Our objective today was to obtain fresh vegetables at a good price. We left just before noon after a few hours of studying, and just as dark visions of my non-future as a board certified pediatrician trickled into my mind. My husband's aim was to control the trickle and prevent the dam from bursting.
So we decided to go to the Indian grocery store, also known as Patel Brothers. I have been going to Patel Brothers for a long time, almost for as long as I can remember. Long before I was married, while I was living in Connecticut with my parents and brother almost 20 years ago, I was still in elementary school, and we used to travel two hours by car to Jackson Heights in New York City to go to Patel Brothers.
We would fill the shopping cart until the bags of daal were practically spilling out their contents onto the dusty, scratched lineolinum floor. The checkout counter at Patel Brothers at that time consisted of a plain counter top maybe the size of an extremely small dining table. Maybe. There was no conveyor belt to deliver the goods to the grocery clerk. I was quite short at the time, and would watch from below as my mother emptied the cart. The checkout clerk handled the items with agile rapidity, which was necessary to handle the large amount of customers like us, coming from all neighboring states for fresh spices and vegetables. For the produce items, he would weigh them first, use a Casio calculator to determine the price, then click in the price into the cash register keypad. There was no scanner, no automatic pricing system. And there may have been another individual present filling up plastic bag after plastic bag with "Thank you" written on it. Even the quality of the plastic bag felt cheap compared to our local grocery store in East Lyme.
My father was not with us as we purchased our items. He was walking to the car, and was to drive it close to the store so that we wouldn't have to walk block after block with fifteen or more loaded plastic bags. He would pull up our Dodge Aries to the store and we would pile the groceries into the car as quickly as we could to avoid making oncoming traffic back up.
I hated going to Patel Brothers as a kid. I hated waiting until my parents filled up the cart with an endless amount of groceries. I hated that there was no conveyor belt. I hated helping pile all those groceries into the back of the station wagon. And I hated, two hours later, emptying the station wagon after a long day trip to New York City. Other parts of our trip to New York City were much more fun. For example, I enjoyed holding my father's hand while riding the long escalator all the way up to the top of the Empire State Building. I loved it when my parents bought me a little pin of the flag of India for me to wear at the gift shop at the World Trade Center. And I loved visiting the Ganesha Temple in Flushing, where my mother would place a bright yellow crysanthemum into my braided hair. I especially loved eating the delicate paper dosa that we would buy from a small shop adjacent to the temple. I would carefully tear off a piece of dosa with my fingers, although I think I would practically burn my fingers every time since it was so fresh and hot from the skillet. But the Patel Brothers was definitely the low point for me in day filled with crowded streets, swarms of people along the city sidewalks, and good food that was the antithesis of small town Connecticut where we lived at the time.
But today, as I used a trip to Patel Brothers with my husband as a study break. As we entered the store, and the aroma of turmeric, asofoetida and cumin forced its way into our nares, I finally saw all those trips to New York in a different light. As my husband filled up a flimsy clear plastic bag with plump, juicy tomatoes at a price of 69 cents a pound as opposed to 1.49 cents a pound at Shaw's in Fenway, and as my mood lightened as I saw fresh okra, ginger, coriander, grapes and "zukini" (yes, that's what the sign said), I felt compelled to apologize to my parents for hating those trips as a child. We bough fresh tomatoes and eggplant and ginger and Indian squash and spices and so much more all for much less than in a regular grocery store. And it brought me great joy.
All I have to say is thank GOD for the Indian grocery store in Waltham, Massachusetts, only a 20 minute drive from our 700 square foot apartment in Boston. And thank the universe that the eyebrow threading salon is just a block further beyond the store, but that is another story...
