The Sari Shop Read online

  The Sari Shop

  The Sari Shop

  RUPA BAJWA

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2004

  1

  Copyright © Rupa Bajwa, 2004

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90141–1

  In loving memory of two very special men:

  Sardaar Piara Singh Goraya

  and

  Harvinder Jit Singh Goraya

  PART ONE

  1

  Ramchand had overslept, waking up only when the loud noises of a brawl in the street below had jolted him out of sleep. He rubbed his eyes, got out of bed and walked to the window. He peered through the rusted iron bars at the two people who were fighting. One was a milkman, who had been cycling back after delivering milk. He had large, zinc-coated iron cans (that looked like aluminium) strung on either side of his bicycle, and one of these now-empty milk cans had bumped into a pedestrian on the narrow street. A quarrel had flared up, and the two were shouting loudly, red-faced and angry.

  Ramchand sleepily brushed his teeth by the window, leaning against the wall. He watched the fight to its end, when the previously interested spectators began to get bored and calmed the two men down. It was just a ritual; people in street fights thought they lost face if they stopped before spectators intervened. The two finally went on their way. After that, Ramchand just forgot to watch the clock. He continued to stare vacantly out of the window for a long time, his mind still fuzzy with sleep. The morning was cold. His limbs and mind both felt frozen. He moved slowly.

  By the time Ramchand looked at the little red clock on the table and realized that he was late, it was too late. He bathed and dressed in a hurry, dropping things all over the place, scalding himself when he warmed water for his bath on the kerosene stove, fumbling with the buttons of his shirt and spilling hair oil on the already dirty floor. Finally, he ended up misplacing the heavy iron lock, along with the key stuck in it. He found both right under his nose on the table after he had spent fifteen minutes searching for them everywhere. He rushed out of his room and made his way towards the shop then, half-running and half-walking through the narrow streets of the crowded bazaar, hurrying past pedestrians, dodging rickshaws and nearly running into vegetable carts. He could feel his toes perspiring inside his grey woollen socks.

  Even at ten in the morning, the bazaar was throbbing with activity. The halwai was already installed in front of the Mishthaan Sweet Shop, pressing jalebi batter into squiggly shapes that floated and simmered in the oil in a big iron cauldron. All the shops had opened for the day and, Ramchand noted guiltily, all the shop assistants were already in place, trying to sell things with fixed, attentive smiles on their shiny, bathed faces.

  The older part of Amritsar, the original walled city, was full of bazaars – small ones that only the locals knew about, tiny bazaars that sold bangles and cloth very cheap but could be reached only on foot through tiny alleys; and the big, main bazaars where the streets were wider and the roads slightly cleaner. The bazaars of Amritsar were busy places where every day, throughout the year, transactions were made, prices were bargained over, shops were opened in the mornings and shut in the evenings. It was as if it had been so since the beginning of the world and would continue to be so till the end.

  There were no empty spaces. Just a jumble of old red-brick houses, aged grey concrete buildings, shops, signboards, numerous tiny temples at street corners and crowded streets thronged with people, cows, stray dogs, and fruit and vegetable carts. There were no gates, doorsteps led straight from the streets into houses. Crumbling buildings ran into each other like cardboard boxes stuck together with glue. Their terraces overlapped, there were no boundary walls – you couldn’t tell where one finished and the next began. Occasionally there would be a gap in the mass of buildings, where a very narrow alley would nudge aside the unyielding walls and squeeze itself painfully through the solid structure, joining another similar narrow lane at some other end. It could take years to become familiar with the maze-like network of lanes and alleys and short cuts in the old city.

  Money, congestion and noise danced an eternal, crazy dance here together, leaving no moving space for other, gentler things. The actual walls that had once surrounded the city had fallen away long ago, but the ghosts of the wall still separated the old city from the newer one that flourished outside.

  The shop where Ramchand worked was one of the oldest in the city, tucked neatly between Talwaar Furnishings and Draperies and Chanduram’s Fabrics. It was in one of the main bazaars, buried away in the heart of the city, yet with parking space for customers who came in cars. In this bazaar the shops were larger, older, with good reputations and old, regular customers, and the shop owners were all considered respectable people from old business families.

  A large fading green signboard over the entrance of the shop said Sevak Sari House in flourishing red letters in old-fashioned calligraphy, both in English and Punjabi. The signboard was slightly misleading. The shop did not just sell saris. The ground floor stocked fabric for men’s clothes as well. There were dreary browns, blues and blacks here. But very few people visited Sevak Sari House to buy Men’s Suitings and Shirtings. There were other, larger shops that had a wider range devoted entirely to men – the Raymond showroom two lanes away, for instance. So the ground floor of the shop wore a dusty, jaded look. It was the first floor of the shop that sold saris.

  Packed from shelf to shelf with crisp Bangladeshi cottons, dazzling Kanjeevarams, Benaras silks, chiffons, crêpes and satins, it was the first floor that pulsated with an intoxicating, rich life of colour and silk and brought in the customers and profits. And it was because of the huge success of the first floor that Sevak Sari House had been known for decades as the best sari shop in Amritsar. The suiting and shirting cut-pieces in the ground floor cowered under the sparkling, confident dazzle above.

