A Times of India archive photograph shows long lines at a fair-price shop in Bombay's Girgaum district. Women waited on the left and men on the right to buy one seer of rice per person. Its caption says grain queues, absent after rationing was introduced in 1943, had returned for the first time in fourteen years.
The customers wanted the same commodity from the same shop, yet the queue was divided by gender. A system rationing rice per individual intersected with a convention separating men and women in public space. The image records scarcity, but also the social rules deciding where each person was expected to wait.