“Arrey, this is not pav kilo,” my mother’s 95-year-old kaki yells to me as she weighs three tomatoes in her wrinkled and deeply furrowed hands. The tarkariwala had just palmed these off to her. He knows that she can’t see very well and thinks she wouldn’t know the difference if he gave her lemons instead of tomatoes. What he doesn’t know is that these hands have cooked more tomatoes than he’ll sell in a lifetime; that these hands have toiled to make meals for her family, her neighbours and their families for decades.
