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y Maneesha Lele<br />
Nonfiction<br />
2nd Place<br />
If you saw Manda on the street, it<br />
would have been hard to guess her age<br />
or her profession. She wore large horn<br />
rimmed glasses that gave her an almost<br />
professorial air. Habitually draped in a<br />
tasteful sari that showcased her elegant<br />
frame, with gold bangles that sparkled<br />
around slim wrists and the typical, gold<br />
marriage chain and earrings set off by<br />
her smooth dark skin, Manda was a surprising<br />
blend of old school values, venerable<br />
tradition and glowingly modern<br />
ideas.<br />
I often spotted her, swiftly and surely<br />
negotiating the bad roads and terrible<br />
drivers with practiced ease; all<br />
the while talking softly yet animatedly<br />
into her cell phone, and wondered how she<br />
could remain so unfazed by it all.<br />
A self-made mother of three, Manda<br />
had dropped out of school by the eighth<br />
grade, and like many before her, had<br />
swapped a rural life for a married one<br />
in the big city, establishing a satellite<br />
dwelling for her younger siblings,<br />
bravely and boldly taking on the added<br />
responsibilities of ensuring a better<br />
and brighter future for them as well as<br />
for herself. But for herself, Manda had<br />
wanted to fashion something new, more respectable<br />
and far more exciting, rejecting<br />
the offers of house cleaning or baby<br />
sitting that must surely have come in<br />
thick and plenty.<br />
In every house that Manda worked in,<br />
she followed an apparently cherished preparatory<br />
routine. The first thing she did<br />
was to brew herself, and anybody else<br />
that wanted one, a strong cup of tea.<br />
Then, unselfconsciously adjusting her<br />
glasses more firmly on the bridge of her<br />
short straight nose, Manda would calmly<br />
and intelligently take in the scene about<br />
her. Her concave lenses magnifying the<br />
huge chocolate orbs behind them threefold,<br />
she would proceed to ask questions<br />
relevant to the tasks at hand, carefully<br />
weighing the answers. Then, satisfied<br />
at last, she would delicately sip at the<br />
hot, fragrant brew and flash a smile, the<br />
sudden, special, irrepressible one that<br />
38<br />
always seemed to be lurking just<br />
beneath the surface.<br />
Sometimes I wondered if the<br />
‘routine’ was her way of creating<br />
small zones of tranquility;<br />
tiny time-outs as she went<br />
from one hot, hustly-bustly<br />
kitchen to the next, dealing<br />
with the vagaries of impatient<br />
or confused or indecisive or<br />
unprepared or territorial or<br />
simply super-demanding employers;<br />
finding her way through and around<br />
their messy and sometimes ill lit kitchens,<br />
fighting against time to stay on task<br />
and keep her sanity and through it all,<br />
to keep concocting the customized culinary<br />
delights she was paid to.<br />
Since spices were not only Manda’s<br />
constant companions but also treasured<br />
tools of her trade, I thought she would<br />
be the authority on the best place to buy<br />
some. I imagined a small crowded storefront<br />
down a dingy, winding, back alley<br />
in the heart of a distant dusty market<br />
with a name that was hard to pronounce.<br />
A chest-high steel and glass countertop<br />
would separate the overwhelmed shop boys<br />
from an impatient throng of customers,<br />
all leaning forward and trying to outshout<br />
the others, eager to be the first<br />
to be served even if they had been the<br />
last to join the crowd. The air, thick<br />
with the intermingled scents of pungent,<br />
dried spices would grow thicker with the<br />
occasional expletive and the urgent,<br />
verbal short hand as the sharply barkedout<br />
orders sailed across the small<br />
space. What would make it all worth the<br />
trouble would be the authenticity of the<br />
spices at unbeatable prices.<br />
Imagine my surprise when Manda coolly<br />
replied that in her opinion, the best<br />
place that she knew of was the newly<br />
opened supermarket on the opposite river<br />
bank, in the little gully next to the<br />
cinema theatre across the bridge and<br />
plainly visible from our balcony. She<br />
added that she greatly enjoyed shopping<br />
there.<br />
“But that’s a place where only rich<br />
people shop,” I almost blurted out, managing<br />
just in time, to bite my tongue.<br />
It was a novel kind of shopping experience<br />
for the well- heeled Indian consumer.<br />
And probably one that was here to<br />
stay. Just inside the clear, reinforced<br />
glass doors that swung quietly open, a<br />
courteous, uniformed doorman stood to<br />
attention. He greeted one and helped one<br />
shelve any extra bags one may have been<br />
carrying, placing them a specially allotted<br />
slot. In exchange, he gave one<br />
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