Skip to main content

Left Blue

 I have shopped at the local Asian grocery store sporadically for two decades now. On my recent trip which came about for the first time since the pandemic started, I noticed a lot of change and not in the ways I might have imagined. The owner is a woman maybe in her early 60s. The whole family works in the store. She is still a fixture running one of the registers as she always did. 

The surrounding cast of characters is completely different. There used to be a couple of kids a bit older than J that came around to work at the store after school. Looks like they have moved on to other things now they are in their mid-20s. The owner always had perfect hair, pretty jewelry and fashionable clothes. She rarely talked to any of her customers and I can't recall ever seeing her smile. But if you struck up a conversation with her, she would be pleasant enough. 

It is no surprise that everything is a lot more expensive than it used to be. The fish stand was not well-stocked and what little they had did not look appetizing. The mix of customers at the store felt quite different from what I had been used to seeing on my trips here. A lot of folks shuffling around the aisles cluelessly much like me. A certain sadness permeated the air even as everyone carried on as before. The social distancing signage remains but no one cares to follow them anymore. But it serves as a reminder to the last couple of years we've been through. Maybe that blue feeling has lingered on in this store more than the others - the owner is a pale shadow of her former self. Her hair is a short, choppy bob - not quite the perfect coif she used to have, she wears dark sweatpants and an oversize sweater, the jewelry is largely gone.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...