CHENNAI : Summers in Madras have always been a good exercise in sociology and human behavior. When the year starts to enter the month of April, when people around you start questioning the speed at which time seems to be moving and that it feels like New Year’s was just a week ago, our concerns on our calendars transition from our perception of time to dealing with the summer months in a city that has a premium subscription to the sun’s best summer package.
One of Madras’ best kept secrets is its juice shops; the ones you see in the corner of every big intersection; the ones that stock up on its mangoes and avocados; ones that serve you a large glass of juice for a price that’s exhilaratingly cheap that it makes you question the fruit, the shop’s hygiene, and the necessity to gulp a few more glasses because the sun isn’t going to go away.
If you haven’t been to a juice shop in the corner of your street, I strongly recommend that you do; not because I’m hard selling the idea of fresh fruit juices and shakes but because it instigates a sense of community — one that allows you to reinstate your faith in the city that it’s going to help you get past
the summer.
The best times to go to your corner juice shops are in the evening when it’s permissible for large crowds to be confined to a small location without it turning into a melting pot of humans. You have two different sizes to choose from — the ‘medium’ and the ‘large’. There is no real ‘small’, the ‘medium’ is effectively your small. I think juice shop owners employ this strategy to trick customers into buying more; ‘medium’ certainly sounds bigger than ‘small’.
From Dragon Fruits to Avocados, corner shops stock up on fruits that you wouldn’t be able to access unless you went looking for it. And these fruit shakes and juices aren’t just refreshments, they are affordable, safe public places to build community.Before the west started taking to malls, sometime in the 60s, there was a dire need for a ‘Third Place”; if your life were to be divided into places that you spend your time in, it’d be home, work, and a third place.
And the third place is why malls came into existence — they’re cheap, you can run into people, you could make friends, you can spend a lot of time there, and you can go there without purpose. The corner juice shops are Madras’ Third Places, especially during the summer months.With the lack of public spaces to resort to while the sun stares down on us, our corner juice shops become the makeshift spaces that bestows communion and have a ‘large’ glass of Dragon Fruit shake for just `60.