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Unit 8: Rupa Bajwa: Sari Shop—Introduction to the Text

parts where Ramchand pursuits for English-language education, his turmoil while encountering Notes
with a professor in the shop, the homework he does before visiting a royal customer’s house, and
the effort he puts in while sitting with his books, trying to make sense out of them- all form a very
delightful read. However, towards the end of the first part, the story drags, becomes repetitive,
and you wish the author would move on to unravel Lakhan Singh’s story, and also the mystery
behind the woman who drinks. You also become impatient as the apparently-unimportant characters
such as Tina Kapoor and Bhimsen Seth are pointlessly discussed extensively.
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

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