Pick...

I saw her first thing as I entered the grocery store!

Not that she was strikingly beautiful or even particularly good looking. But she was the first person in the first aisle of the store and I couldn't help notice that she was picking the okra (now that was good looking!) delicately, carefully, one by one...

I wanted some of that okra! So while I waited for the First Lady to be done with it, I found my cart a safe parking spot (stuffing my jacket in it so no one would walk away with it) and armed myself with a plastic bag to gather my loot in...

Given the First Lady had moved to the second stall and given free access to fresh okra, I dug in. I thrust my right hand in, scooped out handfuls and gathered them in the bag until my left hand, holding the bag, started moving south, the gravitational force due to the weight of the okra defeating the resistance my arm offered...

Satisfied with my okra loot, I knotted the bag and gently looked over at what First Lady was picking at stall 2. Vegetable K, (I will call it for the purpose of this story as I don't know what it's called in English and in Tamil, it starts with a "K"), looked good too. First Lady or not, she certainly seemed to have fine taste...

Now I wanted some of that too but it didn't look like she was moving past it anytime soon. So I decided to come around and start picking Vegetable K from the other side. Kinda like from aisle zero...

Armed with another bag, I was ready to thrust my hand into K too, but something stopped me. It was the First Lady. She seemed to have made the chore of picking vegetables into an art. She picked one K at a time, gently pressed it to see how it was. She neither wanted it hard nor squishy. She wanted it soft and fresh but firm. Every time she found a bad one, she would patiently drop it to one side and pick another one. On and on she went...

After the brief moment of admiration of her art I looked down to see what my own hand was doing. Lo and behold! I was doing the same too. I didn't know what had come over me but I was picking Vegetable K, one by one! For someone who couldn't tell a good K from bad, I couldn't fathom why I was doing this. Frankly I think I was just embarrassed to thrust my hand and scoop it out as I stood right across the stall from the First Lady...

Another gentleman joined us soon. As though this was some kind of programmed act, he started picking them one by one too! I at once looked up at him. He didn't seem any different than me. Well, I'm not judging him, but he definitely didn't look like he knew a bad K from good. If I was embarrassed, I guess he was in entrapment. He had joined a code of conduct that was sacred, not to be broken...

None of us spoke or even looked at each other, we just continued cherry picking Vegetable K as though there was nothing else we'd rather be doing on a beautiful Sunday afternoon...

We might have gone on and on long into the evening but as though the proof that all good things must some time end, soon a woman, slightly older and clearly the norm, joined us on the vacant fourth side of the Vegetable K stall and before we knew it, thrust her right hand in...