Ruma Sengupta opens the store at ten on the dot, which is later than most groceries but earlier than most customers expect of her. The bell above the door is a small brass one her father shipped from Kolkata in 2010. It has needed re-fastening twice.
The store is called Maa"s Pantry. It sits on the second floor of a brick building in a small Montana town, above a tax preparation office. There is no street sign. You have to know.
Ruma is fifty-five. She came to the United States in 1996 with her husband, a petroleum geologist whose work eventually brought them to a refinery job in this corner of Montana. She has lived in the same house since 2003.
Maa"s Pantry is, by her own knowledge and a great deal of Googling, the only Bengali grocery within two hundred miles. Her closest competitor, if you could call it that, is a South Asian store in Salt Lake City that does not stock the things she stocks.
She stocks mustard oil from West Bengal, frozen hilsa fish from Bangladesh, panch phoron, kasundi mustard sauce, gondhoraj lemons in season, and a brand of Darjeeling tea she imports six kilograms at a time. She also stocks Maggi noodles, Parle-G biscuits, and, somewhat reluctantly, a small section of Hindi-language romance novels.
The first customer of the day, almost every day, is a retired schoolteacher named Mira who lives ninety-two miles away in another small town. Mira drives in every Tuesday. She has done so for fourteen years.
I do not need a lot, Mira says, examining a packet of cumin seeds. I need to come.
Ruma understands. She has set up a small back room with three folding chairs and an electric kettle. Mira sits there for an hour with a cup of tea before she drives home.
“She has set up a small back room with three folding chairs and an electric kettle.”
The back room is, depending on the day, an informal community center, a counseling office, a debate hall, and once, memorably, a wedding-planning headquarters for a couple who had no relatives within a thousand miles.
Customers come from Wyoming, Idaho, the Dakotas, and the far edges of Canada. They are graduate students, oil workers, doctors at rural hospitals, a single Bengali farmer with a wheat operation outside Bismarck.
She runs the store alone four days a week. Her husband, now retired, helps on Fridays and Saturdays. He runs the register and pretends not to listen to the conversations in the back room. Ruma knows he is listening.
The store does not make much money. It does not lose money either. Ruma has been clear with herself about what it is.
It is a service, she says, weighing out turmeric on a small scale. It is not a profit center. If it pays for itself, that is enough.
She buys most of her inventory through a wholesaler in New Jersey, who ships her pallets every six weeks. The shipping costs are absurd. She negotiates them gently and persistently.
She makes her own sweets on weekends. Sandesh, rasgulla, a coconut burfi her grandmother taught her. Customers preorder. She delivers them in small white boxes tied with red string.
Her daughter, who lives in Seattle and works in tech, has tried for years to convince her to start an online store. Ruma has resisted. She says half of what she sells is the back room. You cannot ship the back room.
There was a hard year in 2017 when her husband had a heart attack and she nearly closed the store. She kept it open by reducing hours and asking three regulars to volunteer. They did. She has never forgotten which three.
The store smells, depending on where you stand, of cardamom, mustard oil, dried fish, jasmine rice, and the particular sweet warmth of stovetop chai that she makes throughout the day in a small saucepan.
At noon she eats lunch at the counter. Rice, dal, a small piece of fried fish. She offers some to whoever is in the back room. They usually accept.
She has been featured in two newspapers and one regional magazine. She did not enjoy any of the interviews. She does not consider what she does to be a story.
I am a grocer, she says, ringing up a young engineer who has driven three hours for ghee and a bag of sona masuri rice. That is all.
She closes the store at six-thirty. The bell rings as the last customer leaves. She wipes down the counter. She refills the small tin of cardamom pods on the spice shelf. She turns off the lights one row at a time, the way she has always done, because she likes the slow goodnight of it.
Downstairs the tax office has already closed. The street is quiet. She drives home along a road that, in summer, smells of cut alfalfa. She thinks about what she will need to reorder this week. She thinks about Mira, and whether Mira looked tired. She thinks about her father, who never saw the store, and would have liked it.
