Notes on space (2): supermarkets

On the evening before a-lockdown-which-is-not-called-a-lockdown was imposed in late May, I go for a walk. It is drizzling slightly and it’s disorienting to see glittering Vesak lights draped on buildings because I had forgotten about Vesak as COVID news and work occupies most of my mindscape but I need space, I need fresh air, I need a pear to bind a pickle, I make pickles now.

There are a few walking paths in the city and suburbs —  the one closest to home cuts through a wetland where petulant ducks fretfully cross the walkways — but I prefer walking outside these designated walking areas, away from unmasked joggers, and like the unpredictability of a city walk. There are a few different walk routes I can take and these are triangulated according to time. If it’s late evening, I skip the public-but-feels-like-a-private by-road that has well-pruned cyprus trees and heliconias outside tall, gated houses but is too-quiet after dark. I now skip the winding shortcut lane after a white double cab recently followed me down the lane, waited while I hid in a side road for ten minutes, and then followed me again. Now in the evenings, my preferred route is a notoriously busy road that winds its way past a few supermarkets so I can pop in and get whatever groceries I have forgotten to order that week. 

What is referred to as a supermarket in Colombo is a far more modest version of what exists in certain parts of the world. I want to tell you that I think about the small-time grocers that have been displaced by the supermarkets which have mushroomed in densely populated urban areas, that I reflect on how smaller grocers lack the financial strengths that large companies possess and operate on an unequal playing field. But I have come to prefer the air-conditioned convenience of supermarkets, and these are not thoughts that surface often and when it does, it is followed by pinpricks of guilt which I think I am assuaging when I magnanimously go to our neighbourhood grocer to pick up things that aren’t readily available when shopping online (#supportsmallbusinesses #buylocal)

On the few occasions I have lived overseas, my FoB-status and a lack of well-traveledness were most visible in supermarkets. Grocery shopping was a hallowed and anticipated event. I was stupefied by the variety. In one city, I was within walking distance of five different supermarkets and each week, armed with my student budget, I would linger over the shelves, pore over produce and add one ingredient, one item I had never tried before into my weekly groceries. The shelves were filled with an excess of dizzying choices which are hailed as markers of modernity and aspirational living. Bread was not just bread it was baguettes, white sliced bread, brown bread, soft and creamy brioche, plump milk bread, ciabatta, focaccia, multigrain, wholewheat, pert loaves of rye, pita, tortilla, paratha, naan, pumpernickel. Detergent came in 14 different varieties. Recently in Colombo, simulacra of these hypermarkets have emerged. Sprawling spaces and “immersive shopping experiences” laid out across wide expanses of land. In property brochures, proximity to these spaces is highlighted as a selling point.

Spaces like these reveal more about us than we intend. Our food security and shopping habits give a glimpse of our income and make-up of a household.  What we buy and how much we buy. Modes of transport to and from a supermarket. Our interactions with one another — although now with a pandemic, there is an element of distance pre-embedded in these interactions.  I've come to recognise, not without shame, how my mood guides my behaviour with strangers in publicprivate spaces like this. Curt tongue-clicking at a slow-moving line, impatience at the temperature check at the entrance — residual hygiene theatre from the early stages of the pandemic which is at odds with where we are now — as though the shaving of these few seconds has tipped the wider expanse of the day off-balance, as though I have somewhere else to be. 

I like observing grocery detritus — which types of fruit and vegetables remain at the end of the day, which items are hurriedly dumped at the wasteland shelves by the cashier. When the coconut oil contamination episode happened, the shelves nearest to the cashier which usually houses grab-n-go items like chewing gum or snacks had bottles of oil. I like editorializing people’s carts and can hazard a guess at what a pack of ice, multiple 6 packs and packets of cocktail mixture in a cart means. What it means when someone is in a corner totalling their bill before they go to the cashier, subtracting items without fanfare. When a man has his partner on a WhatsApp call, pointing to every item in the produce section: "Oyate carrot oneda? Meken keeyada? Ethakota araka epaada?" In 2018, a local comedy duo which specializes in viral sponcon had a video for a supermarket chain caricaturing the types of Sri Lankans at supermarkets poking fun at serial samplers, the person who bulkpays all their bills, the person who shuns a cart and balances all their items from waist to chin etc. 

On occasion, when I leave the supermarket — arms splayed, scarecrow style with reusable cloth bags balanced from elbow to wrist — I think of how mundanely nice it must be to share routine chores like this with someone else. Maybe that's what most people crave: good company for the intimacies of daily life. But I'm also a (pre-pandemic) grocery dawdler and enjoy taking my time with grocery shopping and to have company in this would mean being with people who also enjoy grocery dawdling. On most days, I go with a list to sternly minimise distraction. If it's a short list I scrawl it on my arm for easy reference, vestiges of a school girl habit. 

Even a year and a half later, a result of the pandemic is the dislocation of the everyday. For those who have had to contend with illness, death, vast upheaval, the dislocation is violent. For others, these displacements are quieter aberrations. Recently, I met someone new, a person I was keen to make a good impression on, and after a year and a half of limited in-person interactions, I fumbled with the chasms in conversation and realized I was out of step with the social dance that is required of one when making friends and getting to know someone new. 

Although online grocery shopping is commonplace in many countries, it took a while for the delivery networks to heave into place in Colombo last year. Now, our household grocery shopping is done entirely online and the supermarket as a physical place to procure household items has shifted. It is relegated to a pitstop on a walk. A place to whizz in and out to pick stray items up, mask firmly on, avoiding people.

