Corner Shop

There are certain corner shops and grocery stores, little backwater dives located on secluded streets, that even in the lengths of afternoon seem dark and gloomy, as if they were located underground, and only a glimmer of light were allowed through.
In one such shop, on one such afternoon, M traipsed to and fro, pretending to be interested in the scant merchandise on offer. The interior of this little shop was murky-brown and bare, with a floor-covering smooth and swept-clean. Against one wall was a cheap-looking wire rack on which various newspapers and magazines were arranged, and by the door leading into the inner sanctum of the building was a chipped, shoddy counter on which were scattered a few scraps of paper. The place was empty of staff and of customers, besides M.
He wandered around, coughing embarassedly, waiting, puzzling at the bare pasteboard walls, the sense of desolation and even despair which seemed to inhabit the place. It seemed for all the world as though the shop had been cleared of all but its most worthless stock, and even of its internal decorations, so that the only advertisement posters that remained were of the quietest and most modest kind.
The proprietors of the shop were a rotund, homely family of Asians, who M had seen before stepping out onto the shop-floor among the crowded,neatly-piled boxes of stock, the solid-bodied mother, perpetually grinning and head-scarfed, purple-swathed in a neat sari with a diaphanous veil. Yet behind it all, somewhere, M felt as always the great gloom  of such families, an inexplicable gloom related to headscarves, moustachio'd fathers with white-glaring eyes, coins scraped bitterly across counters, lamentations in Urdu, mangy newspapers full of swishy characters in the back alley. This family worked quietly, arose at dawn to gather in the papers, sort out the rack with its load of brightly-coloured magazines, creaking across floorboards, mumbling their sorrows to one another.