The Grocery Shop

Its pretty late in the night and its drizzling. The air is colder than usual. I take a turn leaving the main road behind and walk towards the lane which leads to my home. I leave the honking of the cars and the glimmer of the city lights behind. The lane is illuminated too, but the street lights do not glimmer. They cast a dull orange light on the road reflected on its wet surface. The silence is disrupted by occasional bike or car passing by. Round the corner there is a small grocery shop.
Its like any other grocery shop in India. It feels like any other grocery shop. Almost all the iron is rusted and almost all the wood has been feeding termites for years now. Plastic sheets lie sprawled on the roof in a half hearted attempt to protect the shop from rain.
I approach the shop, to see a clutter of people. A sole shopkeeper is busy getting orders, calculating the change, sorting the things to be given out, keeping an eye on the goods displayed outside and keeping off the flies buzzing over jaggery all at the same time. He does not greet anyone, he does not ask if he may help us, in fact he doesn't even appear to be listening, but the moment someone asks for something it magically appears in his hands and is passed on to the customer.
I look around as I patiently wait for my turn. The shop seems to be warmer, cozier from inside. I have the sudden urge to step from the drizzle outside into the warm moist interiors. I look up to see the sign board of the shop. It has a name I never really bothered to know. The name is misspelt, but it hardly matters till the phonetics are correct. Below the name in a smaller font the words "general store" are written. I look at the myriad of the things on sale inside and think it is such an apt description.
I look closer into the shop and see that all the walls are lined with dusty wooden shelves. Goods on sale are stacked on them. At the first look it seems like utter chaos, the first thought probably will make anyone realise the pattern in this chaos. There is shelf for perishable items, one for toiletries, one for snacks, one for vegetables, one for grains, and so on. The sweets however lie in the glass jars displayed right in front. Its the most important part of the shop's decoration apart from the calenders that cover the cracks in the walls.

The goods do not look like being on a glamour display, like the stuff in the supermarket. The goods here seem to be waiting to be taken, to be put to use, to serve their purpose. The wooden shelves that hold them creek under their weight, but none has been broken.
A mouse scurries down on one of these shelves. No one notices it, no one would have cared about a mouse even if they would have noticed it. After all hygiene is not what we expect from the stores like these. The mouse disappears as quickly as it came into a small dark hole in the corner. As I stand there in the cold, I feel a bit jealous of the mouse getting into even cozier corner of the shop. I glance around the walls of the shop, the walls once whitewashed are now light brown in shade. There are several cobwebs that hang down the ceiling, like curtains of a stage. I do not see any spiders although.
The crowd around me ebbs away. I approach the shopkeeper and say, "four eggs and a Rin soap." I do not get a reply, not even a grunt. The shopkeeper is busy calculating someone's change while I place my order. But he next thing I know once he has returned the change is he is busy finding his way among the sacks lying on the floor to the shelf where soaps are stacked. As he hands over my stuff, he asks "Anything else?"..He doesn't bother to be polite neither he says thank you. I wonder why I liked the sound of that curt "Anything else?".
I say "no" attempting a smile and walk away. I wonder if I am nuts when I feel slight flicker of pride to be the owner of four eggs and Rin soap. I feel satisfied of having bought things form this shop. The shop is not branded or none of the goods that I bought are going to last long.
But I know these goods will complete my day tomorrow. I know that I would have contributed to a small part of the meal the shopkeeper will have that night. I know that a mouse will still have its cozy dark hole, I know the spiders will still have the walls to spin their webs. I know the flies will have their share of jaggery. I also know tomorrow there will be a small tuft of grass growing on the mound of wet soil collected on a corners of the shop or perhaps on the cracks of the wall. The shop is not just a dilapidated structure. Its a home to many lives and a world in itself.