Balwant Singh

Balwant Singh was born into the kadhai, in the sense that Singh Sweet House was already forty years old and thick with the smell of ghee and cardamom by the time he was old enough to be handed a wooden ladle and told to stir without stopping. His grandfather had set up the shop after Partition with a single kadhai, a borrowed handcart, and a recipe for barfi that he refused, for the whole of his life, to write down anywhere.

Balwant's father ran the shop through the sixties and seventies with two sons at his side, Balwant the younger of the two, and it was understood, in the unspoken way such things were understood in that generation, that the elder son would eventually have the family's small piece of agricultural land outside the town and the younger would have the shop — a division that on paper looked equal enough, and in practice left Balwant with a business that also carried, silently attached to it, his father's outstanding debts to two suppliers and one moneylender.

He has never spoken a word against the arrangement, not to his brother, not to his wife, not to the two nephews from the brother's side who now farm the land their father once farmed. Every festival, without fail, Balwant sends two kilos of the shop's best across town to that brother's house — motichoor at Diwali, gujiya trays at Holi — packed by his own hand, weighed twice, and never once billed.

The shop itself opens at four in the morning, when the milk arrives and the first kadhai of the day goes on the flame, and Balwant can tell the readiness of a syrup by the sound of it bubbling from the next room without needing to look at it, a skill his father had and his father's father had before him, and one that no thermometer, in Balwant's clearly stated opinion, will ever replace.

His forearms carry the scar marks of forty years near an open flame, small pale patches from spitting oil and careless moments with hot syrup, and he wears them the way other men wear medals, mentioning them only when a customer asks and never at any other time.

The colony marks every occasion that matters through his counter — births announced with laddoo, examination results celebrated with barfi, even the more solemn occasions requiring their own particular sweet, which Balwant prepares with exactly the same care regardless of whether the day being marked is a happy one. He has, over the decades, become less a shopkeeper than a kind of civic institution, present in every family's good news before the family itself has quite finished telling everyone.

He tastes constantly through the working day, a pinch from the ladle, a sliver off the tray, checking texture and sweetness with the seriousness of an examiner, and yet at home in the evening he will take nothing sweet at all, waving away his wife's offer of dessert with the same line every night — bas, whole day it is there in the mouth already — a preference his wife has stopped questioning though she has never quite believed it either.

There was a difficult year in the early nineties when sugar prices rose sharply and two competing sweet shops opened within walking distance, cutting into custom that had once been entirely his; Balwant responded not by cutting his own quality but by holding a mela outside the shop for three days, distributing small samples free to anyone who passed, and within a month the competitors had adjusted their ambitions considerably.

He has no plans to retire and no one has yet worked out, including Balwant himself, who among his two sons — one in an office job in the city, one still deciding — might one day take the kadhai from him, and until that question resolves itself he continues exactly as he always has, at four each morning, stirring, tasting, judging syrup by ear, sending sweets across town to a brother who took the land and said nothing, and receiving in return nothing but silence, which Balwant has, for forty years, chosen to answer with sugar.