“Everybody will forgive me if the face cream they want is not there. But they won’t if there is no rice or atta”

It is 10 in the morning, and all of the neighbourhood’s residents have descended in a single queue. There are men here with large empty bags, consulting small chits of papers as though committing them to memory. Some scribble just-remembered items on their palms. One couple is carrying large luggage bags with wheels that even airlines wouldn’t allow as check-in baggage. An elderly woman can be heard telling her daughter, “If there is lootmaar [rioting], you get the rice, I’ll get the oil.”

We are all, of course, at the grocery store.

The number of people who have showed up today is so large that there are not enough white chalk lines to stand at—but the queue moves in a somewhat orderly fashion. Every few minutes a surly employee from the store walks through the length of the queue, measuring the distance between each individual and physically shoving those who commit infractions.

Across Navi Mumbai and neighbouring Mumbai, the last few days at vegetable markets and grocery stores have been particularly chaotic. The agricultural produce market committee (APMC) wholesale centre in Vashi—from where most of Mumbai and Navi Mumbai receive their groceries and fruit and vegetables—has been shut after a trader tested positive for Covid-19. Supplies across the twin cities are hit. Supermarkets and shops have shut down. In some areas, a few of those that remained open, to let their supplies stretch, announced that no individual can run up a bill beyond Rs 2,000.

In several parts with high numbers of infections, authorities have ordered grocery stores to be opened only on some days for a limited number of hours. The sight of grocery-seeking people in cars defying rules banning travel beyond the 2 km radius of their houses has become common.

This particular grocery store, Daily Needs, located in Navi Mumbai’s Belapur area doesn’t appear to be particularly strained. Run by Karsan Patel, a genial and portly presence at the store counter, known locally as ‘the uncle’ but who is really only in his mid-40s, the store has remained open through all days of the lockdown, from 9 in the morning to 5 in the evening. The store stands at the end of the market square. Every other shop is shut, except for two smaller grocery stores, a pharmacy and a temple. The queues to the other two grocery stores, hit by dwindling supplies, are negligible; the one at the pharmacy has a few people; and there are unsurprisingly none in front of the temple.

As I join the queue, I can count at least 40 people in front of me. Within minutes, when I turn around, 20 more have materialised behind me. After about an hour of waiting, the queue progresses enough for the shop front to become clear. One can hear Patel’s recorded voice emerging from a loudspeaker. There are restrictions in place, it announces. Some items are rationed, not more than four people can enter at a time, and no one is allowed for more than five minutes.

Feet shuffle as the message goes on. At the counter, instead of Patel, there are five large men. They rummage through the purchased items, ensuring that excess amounts of some restricted items such as rice, pulses and flour haven’t been purchased.

Occasionally there is a flareup. In the background, a phone rings incessantly. These are people looking for home deliveries. The reply is always a curt ‘no’ and a loud banging of the phone.
“Where is uncle?” I ask. They turn to each other.

“Inside,” one of them says.

“I thought he was behind [the store],” another goes.

“Maybe outside,” goes a third.

None of them really know. Patel shows up several hours later. He arrives at the back of the store, where the goods for his shop are unloaded. Every time during the next few days, he comes in a different way. Today it is on a bike, a tempo filled with goods following him. The next day, he arrives in his car, a maroon hatchback, all the seats behind and beside him taken up by cartons of biscuits and oil. On another day, there is just a large truck filled with grains and pulses instead of him. When you strain your eyes, you can see him behind the looking glass, seated with the driver.

“If there is a truck, there is no driver. If there is a driver, there is no loader,” he says. “You got to do everything yourself.” All of Patel’s geniality has been drained out of him. When you ask how his day has been, he utters an obscenity under his breath.

The supply chain of essential products in India depends upon millions of people doing things by hand. Crops are harvested by hand, they are transported through large swathes of roads by truckers, each sack of goods loaded and unloaded again and again by lines of hands. If there is a little breakdown in any part of the chain, the whole process comes to a halt. At the moment, there are fewer trucks on the roads. Those that are on the road often complain of being harassed by policemen. When they do arrive within city limits, they find that workers who unloaded trucks have now all left for their villages.

“I get calls from distributors saying, ‘Goods are here, but you have to come pick it up yourself. There is no worker here to do that,’” Patel says. He is now slumped on a chair. Around him, the workers at his store are all over the truck unloading cartons of biscuits and sacks of pulses.

“I will say in short [the issues he faces]. You write in long,” he says after staying silent for some time.