  There was also a second floor that customers never saw. It contained a big storeroom and a small toilet that was used by Mahajan and the shop assistants.

  Ramchand was one of the six shop assistants who worked in the sari section.

  *

  Ramchand stood uncertainly at the entrance of the shop, his palms cold with sweat despite the chilly December morning, thinking of Mahajan’s rage that would soon descend on him. Ramc
hand peered in. Mahajan was talking to somebody over the phone. Making the best of it, Ramchand sprinted across the ground floor under Mahajan’s disapproving eyes.

  There was a Ganesha idol installed near the foot of the staircase that led up to the first floor. Ramchand would usually stop before this idol for a moment every morning, with folded hands and closed eyes, and then after an elaborate bow, would make his way upstairs. But today he just hurried up the shaky wooden steps as fast as he could. His heart thudded inside his chest. Any moment now Mahajan would stop him and give him a dressing down. But he climbed up to the first floor safely. In the small space on top of the staircase, and in the front of the big glass door that led into the sari section, he tried to get his breath back. Then he struggled with his shoes, first hopping on one foot and then on the other, trying to get them off. His hopping made thumping noises on the wooden staircase.

  And then Mahajan finally bellowed from below. ‘Trying to break the place? Coming late? You think I don’t notice? Am I blind? Stupid? Hunh? You think a shop can be run like this? You will come and go as you please? Are you a king or something? Raja Ramchand? Should we send an entourage and a bagghi to pick you up every day?’

  Ramchand stopped immediately and waited. Silence. Then he cautiously took off his shoes, wishing his feet wouldn’t smell so. He had taken a bath and worn fresh socks, and yet… He knew that the smell would become even stronger by the end of the day. Ramchand arranged his shoes neatly on the wooden shoe rack on the side of the wall, in the row assigned to the shop assistants. The other rows were for the delicate sandals, the kolhapuri chappals, the platform and stiletto heels of the female customers. Ramchand patted his hair and straightened his kurta to make up for the feet, and walked in.

  He went to his allotted place and sat down cross-legged. The shop was an old-fashioned one and there were no counters. The entire floor space was spread out with thick mattresses covered with white sheets, and on these mattresses sat the shop assistants every day, facing the customers, and endlessly rolling and unrolling yards upon yards of important coloured fabric.

  ‘Namaste Ramchand Bhaiya. Late again?’ grinned Hari, sitting some distance away. Hari was the youngest among all the shop assistants. He was a careless, cheerful, young man with a cheeky face, who often got shouted at by Mahajan.

  However, unlike the effect they had on Ramchand, these unpleasant encounters always left Hari completely unfazed. In fact, on slightly dull days, they even cheered him up. ‘In from one ear, and out from the other,’ he would always say, beaming broadly, after Mahajan had spent considerable time and energy telling him what he thought of him. Because of Hari’s junior status, his inexperience and his indifference to the intricacies of fabric, he had been put in charge of Paraag Daily Wear Saris and Paraag Fancy Saris for Occasions. One didn’t need much skill or specialized knowledge of fabric to sell these. It would be a long time before Hari would be put in charge of anything else. Not that he cared.

  Ramchand smiled back at him. ‘What to do, yaar?’

  ‘We could hear him shouting at you even through the door,’ Hari said, still grinning.

  ‘What to do, yaar?’ Ramchand said again, this time more gloomily.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Hari comfortingly. ‘You did a good deed for our Mahajan. If some people don’t get to shout at someone early in the morning, they can’t digest their breakfast properly. Now that raakshas Mahajan will have very good digestion.’ Hari cackled at his own joke. ‘For that is the sort of man our Mahajan is,’ he added, winking at Ramchand, and cackled again. Then he sighed theatrically.

  Gokul sat placidly folding some saris into neat rectangles. He was in charge of very expensive crêpes, and in the wedding season he also helped with ornate wedding lehngas and saris. He was a grave-looking man in his forties who took his work very seriously. Mahajan thought a great deal of his experience and his sincerity, but this still didn’t save Gokul from occasional tongue lashes from Mahajan. About ten years back, Sevak Sari House had also decided to stock chunnis. For there were many Sardaarnis from old Sikh families, matriarchs as well as young women, who came in to buy saris and asked hopefully whether they had chunnis as well. For them, saris were necessary, they were fashionable, but their real clothes were salwaar kameez. And so, after many of them had wistfully enquired about chunnis, saying that Sevak Sari House was so dependable, and that it was so difficult to get really good quality stuff in chunnis these days, Bhimsen and Mahajan had put their heads together and had decided to stock chunnis too.

  And Gokul had made it his business to know his chunnis very well. There were no ordinary chunnis in Sevak Sari House. They sold saris, so if some chunnis had to be there, they had to be special. All of them were two and a half metres in length, and of the required width. No well-dressed sardaarni liked a chunni shorter or narrower than that; they thought that those kind of chunnis were for Hindu women or for very young girls. Apart from the length, the quality was taken care of. There were pure chiffon chunnis, there were lovely white silk chunnis that could be dyed to match any silk salwaar kameez, there were gold-edged bridal odhnis in red, pink and maroon, there were white chunnis with discreet light-coloured embroidery at the borders for widows from good families, there were the colourful ones embroidered with traditional phulkari work – usually bought by Sikh women for their daughters’ trousseau, and many others. And Gokul could handle all the customers who came in asking for chunnis.

