SH: [laughs]
LA: [laughs] Up next, Shahnaz on where she grew up and how it shaped her.
Tell me a little bit about where you grew up.
SH: I grew up in a very small town called Ernakulam, in Kerala, which is a state in southern India. The road I grew up on runs parallel to the railway station. And so, there would always be like these little streets from which, like, people going to the station and people coming from the station would be running to catch the trains, or, uh, you know, coming out of the station. Um, and there was just this random assortment of businesses. Um, there’d be like, uh, uh, like, th- this time that I went back, I saw, uh, there was like this cluster of leather shops. Like all these people who are making school bags and shoes.
Um, and I’ve always been fascinated by how certain, you know, uh, vendors kind of cluster together. Um, so I feel like this road is sort of like remaking itself as like a sort of like road of leather vendors. Uh, there is a little f- flour mill, and, um, as a child, I used to often to the flour mill, when my mother’s grains, my parents would send me to the flour mill to get an, get all the grains, uh, milled. And I still do it now, because, uh, I loved the idea of going to a mill to get something ground. We buy so much flour now from the supermarket, and still, this little mill is still running. And there’s this one man who still will grind your poultices and grains.
There’s a lot of development on both sides of the street, especially now when I go, you know, what used to be all these houses, are rapidly giving way to apartment buildings. And there are lots of little bakeries where, um, I used to stop after school to get, you know, little snacks, like a little samosa or an egg puff.
LA: God, I bet they smell so good there.
SH: [laughs]
LA: [laughs]
SH: Yeah. Exactly. And, yeah, luckily the bakeries are still there. And somehow they seem to be expanding. There seem to be more bakeries. At some point, I said the people on this road will keep these bakeries alive.
