The rhythmic cranking of the old Khaitan fan is my company as I wait for Mr Krishnan Nair. KrishnEttan (Ettan meaning big brother in Malayalam) , as he is fondly called, is an old friend of my father. As I look around, I find myself sitting in a not-so-unfamiliar Kerala middle class sitting room , furnished with dark red jack-fruit wood furniture. In front of me is a glass table with a tree trunk as its supporting legs. The sense of dullness that emanates from the paint of the furniture, proudly testifies to its age and the intricate woodwork found on the hand-rest , to the position the family held in its heyday. Through the window I can see the coconut trees dancing merrily to song sung by the slow breeze, free from any worries, enjoying the lazy Sunday afternoon reminding me that I am not in Bangalore. It was one of those moments that you wanted to capture forever. I enjoy this small concert nature has arranged for me for a while and then my eyes wander back to the contours of the room. The only thing that stands out from this tiny pi cute of sub-urban is the small picture of Veer Sarvakar alongside a bigger frame of a majestic old man, who as he later tells me, is KrishnEttan’s great-great grand father.
As I while away my time reading the latest edition of Jyothisratnam ( a astrological magazine in Malayalam), thinking about how I should spend all the money I am supposed to get according to the magazine, a skinny figure walks in to the room through the curtained door. As the curtain slides away revealing his features, the picture of Kerala gets duly completed . He’s wearing the traditional mundu along with a towel perched on his shoulders.
Before I get a chance to greet him, he starts profusely apologizing for making me wait. I find it hard to convince him that I enjoyed waiting in this perfect picture, as if from any novel by RK Narayanan. He nods at what I tell him but continues apologizing trying to explain the reason. He says that there was a sudden emergency in the locality since one of his neighbor’s sons had been caught smoking and the neighbor had brought the kid to him. He goes on to explain how improvised the kid’s family is and how, his mother has to work as a maid in 5-6 houses just to pay his college fees. His mom had brought him here so that KrishnEttan could put some sense into the guy’s head, Ettan being the only person the kid would listen to.
That’s KrishnEttan in a nutshell for you, greatly respected, greatly learned yet so humble in all his dealings that nothing can make you stop falling in love with him. Any respect you show to him is humbly returned back at you, which makes you feel important and intelligent, even though you know that no class can teach you what KrishnEttan has learned during his 70 odd years as a human being. Of course any question on his age returns a blank as he frankly confesses that he was not born onto a household which had the resources to record such information. But from his fond anecdote of having stayed up all night celebrating Indian freedom and then the subsequent freedom from schooling in the very next week due to the closure of village school gives you a rough idea.
As I sit there, he instructs his grand daughter to bring in some tea and jack fruit chips, proudly stating that it’s the jack-fruit tree that I passed in the veranda that bore the fruit we would be eating. We talk about many things, like the coconut disease, his cow that recently gave birth and the declining fertility of earth, things I would never get to talk about in Bangalore or even back in Cochin. Of course I am not at all good at such small talk, due to lack to knowledge if not a million other reasons, but KrishnEttan does most of the talking and puts you at ease, where you start thinking that you could go on talking about these subjects for hours and hours.
After a while we slowly move on to the purpose of my visit, to understand about the shop he runs at the town center. I (try to) explain it to him that I am trying to understand the impact of the retail boom that’s happening in India and which is going to hit Kerala soon. He seems a bit surprised when I project my concerns about the retail boom, especially its impact to the community shops like his. For the first time during this visit, we seem to be taking in two different languages. But soon KrishnEttan picks up; he starts asking me questions like how it is different from the Varkey’s or the 9-10 supermarkets that has been there for more than 2-3 years now. I explain to him the difference in scales of the ventures and how they can push the prices down and down. But after a while his ever infectious smile, which had been replaced by a thinner form of itself for a while, returns back with all its vigor.
As I finish I get the inkling that he has some story to tell me as I see his eyes widening up with memories of yesteryears. He keeps his glass cup, now half full with tea, down on the glass table and starts talking. “Our family is originally from Trivandrum and we moved here after selling all our ancestral property there in search of greener pastures. When my father set up shop here, his was one of the first shops at our now crowded town. At that time, this was not the “combuter-area” (IT Park) that it is now, and there was hardly anyone living near by. Most of his customers were daily wage laborers working in the near by factories. Wide-eyed youngsters and cynical veterans alike, coming from different parts of Kerala mostly out of necessity than choice. All the concrete building that you see today were plain fields and most of us lived in cottages weaved out of coconut tree leaves.”
He continues “With the savings my father had, we were one of the richest families in the neighborhood and initially set up his shop as a small tea shop for the laborers. My mom and sisters used to help my cooking the meals and later my and my siblings would go to school. We served good food at reasonable prices and soon enough we had all kinds of people coming and eating at our place right from the contractors to the laborers who worked for them. There were people to whom money was not a problem and there were also people who would get their wages only once in 3-4 months. My father always always gave credit to anyone who genuinly required it. Trust was the important commodity that he held in stock and that was what helped him build his business. He used to tell me “Don’t distrust a person until he gives you a reason to do so, and when he gives you a reason still never hesitate to give him a chance to atone”.People loved him and his store was like a second community center.
“As time passed, He saw that the people were struggling to get essentials like soap, powder etc from the city market which was 20 km away. In those times we didn’t have buses every 5 minutes like we have today and there was only a single KSRTC bus plying twice per day. So as a service to the people, he started to stock up on these items and sold them at a small margin.”
After the fire in my school, I also started working at the shop and as more and more customers demanded more and more things, we slowly increased our inventory. There was always a demand for all the things we stocked since the customers themselves were telling us what to stock. And with CEPZ and other factories coming, our customer base grew, as did our inventory. “
“When my father passed away, I took charge and with the “combuter-area” coming, sales only increased. The commodities that these newer people demanded fetched us better margin but that didn’t prevent me from stocking up on commodities our older customers required. And so even today our shop is used by both by the daily wage laborers as well as the combuter people and depending on the person I still offer credit if they need it. But coming to think of it, from the days of my father, its actually much easier for me to give credit since there are other assured revenue sources. Some of my customers have been shopping at my shop for more than 30 years and even the people started coming yesterday are always made to feel at home and whatever special requirement they have I try to personally see to it that they get it”
See Sabari, can the new supermarket offer this kind of service? Can they tell a boy that they knew his father and grand father? Can they know each and every customer by their name and be close enough to call them by their first name? Will they give credit to a person with no fixed income?
I stare at him with no words coming not just because the story has made me cry. As he narrated it, I could see the various images that flashed through his eyes, a part of me living through them, giving me a kind of vicarious pleasure/pain. I tell him he’s right and that supermarkets, however advanced and better, still cannot offer what his store offers. A part of me totally believes it as I say it, while the other part, knowing how the motive to make money drives even the noblest of acts in the corporate, trusts the ingenuous mind of the supermarket barons to come up with something to beat all this. But that’s for another day perhaps and a sense of contentment fills me, as a lot of my worries about the sustainability of his and similar business are dispelled .
He accompanies me as we step out, insisting on as least walking me back till the bus stop. As we make our way towards the bus stop thru a “kacha” path covered on one side by walls weaved from dry coconut leaves and open land with coconut and palm trees on the other, the heavens open up. As the tiny drops of water fall on the leaves, they remind me about evolution and the need to re-invent oneself. It’s as if the nature is talking to me in her language reassuring me that its not the end of the day for the hundreds of KrishnEttans of India
