It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, inching towards a breezy evening. The way it usually is here in Bengaluru.
Post-lunch, I walk back from Udupi Grand and I remember - surprisingly, for I usually forget these things - to buy some eggs for dinner.
As I slumber into the shop where we usually buy milk and eggs and small things like these, I see that the shop is dark and there seems to be no one there. The shopkeeper, I see, is standing somewhere away, occupied in arranging his wares for the tea shop. It’s almost 4.00pm.
I peep into the shop and there’s some movement. A small girl, of course. The shopkeeper’s grand-daughter, of course.
Mentally, my non-nativeness has kicked in. I have to talk to this small girl who may or may not know Hindi or Tamil. (I’ve spoken Hindi to the shopkeeper and his family for more than a month till I realized they all understood and spoke good Tamil).
The small girl must be about 8 or 9 years old. She’s wearing a bright green chudidaar that fits her petite form beautifully well.
“Mutte idi-a?”, I ask haltingly. The brief-nanosecond blankness on her face tells me mutte is not the right word for eggs in Kannada. “Egg”, I quickly recover and provide a recognizable synonym.
“Eggs?” she chimes in questioningly. This is the sweetest voice I’ve heard in a few months or may be a year.
In the drowsy, lethargic laziness of a cloudy, dark Sunday afternoon, her face glows and how! I saw a picture-perfect face of a much older girl the other day as I turned left into Indiranagar Double Road and this face - while not similar or alike - has the same brilliant yet sublime glow.
I look at the eggs basket and notice that it’s almost empty.
She walks out of the darkness, towards the eggs basket.
“How much?” she asks in English. She means “how many” but I do not notice this slip till I come back home and write.
I count six in the basket and decide that’s how much I want. I ask her, “Cover idi-a?”, still sticking to Kannada as I’m yet to fully comprehend the seriousness of her using English to communicate.
The way she picks English to field her questions and deliver her answers, with aplomb and instancy, mind you, has me noticing her much more intently. She’s not shy, doubtful or scared of the responsibility of handling the shop for a while. She’s confident and knows what exactly to do when someone comes to the shop. And all of this maturity comes through in her actions. The way she asks questions. The way she quickly dispatches the items.
She marches into the shop to fetch a cover. In the meantime, I notice that two eggs are partly broken. So I take four of them, put in the plastic cover that she’s holding open for me.
In the whole fifty-odd seconds of the process, I gather my thoughts and decide that I should switch to English to this young girl.
“This is enough,” I say.
She turns to her grand-dad standing a few feet away and asks, “Thatha naalku eggs eshtu?” He replies and she turns to me and says, “Twenty rupees.”
As I pay her, I can’t help saying, “Thank you, ma'am.”
The only thing I didn’t do was remove my imaginary hat, bow down and pay royal respects to this Highness disguised as a middle-class Bangalorean.