Small unidentified happenings

I love the little UFO moments in life where someone or something so utterly random crosses your path so as to be life affirming. Such a very thing happened to me today, dear reader. I was in Little India looking for a large sponge or a  broom handle attached to one of those squeegee things.  I stopped at one stellar shop which had populated the footpath with a constellation of aluminium utensils and plastic buckets of varying sizes and colours. I walked into the tube-lit store and found the ownerman who had one good eye and another eye which looked like a large white, carved marble. He stood up and said "yes, hello?."  

I said, "Hello, do you have one of those large sponges? Or those mops with a sponge, you know, to soak up standing water?"

He thought about it for a second and then he said, "No. I don't have that. But I have rope."