My gradual realization about what a one-off and distinctive institution Ujjala Chanachur is came to me when I began to notice its queues. I don’t mean that I was impressed by the number of people who lined up to purchase the product — that number varies from two to ten — but the fact that a queue was enforced by the proprietor or vendor at all. This makes the tiny shop exceptional in its dealings with customers. We all know how one of the ubiquitous innovations of contemporary India is the horizontal queue, stretching from left to right or right to left, whichever way you choose to see it, instead of front to back, as is the convention; this horizontal line can be added to at any time, by simply joining, in a stealthy act of mock-political solidarity, the others who are already waiting, and adding your voice to theirs. The vendor’s strategy in this regard is to keep his head bowed and finish working on whatever he’s rustling up, and then question the next person he arbitrarily glances at about what he wants. Whatever his inner feelings — and they can’t, despite his apparently contained air, be calm — the person in the horizontal line experiences a roller-coaster of emotion. Ujjala Chanachur abhors this kind of drama. I’ve seen people try to slip in sideways, adhering to an existing customer like an unobtrusive rib, and then make a careless interjection in the vein of “Achha dada, araisho deben” — “Two fifty grams, dada” — only to be sternly gestured by the vendor (they’re eagle-eyed and miss nothing, the Ujjala staff, immersed though they might seem in their task) to go and stand behind the other customers. So there’s no milling in front of the shop; the queue, when there is one, stretches to its right. In this way, everyone is ensured that they’ll get the manna of the chanachur without having to spectate as someone gets theirs out of turn. And so customers here exude an unusual confidence, and are noticeably silent, patient, and not worked up in comparison to their counterparts elsewhere, even allowing themselves the luxury of thinking of other things as they wait: all this arising not only from trusting the product, but also from trusting the system by which they’ll eventually procure it. It’s an exemplary ritual of civilized buying and selling which you might well miss if you pass by the shop in a hurry, or haven’t visited it a couple of times.

For me, this is familiar territory, since it’s not far from where my maternal uncle has lived for about half a century. Yet such claims have to be qualified by irony — I never heard of Ujjala Chanachur when I used to visit my uncle’s family every year (though I knew of Ujjala Cinema, and probably even went there to watch a film with the extended family); now that I hardly visit my uncle’s house (though we finally live in the same city), the main reason for my sojourns to this terrain is the chanachur shop. And it’s because Ujjala Chanachur is in my thoughts that I mention it to my cousin, this very maternal uncle’s daughter, who’s come here from America, on holiday with her two children; I learn for the first time that my uncle has not only tasted it but is, in his unmistakable manner, a champion: “He claims it’s not just good, it’s the best chanachur anywhere,” my cousin informs me, slightly indulgent towards her father’s habitual extravagances: for him, things belong to two categories, ‘the best’ and ‘the worst’. But I do agree — though my experience and comparativist knowledge in chanachur is limited. Ujjala’s variety I came to know of after my marriage, through my wife, a Calcuttan born and bred. Earlier, I wasn’t terribly conscious of chanachur as a worthwhile snack or even a pastime. Unlike many people who measure their humanity and others’ through how addicted they are to, say, phuchka, my passion for Indian junk food burns with only a low-grade intensity. From graduating to a consciousness that Ujjala Chanachur exists, I now have an irregular but foreseeably permanent relationship with it. Along with this relationship has come an appraisal that this chanachur is probably, in its own way, famous, at least among a freemasonry of connoisseurs.

The shop, with its superior fare and its superior view of queues, is remarkable partly because it’s so unprepossessing. It’s actually not quite a shop as we understand that word today; but it’s more than a stall. Primarily, it is a small room — divided by a wall into the shop in the foreground, that gleams because of its stone and glass surfaces, and the workplace at the back, largely invisible except for the giant black karhai whose one end juts out into the customer’s line of vision, and the blackened, medieval walls. The owner seems to think it’s perfectly appropriate for the customer to understand that chanachur is created in a timeless furnace before it travels just a few feet into the petit bourgeois propriety of the front part of the shop, with its smart, blue-tinged weighing scale; here it acquires the air of having been manufactured by a form of immaculate conception, with no connection to oil, grime, and smoke. This front part has large mirrors, a mandatory likeness of Ganesh on the left, a mother goddess in the background before the mirror, and a large, minatory Kali on the right. On shelves are edibles in cellophane packages: the sort of thing that few people come to Ujjala in search of, and for which they can go to Haldiram Bhujiawala. The shop, which is all floor, always has two people in it, and often three; these people are never seen standing. Mostly, it’s the proprietor who sits like a munshi on the left, relaying the customer’s preferred permutation to the vendor on the right, who’s usually too busy rustling up these very specific, nuanced orders to be mindful of the existence of the customers themselves; the latter just might, occasionally, leave without being looked at even once by the man who’s prepared their mix. The proprietor or his substitute receives the money, hands over the parcel, and, in keeping with Ujjala’s generally enlightened outlook, is businesslike and isn’t insistent about customers handing in exact change. The shrine-like bhakti or devotion imparted to the interior by its three or four deities is reflected in the quiet, methodical zeal with which the vendor concocts the chanachur. Not far above him hovers an orb-like clock, alerting us to the fact that this narrow, busy scene is slightly reminiscent of Bhupen Khakhar’s Janata Watch Repairing, in which, too, someone, in a constricted space of which he’s the centre, is painstakingly handling bead-like objects — the parts of a watch. Both in Khakhar’s painting and at Ujjala Chanachur we’re asked to understand that time is work, that it’s precious, and that it’s a barely graspable aspect of eternity.

In fact, not much else is happening in this environment: the Ujjala Cinema itself, after which the chanachur is named, is long gone, replaced by a seven-year-old glass-fronted edifice that looks, oddly, like it’s still expecting occupation. Walking in the opposite direction, you find that Basusree is barely extant, with idlers gathered on a sofa by the entrance, waiting for Jism 2 to end and the audience for Muktodhara to arrive; the cinema largely forgotten by the bustling, carefree middle class (itself now so remote as to be a fiction) that climbed up its stairs only 30 years ago. Back at Ujjala’s, I must remember to instruct, like many other customers, that I want ‘naam matro’ peanuts in my mix — that is, as good as none — and an abundance of the papri that’s made of some variety of besan and/or flour, and resembles more closely than its equivalents in other kinds of chanachur the curled petals after which it is named. The man nods dourly, distributes a percentage of each ingredient into a brown paper bag, grudgingly adding a few peanuts for the sake of form, sprinkles the mixture with a brown dust that may be rock salt or chaat masala, and shakes it temperately. Turning my back to the shop with the precious parcel, I see, diagonally across the road, one of the city’s most magnificent monuments, the Greek Orthodox Church, which I used to pass as a child going down the wide avenue that’s S.P. Mukherjee Road, but haven’t yet investigated. Such grandeur in proximity to the small-scale domesticity of my uncle’s house was something I could never get used to. I’m still a bit overwhelmed by its portals. I have little to do with this Calcutta any more though; getting back into the car, I encounter it each time as a transient while relishing the ebbing warmth of the papri in the brown paper bag.