Episode 3 — The Salesman

The salesman came to Paltan Bazaar in the winter, carrying two tins and a smile.

He was a city man, from Bombay, in a coat too thin for the Doon cold, and he went shop to shop with a boy who carried his sample case. By now the picture house across the road had a name — the Kohinoor Talkies — and a painted board with a lady on it, and on Saturday nights the whole bazaar filled with the crowd from the last show, hungry, looking for something sweet.

Satnaam was fifty-seven, his wrists ruined by the cold, and it was Mohan who cooked now, twenty-three and strong, while the old man sat by the stove and corrected.

The salesman set a tin on the worn counter and prised the lid with his thumb. Inside, the fat was white and smooth as soap.

“Smell it,” he said.

Mohan bent and smelled. “It smells of nothing.”

“Exactly! Nothing. No smell to fight your cardamom. It does not turn in summer the way your ghee turns. And” — he leaned in, because this was the sermon — “it costs one-third. One-third, sir. You make the same sweet, you charge the same price, and two annas out of every three, you keep. Every shop from Amritsar to Calcutta is turning. Soon you will be the last man in India still burning cow’s milk on a stove like your grandfather.”

Mohan had stopped stirring. Satnaam noticed that his son had stopped stirring.

“Who can tell the difference?” Mohan asked. He was looking at the white fat.

“No one.” The salesman was delighted; this was the question that meant the sale was half made. “That is the beauty of it. No tongue alive can tell. It is science, not cooking.”

Satnaam spoke from his stool by the stove. “Show me your hands.”

“Sir?”

“Your hands. Hold them out.”

Puzzled, the salesman held them out. They were soft, clean, a city man’s hands.

“You have never made a sweet in your life,” Satnaam said. He got up slowly, holding the counter, and put one finger on the tin, and pushed it back across the worn wood toward the salesman, an inch, then another. “The sweet is not the sugar. The sweet is the trust. You are selling me a way to keep the first and throw away the second, and no tongue alive can tell — for a while.” He pushed it the last inch, off his counter, into the man’s hands. “Take it away.”

The salesman laughed the easy laugh of a man who has heard no many times. He packed his case. At the door he stopped, and with a showman’s kindness set one small tin on the counter.

“A gift,” he said. “For the day you become practical. It keeps for years — that is the other thing about it. It waits.” And he crossed the road to the halwai near the Kohinoor, who bought four tins on the spot.

“Throw it in the drain,” Satnaam told Mohan.

Mohan carried the tin to the back, past the old well that still gave sweet water. He stood there in the cold with it in his hand. He was better at sums than his father; he had done the arithmetic while the man was still talking.

He heard his father come out behind him, slow steps on the stone.

“You are still holding it,” Satnaam said.

“It cost money, this tin. It harms no one, sitting shut on a shelf. To throw away money that harms no one — that is also a kind of waste, isn’t it?” Mohan turned. “You taught me not to waste.”

Satnaam looked at his son for a long moment in the grey light by the well.

“I taught you not to waste ghee,” he said. “Not to store lies. There is a difference, and the day you cannot feel the difference in your hand, the shop is already finished — it will only take the town a few years to notice.” He turned back toward the stove. “Do what you want with it. You are a grown man. But hear me: a thing that waits is not harmless because it waits. It is only patient. That is worse.”

He went inside.

Mohan did not throw the tin in the drain. He set it on a high shelf in the back, behind the empty jars, where his father’s failing eyes would not find it. Not to use, he told himself clearly, standing in the cold. Only to keep.

The tin sat on the shelf. It waited. The salesman had been honest about that, at least — it was the most honest thing that had come into the shop in years, and it was the one thing in the shop that was a lie.

That night Satnaam went out for the water later than usual, the cold in his hips. The bazaar was loud with the crowd from the last show. He filled his two pots at the tank and carried them home along the emptying road, and he did not spill, and he came first — because no one else in Dehra any longer thought the hour before dawn was worth getting up for.

He always came first. He did not know how few mornings were left in which that would still be true.

Twelve decades. One sweet shop. The water goes bad so slowly that no one can say which year it happened.