THE MOTHER DAIRY MAN

“Brand new flavour hai, Sirjee. Bahut chal raha hai aajkal.”

He looked up at my face to see if that insight impressed me. Almost like an afterthought he added, “Orange candy jitna hi daam hai.”

Amidst all the touting and Haryanvi-accented Hindi sales-pitching, I kept looking at the display placard. Kulfi Paan was indeed a new flavour. Almost exotic to me. The elongated curls of the letter K in the placard hinted at a familiar font. Before I could recollect the name, the ice-cream vendor produced a box of matchsticks from the recesses of his soiled ganjee (vest) and nodded to a middle-aged man nearby.

“Unclejee shaam ko roz ek beedi peene neeche aate hain.” My jaw remained often yet.

Despite manipulative school teachers, cool-as-a-cucumber bosses and determined women, the vendors of New Delhi are easily the shrewdest class of human beings I have dealt with so far. They are crafty; they look gullible and before you know it, you cannot seem to do without them. The ice-cream vendor, when probed, told me of two separate places available for rent nearby. (Later, I looked the places up and found them to be indeed ‘to-let’). The amount of information he held about the locality was indeed enormous. Early morning, you could find him roaming around the Rajiv Chowk Metro station with a kettle in hand, exchanging tea for money and banter with the many Blueline bus conductors, NDMC sweepers, peons and ayahs serving the many houses and offices in the vicinity of Connaught Place’s concentric circles. By 9 AM, his Mother Dairy ice-cream cart would be rolling its wheels. He had a total of 17 placards of the different flavours and types of ice-creams at his disposal. Regardless of their availability, he would put up three different placards every day. And in case you wanted to relieve your thirst in a more fluid way, his cart also contained a sizeable number of Aquafina water bottles.  

These vendors have a knack of sizing people up at the first go. My only other transaction with the Mother Dairy man had involved an orange candy four hours previous to the Kulfi Paan proposal. My 30-day beard prevented him from upgrading me to ‘Unclejee’ instead of ‘Sirjee’. Judging by the exact change and specific product I asked for, he knew I must have had the orange candy quite a few times in the past. And, to top it all, he happened to remember all of this as I came back a second time four hours later, in the space of which he had served at least fifty customers, considering the torrid heat that day.

Needless to mention, whenever a conversation about Delhi pops up in any other city or town, crook is a word regularly heard (apart from rape, of course). And the umpteen vendors, dealers, shopkeepers, auto – and taxi-wallahs have a lot to contribute to this image. Given that you need to be necessarily tactful to conduct business in the capital, the level of tact shows a graded increase as you explore their various locations. Sort of, like a pyramid. Industrious people like our Mother Dairy Man would represent the initial level of resourcefulness. Second place would probably be the cloth merchants of Sarojini Nagar who have, for generations, managed to lure women of all shapes, sizes, orientations and levels of self-esteem with a promise of beauty and presentable appearances. As you move up the pyramid, you encounter those auto-drivers who ply their trade around the airport and railway stations, perennially prepared to fleece those stranded in the city from distant shores. More than once, I have heard instances where these three-wheeling touts pick up passengers near the terminal and trade them to other auto-drivers at the outskirts of Dwarka. You see, Dwarka is this fast-developing satellite suburb adjacent to New Delhi. After the advent of the Metro railway system, business has been really modest for autos in and around the suburb. Hence, they are often willing to pay another auto-driver twenty-thirty bucks in exchange for a lambi sawaari (long-distance 

passengers). High above the pyramid, you have the irascible property dealers and agents who promise to waive you off the relentless red tape surrounding permissions, tenders, etc.

Like all pyramids, both edible and economical, the brunt is borne by the people at the bottom. The Mother Dairy Man’s day does not end with sunset. Before 7 in the evening, he has to go to a Mother Dairy outlet nearby and buy his wares for the following day. There he also helps out in dispensing the average Delhi family’s gargantuan appetite for milk. (A typical family of four in the city easily consumes around two and a half litres of milk). Then after he has washed himself of the day’s grime and tedium nearby a corroded water pipe close to Lady Irwin College, he goes to sleep at a deserted pavement near Himachal Bhavan.  

As anyone who has stayed in the city long enough to witness the dust winds get worse every summer will tell you, there are some cardinal rules you need to keep in mind if you have to survive the capital’s onslaught. But when you sense your tongue turning green from the brand new Kulfi Paan, you remember none of it. I did not particularly like the flavour (never been a paan person); but neither did I find the need to reprimand the Mother Dairy Man for that. Sometimes, it does not hurt to be taken for a ride, even if you are armed with the filthiest of Delhi’s expletives. I put on my ear phones to drown the evening cacophony at Barakhamba Road. Iron Maiden pleading for a Brave New World. For what it’s worth, the Mother Dairy Man might be the only one around when apocalypse descends on this cursed city. With his dry ice-preserved Aquafina water bottles. And the box of matches guarded underneath his magic hat-like ganjee.