The friendly neighbourhood provision man

Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels

Saw Wall-E.
Felt sad.
Earthlings destroying their planet with skyscraper high tons of garbage…cola cans, juice bottles, cereal boxes…a silent outcome of our excessive obsession with convenience living.

Suddenly thought of Mani….that was his name…I think. Most of you might know a Mani. The one I knew had a small provision store around the corner from my grandmother’s house. The store had a thatched roof, its dry gray coconut leaves straggling down from the edges touching the heads of shoppers. One had to duck under them to see a busy but smiling Mani amidst heaps of rice, pulses of many hues, salt and sugar bursting out of large brown jute bags and his cheerful welcome enquiring about everyone at home. Whatever we needed would be whipped out with a skillfulness that verged on the magical. A sharp twist and turn of the previous day’s newspaper and presto! there would be a large paper cone in his blue veined hand, into which he would scoop with equal dexterity a heap of small red round onions, the kind my grandmother asserted, was excellent for aviyal (for the uninitiated in Kerala cuisine, aviyal is a mild preparation of mixed vegetables blended with yoghurt and grated coconut, topped with a generous dollop of coconut oil). The spectacle that followed -- the wrapping of the paper cone, now bulging with plump red onions -- was nothing short of spectacular. He would flip down the edges of the cone smartly, whip a piece of grey coir string, bind it swiftly around the cone and tie a knot with a flourish I am sure only provision store Manis can create.

Mani’s store is still around. But hardly anybody throngs his storefront.

Folks shop at air conditioned grocery stores, stuffed with lines of ravishing bags and boxes of everything one could think of…oranges from South Africa, plums from California, pumpkins from Japan, jelly from Malaysia…dumped irreverently into plastic bags by too-busy-to-chat strangers at the cash counter.Sigh…

Folks might call this wishful romanticizing of mom and pop stores of olden days, but I couldn’t help but muse that Mani’s provision store with his heap of yesterdays’ newspapers and coir strings was a far more sustainable model, a shopping experience tinged with merry camaraderie, courtesy the friendly neighborhood provision man.