“You know where the job of the grocery owner is now. Not here, not in the chair,” he says pointing to the chair at his store counter. “It’s there.” He is now pointing at the sky. “Out on the road.”

Patel’s grocery store is really a mixture of concepts. It has the feel of the neighbourhood kirana, where staffers know you by name and attend to every request, and yet it is also something of a small supermarket, where bills are generated by machines and customers are encouraged to use trolleys even though there is very little space among the rows of shelves. “That was always my plan: to mix the best of the two, the kirana and the supermarket,” he says.

Even now, although he has stopped doing home deliveries, he takes special requests from old customers, from those wanting a specific type of infant milk formula to a certain type of instant noodle. “A mother will come and say, I want Cerelac so and so. I will say, I can’t promise, but I will look for it.”

Patel arrived in Belapur in the early 2000s. Having run a grocery store in a slum in the nearby Thane region until then, he moved here looking at the residential areas coming up and sensing their potential. He also believed the supermarket was the way ahead. He bought out a wine shop and instead of the regular store that he operated out of a slum, he introduced rows where customers could meander and discover products, then a computer to generate bills, followed soon by shopping trolleys.

The lockdown came as a shock to him, he says. Eight of his 10 employees lived in different areas and could no longer come to work. He got relatives and workers from a neighbouring sweetshop to work for him. Patel comes from what he explains is a joint family. Although he and the families of his two brothers live separately, the most essential bond, business, he says, is joint. This way, all of them have as much stake in his grocery store as he has in the neighbouring sweetshop. “So I keep these guys at the shop and I do the running around,” he explains.

Although his store stocks a wide variety of products, from groceries to cosmetics and baby-care products, his priority now, he says, is groceries. “That’s the crucial item. Supply has become very short across the city. And everybody will forgive me if the [face] cream they want is not there. But they won’t if there is no rice or atta [flour],” he says.

His day usually begins at around 6 in the morning now. He heads to the APMC wholesale centre about once every week. In the beginning, he tried to send just his employees. But they would invariably get stopped and harassed by policemen. “So I go now. And I talk my way out of any trouble,” he says.

Since the market has now become very strict about only registered members accessing it, he uses the permit of his brother who is a registered wholesale trader. Even then, the day can be difficult. “There is a lot trouble always. Most of the registered hamals [porters] at APMC have left for their villages. So you need to get unregistered workers in. But the police don’t allow that. Then [the police] say you need to be strict about social distancing, and we try the best we can, but in a place like that [where it is estimated there are at least 50,000 visitors daily] it becomes very difficult. So there are often fights,” he says. Sometimes, by the time Patel is able to complete all his purchases, it is very late in the evening. “Sometimes I return home as late as 11 PM,” he says. The rest of the time, he is mostly in his car, making the rounds of distributors’ warehouses. Usually, he maintains goods worth about Rs 1 crore in his store. Before the lockdown, on a particularly busy day, there would be sales worth Rs 30-40 lakh. “But right now everybody is buying in panic. And they buy as much as Rs 75 lakh worth of goods in a day,” he says. “So the pressure is back on me. I know I have to go back on the road. And get as much stuff as I can.”

In the past, as many as eight distributors would unload goods at the back of Patel’s store every day. But now because of the lack of workers and trucks, store owners are expected to pick up every item. “It’s become very difficult,” he says. “We are harassed by policemen on one side. And on the other, customers don’t listen. And then I have to think of my employee’s safety also. What would happen if there was to be an infection? This place would be closed down. And I’d be ruined.”

It’s now 4.30 in the evening. The queue outside his shop is still lengthy, but customers are made to rush through. By 4.45PM, a few are allowed in and the shutters brought down. They leave, along with most employees, through the backdoor soon after.

Patel walks through the store, inspecting shelves and switching the lights on and off. “You know what’s the biggest challenge?” he asks. He has the answer before one can respond. “It’s those cops. If we are transporting goods in a truck, they will ask, ‘Where is the permit?’ When you are using your private car to carry goods, they will ask, ‘Why can’t you use a truck?’” Whenever he is unable to talk himself out of such a situation, he usually rings up his contacts in the local police station and gets them to vouch for him. But this too is getting difficult. “How many times do I keep requesting the same policeman to put in a word?” he asks.

So he has now figured out another solution. Recently, when as part of an association of grocers, he met the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation Commissioner, Annasaheb Misal, to put forth their grievances during the lockdown, he ensured he had a photograph taken with the bureaucrat.

“Now whenever I’m stopped [by policemen], I whip out my phone and show the photo,” he says.

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