Loose night coats for women hang inside the glass walls of Pareed’s 27-year-old store in Muvattupuzha, an old town on the east side of Ernakulam. Raincoats, funeral kits, Hajj-Umrah pilgrimage clothes, umbrellas -- Pareed has neatly put down a list of what he sells in his store, below its title in big yellow font: Corona.
It has nothing to do with the scary coronavirus pandemic, and people know it too. However, the almost three-decade-old name is now bringing a lot of fresh attention to the shop and its 60-year-old owner, KE Pareed.
“Even as I speak to you, a car has stopped in front of the store and people are getting out to click a photo in front of the store,” Pareed says, suppresses a laugh.
All he knew 27 years ago was that ‘Corona’ sounded like an apt name for the new textile shop that he had converted his stitching centre into. It was earlier called Pant House, a little unit that a teen Pareed had opened in the late 1970s.
“In 1993 when I decided to open a textile shop and stitch shirts of our own, I realised Pant House would not work for shirts. There had to be a new name. In the dictionary, I found this word ‘corona’ that has some beautiful meanings – the circle of light around the sun, a crown, or else the valve of a heart,” says Pareed, a man with a taste for words.
People began calling him Corona Pareed, one he proudly acknowledged all these years. Even now when the word ‘corona’ brings fear to some who hear it, Pareed doesn’t mind the moniker. “Those who don’t know my story and see the name of the shop now look at it with interest. People come just to take snaps of the shop and sometimes include me in their selfies,” shares an amused Pareed.
But business is still not so great, he says. The pandemic has prevented people from coming out to shop on the streets. “Some of them who come to take photos do enter the shop and buy something. Business is not good. This is a small town, even otherwise, there are not a lot of sales,” he says.
Sometimes, his son, the middle child with a job in Infopark, comes to help at the store. The curious prefix to Pareed’s name has not been attached with anyone else in the family – neither his wife nor his three grownup children. Only Pareed is fondly called Corona, even by those who don’t know his real name.