When A Small Shop Owner Shouted At Me For Drinking Cola

Memory Foam #1

I remember the transition periods of my childhood distinctly. One such transition was from living in small villages upto that point, to moving to a small town. My small sixth grade height, still the tallest in the school, found the expanse of Nahan astonishing. The first time I went on foot from one end of the town to another, it took me 40 minutes. That was wild.

This is a football story. This is also a coca-cola story. And a story of hope for kindness. And absurdness. After all, I was at fault, technically.

On the first day of the new school, Varun, who’d later become a good friend—whom I’d accompany to his first beard and moustache trim ever, for which he’d be chaffed in school, both by the teachers and the classmates, to the brink of him having to hide lower half of his face with his hand, for over a couple of days, grinning behind it in delightful sheepishness—asked me if I would like to join the school’s football team. Seeing how physically fit he was—it made him seem older than he was—and despite knowing that he was in my class, I said, ‘Yes bhaiya.’ Fortunately, I was only smiled at then, and this slip of the mind and the mouth never reached others.

We were a young school. Sixth grade was the highest grade. We were going to compete in the inter school football tournament, with other school’s football teams made of high schoolers. We had no chance to win, but we didn’t know that it’d be difficult to score even one goal in the entire tournament. We did end up scoring one, but only when AVN school’s team took mercy on us and their goal keeper just moved aside from the goal post. Aatish scored that goal on my assist. We thought we’d finally beaten their defence, only to realise that the whole AVN team had gathered together behind us, and was laughing.

It was one of these defeat days. I don’t know by how many goals we had been beaten by. Probably nine or ten. I was walking home from the ground. It took about twenty minutes. I played the entire tournament in my Massi’s old sports shoes, which were tattered by now, and my feet hurt in them, not knowing that there were special football shoes called studs, until after the tournament. Despite not having proper shoes, and having no training, and for many of us, no skill, we played with might and confidence. We kicked and ran our feet out. It’s with that same confidence that I did what I did next, and it got me in trouble.

Ten minutes away from home, I saw a small shop—the kind that people open when they’re retired and just want to have something to do—with a refrigerator and some snacks and that’s it. I knew that because the shop extended from a big house behind it, and it had an ex-army name plate.

There was a middled aged bespectacled man behind the counter, reading a newspaper. I assumed. Perhaps not even that, I almost knew—I was confident—that it would be okay to ask for a coca-cola, drink it, and then tell him that I’d pay him later, because he’d understand the sadness on my face, the defeat of having lost all matches without scoring one proper goal, and that the least he would love to do was to help me feel cool, in the sweltering heat of summer and defeat. After all I was only a child. But of course, instead of understanding, or even asking what was I thinking drinking coke without having any money on me, he shouted at me, downright. Shook, I spent the rest of my defeated, now adrenaline powered energy, to assure him that I would immediately bring him the money in the next few minutes, to exhaustion.

It is funny to me now, how my assumption—that a person would at least ask, so that I could tell him, why I so desperately wanted a victory, thirst slaking coke, right then— turned into the urgent need to provide that knowledge unsolicitedly as an explanation, a frightened reason to appease the impatient threats in his shouts. I wish he would have been kinder to a sixth grader and given him the benefit of explanation with a curious smile. But remembering this incident, I loved that I assumed kindness from him.

I’ve noticed that there are generally two kinds of people in Nahan. The category in which this person(at that point of time) fell into—afraid, always on the edge, righteous, assuming, emotionally unavailable(I was going to write stunted, but I felt it too acute), gossip and rumour mongering, manipulative, gangster like, seeped in the depths of toxic patriarchy, perhaps so deep that they didn’t know they were living, and in, it.

And then the other kind that made living there beautiful. Like Varun’s Bua. Proudly intended to remain unmarried, she smiled and laughed heartily, with always more to give and share. She taught us Sanskrit a night before our exam. It used to be a miracle that we got good marks despite studying nothing during the term, except on that one night. The peon aunty in the school, who’d sometimes alert us before the principal—on her rounds—arrived near our classroom. The tobacco eating bus driver, who’d wait for me a little longer than he could, and make room for me for a seat, in an already overcrowded bus. My neighbours—who’d play cricket and badminton and made up games with me whenever I’d call them out. Most of all, my classmates and friends, with the support as strong as trade union’s, against the order of the world, adults, capitalism and education.

Stay tuned for more such stories from down the memory foam! If you liked this, perhaps share it with someone who might need it, like or love it, or just for the heck of it, for reach, in this dystopian world of algorithms.

Until next time.