It didn't switch to an open plan - the barrier between staff and customers was still there, but it was of glass, and should you look respectable and were seeking to choose a decent wine, you could be let in through the glass door and allowed time to browse. And, in keeping with the all-pervasive consumer hard sell of the times, discount offers ("Buy three beers, get Rs 50 off") were emblazoned across the glass counter.
The clientele had changed too, as I realised when I had to spend inordinate lengths of time pacing up and down keeping an eye on my car in front in a no-parking zone while the wife waited for her turn in the doctor's waiting room next to the booze shop.
Many came in cars in which the drivers waited, ready to scoot off at the sight of an approaching policeman on a motorcycle, while the sahibs went in to pick up their supply. But with income rising all round, there was also now a steady down-market trickle in the evening, of ill-kempt men who bought their little portions quickly and slinked off, some tucking the bottles inside their shirt-fronts. The better-off showed no such guilt complex, proof that drinking had become socially totally acceptable among the middle class.
But by far the most interesting was the woman who flitted across the space before the liquor shop with greater resolve as the evening progressed and the stream of buyers grew. She was obviously poor, without even a pair of chappals and looked older than she actually was, testimony to how the poor age prematurely.
Her act was to sell - in reality to accost and palm off - little plastic packets of namkeen to the men as they came out with their buys. The unspoken moral reproof that she used with a fair bit of success was: If you can spend so much on the bottle, you can surely help by buying a bit of munchies from me. I could see it often worked, sometimes the men (99 per cent of shoppers were men) buying a pack simply to get rid of her.
I was most often not a buyer at the shop but still came under her assault when her business was dull. Take something home, surely you will need it, she would insist, implying that I must already be well stocked with liquor at home. Soon I found something peculiar. Some men would give her something to get rid of her but decline to take a packet. I think they doubted the quality of the unbranded stuff. But she would have none of it, insisting on the quid for quo. Obviously she was in the selling, not the begging, business.
The other day she was at it again, making my wait irksome and forcing me to take a packet in exchange for the little I gave her. Then we got talking and she said how it was such an uphill task finding the tuition fee for her school-going daughter. I smiled and said this school fee business was an old trick and she better try another customer or another ploy.
But she insisted that it is school fees she was trying to put together. After a time I began to soften. Somebody that poor could be allowed to lie a little. What if instead of school fees it was the wherewithal for the next meal that she was scouting for? Then I took back what I had given her earlier and gave something more, urging in mock seriousness that it better be used to pay school fees.
She looked a bit overwhelmed and went off after an emerging customer. After she had accosted him successfully, she came back to me and insisted that I take at least one packet as a token. Then she did something that I was least prepared for - tried to touch my feet. I told her gruffly to pay the school fees and dashed off into the doctor's waiting room.
While driving back home I told the wife what had happened and she said, "When will you stop being a sucker? It is always school fees." I replied that she had at least two positives going for her. She was a good salesman and would not beg in principle, trying to make good by dint of her wits. She had the makings of an entrepreneur. If she was better off and educated she could have even been a reader of this paper.
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