It was through his wife that Khader came to own the stationery shop that was right next to the tamarind tree. Just as he had dreamed when he was younger, he ended up marrying the only daughter of a rich man.

At a very young age, Janab Abdul Aziz had left Kalakkad for Singapore and returned when he was fifty, a few lakhs richer. He came back to Kalakkad to retire, dreaming of spending the rest of his life in pleasant inactivity and rest. However, as someone who had worked hard since childhood, it was not long before he realized that retirement was a punishment, not a reward. He learned that if he invested some of his money in vacant plots of land, he might garner excellent returns when they increased in value over the years. So he bought a small plot at the tamarind-tree junction from Neelakantan Potri, for eighty rupees a cent. Later, he decided to build a shop there so he could rent it out. Many people in Kalakkad began to express their interest in renting the store even before construction was complete, which showed him how in demand that location was. And it made him wonder. Well, I am dying of boredom here, he thought. Why don’t I do something myself?

Once the construction was over, he furnished the store with the bare essentials, so sparsely that anyone looking in from the outside would assume the store was empty. And there he sat. The time passed agreeably. Why wouldn’t it? It was, after all, the tamarind-tree junction. Newspapers landed at his doorstep every morning and evening. He had hired a few boys to boss around. There was a cinema theater right next door. The non-veg restaurant was just a few feet away. And there were his friends from the Muslim League to discuss politics.

But business never caught on. His political views were the reason why. The first thing anyone would see as they climbed the steps to the store was a huge portrait of Janab Jinnah Sahib, once the leader of the Muslim League and then the first governor-general of Pakistan. What other reason did the nationalists need to boycott the shop? He could always consider lowering the prices, but the trouble was that Janab Abdul Aziz was not a man of tact. Like an old man singing his first wife’s praises to his second wife, he endlessly glorified Singapore and spoke unflatteringly of India to everyone. So it was no surprise that his business never took off.