  Despite this, Gokul didn’t swagger. He was in awe of Mahajan and was always warning Hari to be careful not to get into Mahajan’s bad books.

  Gokul now looked up at Hari and said, ‘You be quiet, Hari! Calling Mahajan a raakshas at the top of your voice! You talk too much. Some day they will hear you and chuck you out. You have too long a tongue. That tongue won’t earn you your living, boy.’

  But Gokul was smiling when he said this. He had a small, benign face and a dome-shaped head sparsely covered with wisps of hair. Ramchand also gave him a wan smile. Chander was unlocking a cupboard nearby. All the walls of the shop were either covered with shelves, or had sturdy built-in cupboards that could be locked up with the more expensive or delicate stock inside. While the three were talking, Chander didn’t even look up once. He was a quiet man, very tall, and with a very pronounced Adam’s apple. He often did not turn up for work, and maintained a melancholic silence whenever Mahajan shouted at him for this or for any other reason. He would just take in all the insults Mahajan hurled at him, staring into space all the while, biting his lower lip, not answering any of Mahajan’s angry questions.

  The two oldest shop assistants, Shyam and Rajesh, had been working at Sevak Sari House for a much longer time than any of the others. Shyam had greying hair, a thin face and a large gap between his two front teeth. Rajesh was plump, with slightly rheumy eyes. The two kept to themselves, confabulating in low voices about the rising prices, nought per cent interest home loans and where you could get the best bargains for household electrical appliances. They were paid slightly more than all the other shop assistants. Everyone knew this, but it was never mentioned, and the two men never admitted it officially. Shyam had a young daughter he was hoping to marry off to Rajesh’s son. They lived in their own set, middle-aged world, went out for tea and meals together, and called all the other shop assistants ‘boys’, even Gokul, who was only a few years younger than them.

  Ramchand spent the morning arranging new stock. Bhimsen Seth, the owner of the shop, came in at about eleven. The shop had been set up by his grandfather, Sevak Ram. Bhimsen had taken over at the age of twenty. That was when a fifteen-year-old Mahajan had come to him looking for work. Bhimsen had taken him in, and Mahajan had worked his way up in the business. He had, over thirty years, proved himself to be honest, reliable, enterprising and a hard taskmaster. Now it was Mahajan who looked after most of the practical affairs of the shop, though under Bhimsen’s supervision. Most of the time now, Bhimsen Seth didn’t need to come to the shop every day. He had some other busin
esses running that he also had to see to. Ramchand didn’t know whether Seth was his surname or if it was just a respectful way of addressing him. He had asked Gokul once, but Gokul didn’t know either, and Ramchand didn’t dare to ask anyone else.

  On the rare occasions that Bhimsen Seth did come to the shop, he just reclined prosperously in a corner of the first floor, surrounded by a garish assortment of pictures of Hindu Gods, burning incense sticks and greedily counting hundred-rupee notes with his thick, stubby fingers.

  Ramchand watched him out of the corner of his eye sometimes. Bhimsen would intently flip the edges of the notes, and, if he happened to look up and catch Ramchand’s eye, he would give him a slow, fleshy smile that chilled Ramchand’s heart. He always found Bhimsen’s benevolent manner a little sinister.

  2

  In another corner of Amritsar, far away from the old city, in an area where many government officers, doctors and a few businessmen had made new, spacious houses with lawns in the front and kitchen gardens behind, Mrs Sandhu stood in her kitchen and watched the milk boil and froth on the gas stove. She was a fat, fair-skinned woman with a clear, glowing complexion and long, glossy hair tied back neatly into a bun.

  The kitchen she stood in was spotless and fixed up with the latest gadgets. The marble slabs gleamed clean and dry. Hawkins non-stick utensils were stacked neatly in a shelf, there wasn’t a drop or stain on the LG microwave oven, and the floor shone. Mrs Sandhu’s husband was Chief Engineer in the Punjab State Electricity Board. Many of his underlings came into his residence as cooks or gardeners to do domestic chores, and they kept the house spick and span. The Sandhus used to live in the Power Colony, in a government-allotted house, and had recently built and moved into their new house.

  Mr Sandhu was intensely interested in the house, and had planned the construction as well as the furnishing very carefully. Only the best would do. Even after he retired, people ought to be able to tell that he had been Chief Engineer. So the house was big, with the latest fashionable architectural features incorporated in its design. The bathrooms had granite floors. There was a big arch leading into the drawing room, which was sunk into the floor down two or three steps. There were carpets that Mr Sandhu had ordered from Kashmir. All the doors were made of teak, the furniture and upholstery were expensive and had been personally chosen by Mr Sandhu. Many people commented that it was strange that a government officer, no matter how high-up, had been able to afford such a grand house – but then the Sandhus had property, land in their village and, of course, they added with knowing glances, these days which government officer doesn’t take in something under the table?