I Grew Up in a Shop
My childhood smelled of kerosene, loose tea, and my father's arithmetic.
I did my homework on a throne of rice sacks.
Our shop had no name for thirty years. The painted board above the shutter said only STORES, because the painter charged by the letter and my father saw no reason to pay for words when everyone in the lane already knew whose shop it was. It stood between a tailor and a cycle repair shed, eight feet wide, deep as a train compartment, and it held, by my count at age nine, everything a human life required: rice, dal, soap, matchsticks, jaggery, hairpins, kerosene, and loose tea in a tin so old the elephant on its label had faded to a ghost.
The smell is what survives. Kerosene at the floor, tea at shoulder height, and above them both the sweet dust of jaggery, and on Thursdays fresh newsprint when the magazines came. I have walked into rooms on three continents and been nine years old again before I could put my bag down.
And under everything, constant as a ceiling fan, my father's arithmetic.
He never owned a calculator. He held the whole shop in his head, prices, stock, and the running totals of forty customers at once, and he added faster than anyone could pack. A woman would pile the counter with a month of groceries and he would be done before the last packet landed, the number arriving quietly, like a train that is always on time. Two hundred and thirty-one, he would say, and take one rupee off without being asked, because ending on a round number was, to him, a form of politeness.
My jobs were folding newspaper into cones for sugar, minding the counter while he ate lunch standing in the doorway, and weighing things on the brass scale whose weights I knew blind: the kilo like a paperweight king, the fifty gram piece small as a button. The radio played cricket commentary all afternoon. When India batted well, my father gave toffees to children on credit and then forgot the credit.
There was a ledger for the real credit, a long red khata with a cloth spine, and half the lane lived inside it. In our shop, the poor did not beg. They nodded at the ledger, and my father nodded back, and the transaction was complete with more dignity than any bank has managed since.
The shame years
Then I turned fourteen, and the shop shrank.
It happens the way evening happens, gradually... and then all at once.
On the school admission form, in the box for father's occupation, I wrote businessman, and my ears burned, and I pressed harder with the pen as if pressure could make it truer.
Businessman. My father, who wore the same two shirts alternately for a decade and smelled permanently of kerosene and tea.
The worst afternoon, a boy from my class came in to buy batteries while I was at the counter. I saw his uniform through the door and dropped behind the rice sacks like a soldier.
My father, not understanding, called out my name to come say hello. The boy was perfectly nice. He said, cool, your shop, and bought his batteries and left, and no cruelty happened anywhere except inside me, which is the kind that keeps.
I left for college in the city and did not look back. The shop was the thing I was escaping, its smallness, its smell on my clothes. When a supermarket opened across the road, all glass and air conditioning and trolleys, I told my father to modernize, computerize, at least put up a proper name board. He listened the way he listened to the radio between overs. Then he tapped the red ledger and said, “Their computer doesn't know whose husband lost a job this month. Mine does.”
I thought it was stubbornness. I had an economics degree by then, so naturally I understood nothing.
The last ledger
He died on a Monday morning, at home, his heart, with his chappals already on for the walk to the shop. He was seventy-one and had missed, in forty-six years, fewer working days than I missed in my first year of employment.
Clearing out a shop is like taking apart a body.
My mother could not do it, so I flew back and lowered the shutter halfway and worked in that half dark for a week, counting stock for the wholesaler, stacking four decades into cartons. On the last day I took down the khata to settle the accounts, expecting a long sad column of what the lane owed my dead father.
I found the debts.
But every few pages, threaded between them, I found entries no accountant would recognize.
Shanti, 240, husband in hospital, closed. Written across the amount, in his small careful hand, the single word: closed. Not paid... Closed. There were dozens. And between the closures, other lines, stranger ones. Munna passed 8th standard, one toffee, no charge. Cycle shop boy's wedding, one tin ghee, no charge. And on a page by itself, dated the June I was nine: Beta stood full day at counter during fever. Paid one Coca-Cola. Balance, everything.
He had kept accounts of tenderness. Double entry. Nothing owing.
My father could not read a novel in English, but he could read people to two decimal places.
At the funeral they came in a line that did not end, and half of them tried to press old money into my hands, debts from the ledger, some of them years closed. I checked each name against his handwriting and gave the money back. It was the only time in my life I have been proud of an inheritance. It is also the only time an inheritance has consisted of refusing money in a kerosene-smelling doorway while grown men cried about dal bought on credit in 1994.
The shop is a mobile phone showroom now. The rice sacks are gone, my throne dissolved, and the supermarket across the road has itself been eaten by an app. Nothing I was ashamed of exists anymore, which turns out to be its own strange punishment.
For a long time I could not write about any of it. When I finally tried, the poems came out as inventory, kerosene, jaggery, the elephant tin, and I learned that this is simply how grief speaks when it grew up in a shop: it counts. I posted one of those inventory poems on a community wall for poets, half expecting silence... and a stranger replied that her mother had run a tea stall and that she still measures love in glasses.
We have never met... We balance each other's books.
These days I buy loose tea, deliberately, from the one old shop left in my neighborhood, where the owner still folds paper cones and the scale is still brass. I stand there longer than any customer needs to. Once, at a roadside stall, a man filled a stove with kerosene two feet from me, and I had to turn away and look at traffic until my eyes settled. That is the trouble with memory. It is stocked like the shop was: everything a life requires, on shelves you cannot see until the smell finds you.
The red ledger lives on my bookshelf now, between the novels my father never read.
It is the best book I own. Every line balances.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.