A peculiar encounter...

Today I went out with my mother to buy some jewelry for the wedding day. We first went to a smallish shop but didn’t like the items on display. We then went next door to a ‘Venzer Shoppe’ which had a host of all kinds of accessories from jewelry to bindis to bangles to hair clips. The rear end of the room jutted out on the right side where there was a desk with a phone and a laptop. Behind the desk sat a burqa clad woman talking on the phone, with her burqa clad daughter playing at her knee. Save the niqab, the woman was covered from top to toe. The man at the counter was a tall, fair and soft spoken young man who spoke politely in unadulterated Hindustani. The lady at the back was chatting over the phone when we entered… I was trying to catch her tongue but the only sound that fell on my ears was a steady soothing pitch whose words I could not decipher. I do not know why this encounter created such an impression on me and aroused such feelings as I describe here… but the moments in the shop stood out… As mummy and I looked through their wares, my eyes kept wandering over to the woman and the child… obviously educated but also weighed down by religious obligations. Or may be not. They may have never felt the weight, having seen no other way of life. As the young man was marketing his goods, I noticed the several signs of ‘Sale’ and ‘Discount’ from place to place, indicating that business would not have been good… Mummy finally liked a set and proceeded to try it on…. I was now looking at the earnest young man … wondering … feeling a strange sense of pity mixed with fear… pity at the sorry state of his shop and his having to sell practically all his goods at half their price…. And also a sense of resentment that this is the same community responsible for such strong and intense beliefs that subjects its woman to such things as the confines of hijab… Though he was quite clearly Indian, a feeling of some foreign presence clutched me and wrung the heart… Just then the little girl spoke up… “Chachu”, she said, “Yeh lo”, handing him an article to show us… the same language the same name to relationships I thought… “Madam”, he called out to his hired help, “ Aap yeh wapas rakh dijiye”. Mummy decided she liked the set enough to buy it. As the man busied himself packing up the items, the woman got up to prepare the bill and hand us the complete package. The man stamped the bill and assured us that if we ever felt anything went defective, he would repair it for us at no extra cost. He also packed in some extra clasps lest we lose one and gave us a silver blocker complimentary. Mummy was enquiring about their factory, which he replied was based nearby… the lady gave us a visiting card and respectfully asked us to look at a few more items.. But we had to leave… so we went out with the assurance that we could come some other time…