Prologue

The afternoons were always warm just before winter, the gentle sun, and its sting taken away by the cold breeze from the hills around the city. A few stray clouds lingered in the azure sky, occasionally hiding the spent pre winter sun. Dusty roads and the dust laden leaves of the gulmohur trees along the road had a familiar brown haze and you could count the number of potholes every few meters on the tarred surface.

Turning at the first lane to the right, Siva slowed down the two-wheeler he rode, the construction of a new apartment block had spilled onto the road. What ever was left of the road was a curious mixture of sand and gravel and bits of cement all mixed together to form one uneven surface. “There used to be an open ground here” he thought and hurriedly swept the mental image to avoid colliding into a bus. The next hundred meters or so was more or less even. The balmy weather brought a song to his lips and he whistled to a tune lost some miles within his head. Siva turned again into a small lane and parked.

There in that lane stood his curious shop, a mixture of this and that, of small bananas and coconuts from Kerala, of a telephone booth and a Xerox machine and everything that you can think of. He opened the Godrej locks and tugged at the rusting shutters. Straining he managed to lift it up noisily, scaring away a stray cat. Musty and half rotten smells of last weeks bananas wafted out to meet his nostrils and he made a mental note to throw the stale fungus laden fruits away later that afternoon.

Siesta of a few hours had done well to his mood and he was less sullen than he normally was. Six feet tall and with sparse hair on his head, built not to look well built but not too frail either and a face that was wheatishly fair, full lips and as his wife often told him, handsome. He caught himself in the reflection on the glass panels of the shelves, where banana and tapioca chips lay. Preening, he looked at the baskets of raw kappa and curry onions and decided to move them outside into the sun. Dragging them he thought for the first time that afternoon, for the thousandth time that day, “What am I doing here?”

He sat on a red plastic chair and started flipping the pages of a week old magazine. Occasionally looking up to answer the irritating query of people who trooped in to make phone calls. Collecting two rupee coins. He occasionally drifted off to small naps, only to get up with a start when another coin was tapped on the grey counter. Once it showed 6 o’clock on the small time piece on the fridge, he would know that the local south Indians would start coming in to buy stuff from his shop. When he had started a few months ago, there had been no competition, now there were two more similar shops in the locality and his customer base had eroded considerably. He suddenly remembered the rotten bananas at the back of his shop, he lifted the basket and walked around the building where a thrash can lay open, exposing its contents like a disemboweled stomach. The bananas, quite unlike the ones that were local to the state, large yellowish golden, south Indian variety, had turned black and a few of them had ripened to a point where the flesh oozed out attracting a swarm of tropical flies. Siva used to boast to the north Indians who frequented his shop “You eat one and feel full”. As he returned the basket to its place, he saw a few urchins run off with a few intact ones, clutching them as if they were a king’s ransom.

He weighed out bananas by the kilo and put them into large plastic bags for the people, answering occasionally questions about common acquaintances and a few bits of gossip. It just became a little difficult when people asked him questions in Malayalam, he could never answer fluently and had to grasp for words, mostly he shot off in English, which his wife often commented upon and on a few occasions scolded him saying that he was putting people in discomfort. He tried to explain that after years of studying in English and writing and reading so much in that language, he had started dreaming in English. English had become his mother tongue.
The phone rang loudly, he was a little tardy in answering, it was a rarity that people actually could get through to the phone, and people paying two rupees to get through their daily business normally occupied it. As he spoke a smile broke out on his face. He spoke briefly and then fished out a small diary from his back pocket. Turning pages, even as a girl tapped impatiently, he circled a date – 15 September 2002.