Am I dreaming or...

We’ve all laughed and cursed plenty at the famous, traditional crustiness of Pune’s shopkeepers. You know, the old jokes about how they dismissively say “too expensive for you” when you ask them to show you something in the shop. Or how they slam the door in your face as soon as it’s lunch time. I have personally experienced this – where I entered the shop as the shutter was to come down, and found my body almost sliced into two halves by the briskly descending shutter that the man kept pulling down though he had spotted me walking through the entrance. And I was caught in the classical Catch-22: because I was half out, I would not be served (“come back after 4pm”), and because I was half in, I could not exit from the entrance; I was marched to the back of the shop to exit in quite another lane from which I had entered. My crime: asking to be served at 1.02 pm.
Well, guess what, quite a bit of it is changing. And it’s not just the newer more savvy shopkeepers who are showing customers a friendlier face. Last Sunday I saw it everywhere, in all my old haunts. Took me by surprise, I can tell you. I had to rearrange my features - to return smiles, nods, welcoming salutations and thank yous. It was quite something. Put it to recession, to competition, to maturation, or to the coming of the next generation. Take the little shop opposite Mandai where I buy little frames and get things framed. The dour man who never showed me even a flicker of recognition all these years, was replaced by his daughter. The young girl chatted, showed me a bunch of choices to select from, and then cheerfully and expertly attached hooks to the backs of my little frames. Next stop, the guy who buys thinned out brass vessels off you. Again, two young boys weighed, paid up, and spread out a lovely choice of things that I could buy to replace the brass vessel that I sadly let go. Onward to the fellow who keeps yummy esoteric foods like ‘matki papad’ and ‘lissa sakhar’. Normally it would take me a whole 5 minutes at least to get noticed and heard by this gent. Even if there was no one else in the shop! And then another 10 minutes to elicit a grumpy “don’t have it”. This time round, he nodded me in, began to immediately pull out the things that I asked for and actually picked up the phone to ask when the dried onion flakes would arrive, and regretfully told me that it would take another week. When I said never mind, I’ll come back, he said “sorry I know you come from so far”. I jumped out of my skin, and wondered if I had heard that right. In this previous avatar he would have, if you dared to sigh about having come from a far-flung suburb all the way to their shop, shrugged or curled the top corner of one lip. As if to say “Who told you to live in the boonies?”
The same mellow mood was apparent at the cold-pressed oil merchant’s shop. I was on the earlier Pune shopping mode - when it got close to 1 pm, you had to simply give up on the idea of finishing your chores and shopping list in time. Now as I approached his shop and saw the wooden shutters being unfurled for a full shut-down, I thought I would save myself the indignity of being shooed away, and simply stopped on the pavement. The young man (possibly third generation there) who saw me, and the elderly shop assistant, smiled and reopened the doors (believe me, I am not making this up). On top of it, where earlier you were expected to bring your own little cans and bottles, or else go home without your fragrant cold-pressed til and coconut and groundnut oils, this time they pouched it for me. Customer convenience, smiles, consideration and mellow conversations...you better believe it, it’s the softer face of the third-gen Pune shopowner.
Now whether it was this sweetness and light that put me in a good mood, or whether things all around me are getting a little, little bit gentler, I don’t know. But I get the feeling that there is also an increasing tribe of polite drivers on the road too. Suddenly it feels as if I’m not the only one giving way, waving other cars on when they’re stuck at a U-turn, and slowing down or halting completely for pedestrians. I’ve been encountering quite a few others who will do that too, on the road. Somebody pinch me!