous calm and steel. Only her eyes betrayed her inner hesitance. She must have been thinking if she was right in coming to this fancy shop full of glittering shelves and racks, with a huge assortement of goods that she had never seen being sold together at the same time.
Now she waited for someone to approach her, so that she could buy whatever she had come there to buy. Usually in normal corner shops, the shopkeeper and their assistants fetch whatever is the goods asked for and then take the money. But supermarkets are self-help store , where one is supposed to pick our provisions and items in some basket and then bill it at the counter ( we all know that, but she didn’t !!!)
She stood there waiting… .waiting… waiting… neither did she go away discouraged, nor did she make her way past the square tile that she was standing on !!!
What did she want? Why is she waiting for more than ten minutes in a strange shop ? Why does not someone see her and help her out? Thoughts were just racing in my mind. And I stood there watching with my vegetables in one hand and the packet of rice in the other… but I stood there, enthralled like a kid watching another child eating an ice-cream !!
And then, there came a sales guy, asked her what she wanted. She replied, thrusting the note towards him. He just shrugged, went over to the freezer, took a packet of curd and gave it to her. She gave the money to him. He didn’t know what to do since he was not supposed to bill it. He asked her to stand in the queue and pay. I had a look and saw all well dressed, urban men and women standing there. Was our lady going to have the guts to stand there in the midst of these neo-rich, glossily dressed, people who were carrying kilos and kilos of junk food, cosmetics, utensils and God knows what and all !!!
I could see her face twitching, her eyebrows curling and her cheeks changing colour. That is when her eyes turned towards me… oh God … I froze…!! So she knew all the while that I was watching her !! oh god ! I fervently prayed that she does not misunderstand my reasons for observing her. But she had a puzzled look and her eyes seemed like talking to me. I could picturize a scene where in a hut, her kids are waiting near the cooking place while her husband was just outside smoking, waiting for his wife to arrive, so that they could have their meal. If she waited there in the queue, she would be late, and would have to face a lot of stares…. I dunno what I did next was the right thing to do or not… I just asked the sales guy to take her money. I stepped forward and said, I will pay that in the billing counter. I will explain to them”.
Then the sales guy surprisingly agreed and took the money. The lady left in a hurry, not even stopping to look at anything around and made her way towards her house.
The sales guy did not ask me to stand in the line, he said he will handle it.
We both took a moment out to reflect on what had just happened…. I smiled at him, he shrugged his shoulders and then I hauled my veggies and cereals and made my way out of the store.
Strange !! I walked back wondering if the lady will ever come back to the supermarket? If she did, then will she stand in the queue the next time? And the biggest question…. Was I wrong in assuming that she would have gone through the embarrassment of standing in the queue? Did I read her eyes wrongly? Are we assuming things that are not completely true? Were these not my pre-conceived notions about poverty and self confidence?
Was I wrong ?
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