Sri Vijaya Puram: She doesn’t have a shop. She has a spot. A log for a seat, a rusted tin can for company, and a patch of warm pavement at the edge of Rathnam Market, where generations come and go, but she stays. In front of her lies an old Ammikallu, the stone grinder worn silky smooth from decades of use. Meet Sanas Amma, possibly the only person in town still grinding her legacy by hand. Literally.
She isn’t just selling spices. She’s selling time. Smell. Memory.
Over forty years ago, Sanas Amma arrived in the Andaman Islands from a village in Andhra Pradesh. It was the Indira Gandhi era. She came with a husband, a child, and a community of women who carried more than just luggage, they brought culinary muscle memory. They were the masala women. They didn’t need mixers or motors. Just turmeric roots, sun-dried chilies, stone grinders, and calloused palms.
At their peak, there were nearly two dozen of them in Rathnam Market, each woman a specialist in a spice. Today, only Sanas Amma remains.
What happened? Life. Age. Rising costs. The arrival of packaged powders. The slow erosion of space and time for the handmade. And yet, through all of it, she stayed, grinding on the same stone, under the same sky, without shelter, electricity, or signage.
For this prime piece of footpath real estate, she pays ₹750 to the municipal council every month. No receipt, no roof. Just rent. “They say if you want to sit, sit. If not, leave,” she shrugs, with the practiced indifference of someone who’s heard it all before.
But leaving has never been her way.
Her daughter now helps her grind masalas. Her son-in-law runs a lemonade stall across the road. His mother sells sun-dried prawns nearby. It’s a generational micro-economy held together by sweat, sun, and sheer willpower.
Her stall, if you can call it that, offers more than just spice. Her turmeric has depth. Her chili has history. Her coriander smells like monsoon afternoons in kitchens that no longer exist. Each packet she packs is a quiet protest against everything disposable.
“I’m doing what my mother and grandmother did,” she says, her hands never stopping. “We want to carry it forward.”
Except the “we” has become just “me.”
There are no others. The tradition is dying, not with drama but with indifference. If she disappears, so does the last living link to a tradition that once flavoured an entire market, and perhaps an entire island.
She doesn’t want sympathy. She wants shelter. A clean, safe space to sit. Maybe even a table. And, perhaps, the quiet dignity of being seen not as a relic, but as the living, breathing archive of Sri Vijaya Puram.
Because culture doesn’t only live in books or museums. Sometimes, it lives in a woman on a log, pushing spice against stone.
She is Sanas Amma. The last masala woman of Sri Vijaya Puram.
