Your friends don’t want fridge magnets as travel souvenirs. They want snacks
Rahul Patel, who runs the iconic Neelam Foodland in Khar, a shop my father still insists I stop at to buy dink or gond laddus before I fly home to Delhi, has a theory. “There’s a particular kind of customer I’ve come to recognise,” he says. “They walk in slightly hurried, sometimes with a suitcase still half-packed, with a look that’s equal parts love and logistics. They’re not shopping for themselves. Every item they pick up, they’re thinking of someone else’s face.”
He sees them every day. Old Khar aunties who have been coming there since before his time. Their grandchildren, who grew up abroad, walk in like they are stepping into a memory. “They’ll pick up a packet of something, smell it and go completely quiet for a second. I’ve seen it thousands of times. It means the same thing every time.” Patel remembers a mother who came in the day before her son flew to America for college with a list scribbled on an envelope. She bought nibbles like chips, chivda and theplas, enough to last him months. “She didn’t say much. She just kept adding things to the bag.” Another mother, whose daughter had just moved to Toronto, wandered the shop picking up packets and putting them back. Finally, she said, “Just send her everything she would miss.” They packed for an hour to get that order sorted.
But shops like Neelam are becoming rarer in Mumbai. The Irani bakeries selling cookies, those single-counter sweet shops, the hot-chips or namkeen guy that your mother trusted are slowly shutting down or being replaced by chains that look the same in every city and deliver to every postal code. When everything is available everywhere, what is left for the carrier to offer? Patel thinks it is the act itself. “When you physically carry something, you are making a choice. You lifted it, packed it, carried it through airports and layovers. The other person feels it when they open the box.” It says: I thought of you specifically, on this trip, in this city, in this shop.
