Hukum Chand Sethi

Sethi General Store sits on the corner where the colony road bends towards the water tank, and it has sat there since 1971, when Hukum Chand's father put down the first tin trunk of stock and Hukum Chand, twenty-two years old and freshly returned from a course he never finished, arranged the jars himself, tallest at the back, smallest at the front, exactly as a shop ought to be arranged.

He was the second of three sons, the one who was “good with figures,” which in that household meant he was the one who would inherit the ledger rather than the land. His elder brother took the family's two acres near the canal; his younger brother went into the army and writes twice a year, always in October and always in April. Hukum Chand got the counter, the jars, and a set of brass weights that still ring true on the old scale.

In the early years the shop sold what a colony needed and nothing more — soap, matches, hing, thread, the odd tin of Horlicks for a sick child. Over three decades it grew sideways rather than upward: a shelf of biscuits, a fridge for cold drinks bought on instalment, a rack of school notebooks each June. Hukum Chand never expanded into the neighbouring shop when it fell vacant in 1985, though everyone told him to. “This much is enough for one man to look after properly,” he said, and went back to totalling the milk accounts.

The colony has watched three generations pass through that doorway. He remembers the diabetics and tells them, gently, that the good sweets are finished today. He remembers the boy who failed his Intermediate twice and now sells insurance two streets away, and greets him each morning as though he were still the boy with the cricket bat under his arm. Children are given toffees on a running credit that everyone, including Hukum Chand, understands will never be collected; it is simply how a shop like his says good morning.

There was a season, in the mid-seventies, when the shop nearly changed hands. A cousin from Karnal offered to buy the lease and set up a wholesale cloth business instead, better money, he said, and easier hours. Hukum Chand's father was unwell that year and the family gathered twice to discuss it over tea that went cold both times. In the end nothing was decided, which in that family amounted to a decision, and the jars stayed exactly where they were.

He married in 1976, a quiet woman named Kaushalya from two villages away, and they have a daughter now settled in Ludhiana and a son who helps at weekends and complains, affectionately, about the state of the storeroom. Sunday evenings the family sits on the veranda behind the shop, and Hukum Chand tells the same three jokes he has told for twenty years, and everyone laughs anyway because the telling is the point.

One July the water tank overflowed and flooded half the lane, and Hukum Chand stayed up till two in the morning moving sacks of atta onto the higher shelves, refusing all offers of help, insisting each time that it was “a very small thing,” while three neighbours stood outside handing him buckets regardless. By morning the shop was dry and open at the usual hour, and nobody who bought their milk that day knew what the night had cost him.

He keeps a small photograph tucked behind the till, of a building in Bombay he has never visited, cut from an old magazine years ago for no reason he has ever explained, and when customers ask about it he says only that it is “a nice building, no,” and rings up their purchase, and asks after their health, and reaches for the jar of lemon drops that nobody actually ordered.

Ask Hukum Chand how business is, any day of any year, and the answer arrives before the question is finished: very good, very good. Behind him the jars catch the afternoon light exactly as they have for thirty-one years, and the colony goes on trusting a man who has never once, in three decades, been seen to raise his voice, run out of patience, or close the shutter before the last customer of the evening has been properly served.