M ecsa and Kumud, migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh are bickering over a yellow dupatta , having rummaged through shelves of clothes in the community fridge, known as Ayyamittu Unn, installed in Besant Nagar. The elder sister relents and they leave with the dupatta , a red churidhar and T-shirt. Their uncle is waiting in an auto, to take them back home. They say they come here at least once every month and are never disappointed. Shortly, a trinket seller on Elliot’s Beach stops by with her three-year-old son, explores the same shelves and takes a pair of socks, as the guard of the unit looks on.
Started in August last year primarily as a community fridge where people could leave leftover food for the poor, Ayyamittu Unn now seems to attract more clothes than food. ‘Ayyamittu Unn’ is a Tamil proverb which translates to “offer your food to others before eating it yourself”. The first unit was installed outside the tennis club in Custom Colony, Besant Nagar by orthodontist Dr Issa Fathima Jasmine of The Public Foundation that runs the initiative. The Besant Nagar Tennis Club provides electricity for running the fridge. The foundation has since installed three more such units in the city, in Alandur, Ashok Nagar and Kandanchavady.
“We do receive abundant food donations. The apparent excess of clothing can be attributed to how instantly food items get taken away from the fridge,” says the doctor. The idea was inspired by necessity, in an effort to bridge the gap between deprivation and colossal household wastage, she says.
A typical Ayyamittu Unn unit has a refrigerator for the food and five shelves for the clothes. Armugam M, the guard stationed at the Besant Nagar unit says that most of the food is brought in around afternoon everyday, and it gets over within minutes. The clothes shelves are always full and when they get overstocked, they are taken to The Public Foundation’s office, from where it is further donated to institutions like orphanages and relief camps.
According to the entry sheet that logs in details of the donations at the Besant Nagar unit, 502 different donations were made last month alone, out of which 86 were food donations. “One person is allowed to take two to three pieces of clothing at a time. They can come back when in need and take more,” says Armugam. Every few minutes auto rickshaws stop by the unit and the driver picks out what he likes and drives away. According to him, some residents of Urur Kuppam and those living on the Besant Nagar beach generally frequent the unit.
Over Sunday evening and Monday morning, the Besant Nagar unit received 53 pieces of used clothing from 10 different donors. Apart from this, a group of revellers donated a leftover birthday cake that evening and a restaurant worker brought in 10 packets of breakfast in the morning.
When Armugam stops a person from taking more than the stipulated number of clothing, an altercation erupts, which he tries to resolve patiently. This is a regular occurrence, he says. Just as this clamour subsides, Kishen VN and family alight from a car and hand over a bundle of neatly pressed clothes to Armugam. This is the second time the family is donating clothes here.
“As people walk in and take what they need, there is no air of judgment,” says Armugam, who opens the unit at 7 am everyday and locks it at 9 pm. Even at 66, the caretaker tirelessly springs up from his chair to arrange the clothes back in place each time someone ruffles through the shelves. On Mondays, during his day off, Selvi takes over. The 32-year-old however, opens the unit only by 9 am. “That is because once I come here, I cannot leave the unit unattended to go home to look after my small children. So I open late after tending to them in the morning.”
The Public Foundation has also installed a community fridge in Bengaluru. Says Issa, “We often talk about problems like pollution and corruption, but household wastage is seldom addressed. It would be wonderful if more locals took on this initiative.”
