By Our Special Correspondent
As the sun pounds down and the tar on the surface of the road underneath sizzles and simmers, people ease, in ones, twos, and threes, up to the sugarcane stall under the cool shade of a tree. The sweet aroma of sugarcane mingles with the grit and dust of sidewalk. Auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, buses and cars clatter past, honking, jostling and hustling. Suryanarayana is a resident of a nearby village and runs a sugarcane stall at
. He feeds sugarcane into the crusher that is held together by worn-out bolts, lots of spare parts and cartloads of ingenuity.
“Ever summer I am here selling sugarcane juice,” he says trying to ward off the black smoke that the contraption spews out.
The 55-year-old man has spent most summers selling sugarcane juice here, trying to hydrate the people with a glassful of the drink for a few bucks. His arms seem cut from stone and his fingers are thick, battered and nicked.
“I started this business nearly 20 years back,” he announces with a sense of pride. “Earlier, I used to manually crush the sugarcane and I had to turn the shaft attached to the teeth-pocked cylinders.”
Indelible impressions
One of the indelible impressions of the summer is sugarcane juice stalls rising out of grit and dust, sitting at busy honking intersections and dotting the pavements and sidewalks.
Every stall looks part of the teeming, tumbling, bellowing, chaos-bleeding into-order and order-bleeding-out-of-chaos kind of life in the streets. Sugarcane juice is an affair to cherish every summer: squeezing the sugarcane to its last drop, cloth-straining the juice, adding lemon and ice, and drinking it to the lees. Pith piles up by the side of the table.
As the heat increasingly hangs like misery every day, these small-scale entrepreneurs dot the cities, towns and villages to offer a cool, sweet drink to the parched throats and weary souls. “This is a seasonal business,” Suryanarayana explains, “Once it rains, we don’t get any business.” He sources sugarcane from wholesalers or buys it directly from those who cultivate it. “Farmers usually don’t sell us directly. They sell their produce to wholesalers or send it to sugar factories.”
Sugarcane juice-a-pop people are hot weather counterparts to the sweater vendors who keep you from shivering and umbrella people who materialize beside water puddles in rainy season. A street vendor’s enterprise pulses to the seldom-seen, hardly-noticed rhythms of life.
The small-time enterprises are ephemeral by nature. The sugar cane juice vendors morph into fruit sellers, daily wage laborers or any other job that suits them in other seasons. Says Suryanarayana: “I work in the fields or sell seasonal fruits in other seasons. But somehow, selling sugarcane juice is what I like the most”. Suryanarayana hates the blazing summer but he has found a reason to endure it with a smile. “The season brings good business and I get to make a fairly decent income in these months.”
Comments