Musings: Perariyathavar

The Kiosk

There was a kiosk next to where I sat at the food court. 

It offered Banana Avil Milk. 

The kind of stall that looks inevitable inside a mall: a lit-up counter, an overhead TV running its commercial - where a bearded actor whipped up avil milk and handheld gifts - akin to Kinder Joy's, in a yellow egg for excited kids. The person at the counter had his phone out. No customers came while I watched. None left either.

I sat there long enough to notice that the stall had a rhythm of its own - a kind of practised stillness, like something holding its breath. Visible in plain sight, with its distinctive yellow branding, standing upright, a glance and it's forgotten from your sight, as you make your way.

And I thought: what actually holds this together? What does a person have to believe, or risk, to set something like this up?

What are the costs? What are the targets? What happens to the founder, to the person at the counter, to the kiosk itself?

Musings

I kept eating, lazily people-watching. Nothing particular on my mind - just the general drift of a mall afternoon, people moving in and out of frame the way they do when you have nowhere to be for a while.

And somewhere between one spoonful and the next, I started thinking about how something like this actually works. Not the product. The arrangement. The invisible machinery behind a counter that nobody is walking up to.

Because I felt, sitting there, that I was looking at something whose workings I couldn't quite see.

Curiosity got the better of me. I started looking into how mall kiosks actually survive.

A kiosk in a mall like this one doesn't come cheap. Rent alone runs ₹80,000 to ₹2.5 lakh a month depending on where you're positioned. And malls don't stop at flat rent. They take a revenue share on top, usually 15 to 25 percent of gross sales, whichever figure hurts more. If the brand is a franchise, there's an upfront fee already paid, ₹2 to 8 lakh, non-refundable. Fit-out, refrigeration, branding: another ₹3 to 10 lakh. Security deposit, locked away. Staff wages. Raw material with spoilage baked in. Common area maintenance charges, billed separately, because of course they are.

Before a single avil milk is sold, someone has already put in ₹8 to 15 lakh. Probably more.

For a kiosk like this to make sense, there are numbers behind it that most of us never see. Rent. Revenue share. Staff. Spoilage. Franchise fees. The counter in front of me looked simple enough, but there was an entire spreadsheet hidden behind the branding.

For this to work, you need sixty to a hundred customers a day. Five to eight people an hour, every hour, across a twelve-hour mall day. Including Tuesdays. Including the 3 PM slot when the mall feels like a waiting room.

Whether this kiosk was meeting those numbers, I had no way of knowing.

Malls also build in something called a Minimum Guaranteed Revenue, a floor below which you pay as though you had hit it anyway. A concept I didn't even know existed until I started reading about it.

I thought about who had signed that lease. Probably someone who walked through this mall on a busy weekend, watched the crowd, did a version of the math I was now doing, and reached a different conclusion. The franchise pitch deck would have shown Saturday numbers.

The kiosk had a grand opening when I searched online and combed through photos. Something struck me - the people pictured manning the counter weren't there anymore. Probably. I'm not sure if they follow a shift policy.

Reels on Instagram had covered this kiosk, probably as part of promotions. Who knows the backstory of the person making the avil milk, the person serving it, or the story behind the faces featured in the reel?

Somewhere between the launch photos and the promotional reels, I found myself thinking less about the avil milk and more about the people behind it.

Perariyathavar.

Who were they? Where had they gone? Were they still here or had they moved on long ago?

It always gets me when employees glance back at the camera as reels cover a new venture as part of promotions. This was no exception.

One particular YouTube video that I happened to come across showed forgotten remnants of kiosks that once existed in the same food court. Did I walk amongst their midst without ever noticing them? Did they have stories to tell too?

And yet none of the numbers I had been reading about were visible from where I sat. All I could see was a yellow counter, a phone face-up, and an afternoon moving slowly around it.

I don't know which side of the spreadsheet this kiosk sits on. I was just a person eating his food.

It was probably money that gave hope to a family to earn bread at the end of the day. It was something that lent fuel to potential that someone saw. Maybe it still is.

The person at the counter, whoever he is, is part of something whose outcome I can't read from where I'm sitting.

If things don't work out, he would walk away with a week's notice, if that. No provident fund. No gratuity. Just the next counter job somewhere else in the city, carrying nothing of what went wrong there.

Before I Left

I finished my food. The kiosk was still there when I left. The person had put his phone face-down.

I don't know if I'll see the same stall the next time I visit. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll finally see a queue in front of it.

What stayed with me wasn't the avil milk.

It was the realization that every kiosk hides a small ecosystem behind it - founders, employees, suppliers, rents, spreadsheets, hopes, risks, and decisions that most of us never notice as we walk by.

It was one of those things you notice when you have nowhere to be and a store is just sitting in front of you, not quite failing, not quite holding on. Just present.

I don't know what he was thinking.

But I think I understand a little better what it cost someone to put him there.