I have felt the loss of the tactility and visual-ness of grocery shopping. I need to see to measure quantities. I need to see what 500g of pumpkin looks like to know if it will suffice for a salad and a curry. Last year, I miscalculated the quantity for dried red chilies. We’re still going through that stock. Last week, spinach. The intimacies of our grocery list and consumption habits sometimes spill over on our social media when we (selectively) post about the food we consume. Now the entirety of our grocery list is in the hands of a stranger who doesn't know that we prefer unripe tomatoes over the overripe, squidgy ones that yield at the slightest touch, that I sometimes throw in a wildcard vegetable or legume enthusiastically and then struggle to learn how to cook it with diminished enthusiasm. 

The supermarket chain we order from utilizes the three-wheeler network close to each outlet for its deliveries instead of an internal delivery mechanism. The polythene bags are double-triple tied and there is a delivery charge but no packing charge on the bill; an invisible pair of hands is tasked with packing the items that sustain our household, perhaps a new task in addition to their existing scope of work.

Online shopping also disconnects consumption from the systems of production. You see a thumbnail. You add to cart. It is harder to connect this to the farmers who are on the news every day, coming up against an abrupt fertilizer ban that should be staggered over a decade while thoughtfully building new mechanisms to sustain agricultural systems. An ill-thought, foot-firmly-on-neck overnight ban which leaves people gasping for their lives in a pandemic, struggling to keep their crops alive feels distant when shopping online. Middle-men like to blur the politics and labour of food production. But when you shop in-person, you can discern marked differences in the quality of produce, price mark-ups, empty shelves, the notices announcing limits to purchase quantities, and snatches of the back-end permeate the gloss.

The shopping cart theory (...but what differenciates a theory from a random rumination? How do new theories gain credence?) was a post that asserted that an individual's moral character can be determined by whether they choose to return a shopping cart to its designated spot after use or whether they chuck it wherever it suits them. 

"The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing,” the post states. “To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it."

Unfortunately, it also dramatically declares that "A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it”. (!!) So I am going to ignore the black and white assertions of good and evil because we don't live in a convenient cartoon where the heroes and villains are so clear cut and will cherry-pick what I’m taking from this but I feel slightly validated about being exasperated with people who forget their empty carts once they’ve paid for their groceries, letting it block the strangers behind them in line. Slightly.

The supermarkets in my vicinity are not the kind of commercial spaces which improves one’s social currency to be seen in. They feel like publicprivate places to just exist without performance. They are still public and require a fiscal transaction to occupy it and it’s not as if you can put your full, unvarnished self on display but they’re also oddly private enough for you to space out and do your thing. 

I’ve come to despair how so much of ourselves is scripted and performed for an invisible audience and am interested in who we are in publicprivate spaces like this. We are always performing different versions of ourselves — at work, at home, with different friend groups, family, on social media. On social media and on the internet especially, this audience is ever-present. There isn’t an off switch. And because every social media platform mimics well-performing features of other platforms, all social media feel like an extension of one another and a daily Sisyphean performance of competence. On many days, the architecture of these platforms noisily facilitates the "networking and self-promotion and neoliberal branding and presentation of self" that Tressie McMilllan Cottom refers to. 

And I am a willing participant in this pageant but sometimes I just want to be. Maybe this is why I yearn for publicprivate spaces, maybe this is why I like walks outside prescribed walking paths, why I increasingly find myself at supermarkets at the end of these walks. 

Fitness is not the primary objective for these walks. It is the pursuit of a publicprivate space to exist without performance. 

Solo outings, solo dates offer some reprieve, although in this city, you’re never as alone or anonymous as you think you are. Still, I’ve missed this. I miss aimless rastiadu outings by myself. Where I start out in one part of town and at the end of the day, I'm in the other end of the city and have lost track of time and my bag brims with the kind of miscellany and my phone is packed with pictures which are possible to acquire only when you’re on foot in this city. 

We don’t have many publicprivate spaces in Colombo. The beach, VMD, libraries and reading rooms are few places in this city which offer spaces for interlude. I was speaking to a relative who lives overseas and who was explaining how the enormous parks and glut of greenery in her city buoyed her during the pandemic and frequent lockdowns. Land in Colombo is used with maximum economic extraction. Almost every space in this city requires some degree of fiscal transaction to occupy it and is often guided by class. The exuberant future of Colombo's skyline has little room for quietude. 

There was a play called ‘Walking Paths’ years ago that used the jogging paths around the city as its creative fulcrum — the play had no dialogue and the characters were always jogging, walking, moving, restless and never still. The jogging paths which wind their way in Colombo and its suburbs are built for bodies that labour during the week to then labour during leisure to maintain optimum fitness and health in order to labour better. There is little room for indolence, leisure, play, affection, for loitering in these spaces; they are not spaces you can just be unless you tune out the other bodies around you jogging, walking, moving, restless and never still.

On this evening, the night before a lockdown-which-does-not-use-the-word-lockdown, the supermarket is filled with last-minute grocery shoppers. Carts lurch towards the cashier, laden with essentials required for a non-lockdown for an undetermined period of time. The vegetable, rice and pulses sections are stripped bare. 

As I stand in line for the cashier, I see a few curious looks my way. For a moment, I see myself in strangers’ eyes: a tall, masked girl in an oversized t-shirt with a faint sweat/deo sillage, surrounded by people. Holding a solitary pear.

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Ps: It's been a minute. I would have liked to work on this more but I've been silent here for months and needed something to break the silence. This was written in June and is a part of an ongoing preoccupation with space and the self. Part 1 is here. 

In July, Sri Lanka said Basil take the wheel so a few changes have unfolded since — the fertilizer ban was rolled back a few days ago and is being figured out. 

I don't know how it is where you are. It’s been surreal to see one part of the world party and holiday and travel overseas and rush to fling their masks off while Delta has other countries in a firm grip and it’s becoming increasingly harder to plan ahead and know what the next week looks like. In Colombo, the COVID updates have been bleak. I hope you're safe, I hope you're staying afloat.