Lilies. Gerberas. Roses. They’re wrapped in yellow tissue, clear cellophane and that new, biodegradable brown paper packaging. They’re flowers from a dairy.
They’re the kind of flowers you buy on your way home because you’ve forgotten a birthday or there’s been good news or you just want to tell someone you were thinking of them. Impromptu. Unplanned.
On Thursday morning, the unexpected dairy flowers were placed in neat rows outside another dairy. The night before, a shop worker was stabbed and killed. Sandringham’s Rose Cottage Superette is now a crime scene. Locals spent the day laying flowers, paying tribute - and asking: What next?
Kanti Daya, 83, walks with a stick in one hand and an umbrella in the other. He’s lived in this neighbourhood his entire life. In 1891, his grandfather got off a boat in New Plymouth and paid one pound to become a permanent resident. He moved to Auckland to hawk fruit and vegetables before opening his shops - first in Kingsland, and eventually Sandringham. Daya remembers making potato deliveries with his dad.
“The doors would be unlocked. You’d find a little bikkie on the table, and it was great. Nowadays, you can’t leave your back door open.”
Daya is walking and talking, making his way up Haverstock Rd. He’s pulled up short at the police cordon. An officer tells him he’ll need to detour. “The quick way,” says Daya, “Is the other way . . . better than climbing the hill.”
He heard the news at 6am. “Normally I don’t get up at six, it makes the day too long.” But he listened to the radio, and then the phone started ringing. In Sandringham, people were checking in on each other.
Pōhutukawa. Bougainvillaea. Some of the flowers being laid outside the shop colloquially known as “the pink dairy” are handcut from local gardens. Aroha Mita carries a large bunch of star jasmine. It’s from the hedge her neighbour trimmed just last week - before he left for India and left the pink dairy in the care of a young married couple.
Mita didn’t know the man who died, or his wife - they’d only been minding the shop a few days - but she’s lived here 30 years. She knows this neighbourhood.
“I was actually doing the hedges . . . I’d tidied up our clippings and I went inside because of the rain. We heard the sirens and it sounded so close. We hear them every day, almost . . . we looked out the window and saw the ambulance and the police and they were going towards the gate and then his lovely wife was running around the back and I thought, ‘my God, she looks traumatised’ and the paramedics were going towards someone outside their locked gate . . . "
Once, she says, nobody locked their gates.
By 10.30am, a crowd of several hundred had gathered outside Rose Cottage Superette. Sunny Kaushal, Dairy and Business Owners Group chair, was speaking: “What answers do we have for this young man’s wife?”
It was rubbish day in that part of Sandringam. Trucks made the awkward roundabout turn and police lifted the lids on the red bins and peered inside. They doorknocked in groups of three; paused to inspect a garden glove in a gutter. Tents labelled “specialist search group” were erected and, outside the pink dairy, there was a defibrillator on the berm.
Kaushal, who represents 5000 business owners, organised Thursday’s gathering.
“What we are hearing from the community across New Zealand, is that a sense of lawlessness is gripping the entire country. Noone is feeling safe. The businesses are not safe, the workers are not safe at their work, the general public is not safe, even in shopping malls.
“Business owners have installed jail-like bars and structures and they’ve caged themselves to protect their workers and their shops whereas the offenders are out roaming the streets and intimidating, assaulting, ram raiding without any fear. They have no fear of police, of law, of being caught or any consequences. There needs to be accountability.”
He tells the Herald: “This is a wake up call for Government. I see this turning into a voting decision next year.”
The pink dairy is in the Mt Albert electorate. Its Member of Parliament is also the country’s Prime Minister. Jacinda Ardern lives 1.2km away from this crime scene. The flowers, waiata and speeches are done. A smaller crowd remains. What are they talking about?
“They are asking me, ‘what action? When do we do the protest march?’” says Kaushal. “If we have to do it, we have to do it properly. The mood is very angry. People are saying enough is enough. Because it has been decades and decades of these migrant communities who are suffering, but they are not valued.”
Sandringham is a multi-ethnic suburb. It’s famous for its Indian restaurants. Its dahi puri; its chicken 65. On a blustery day in November, makeshift signs direct residents to Christmas tree sales. The halal butcher sells aged rump steak for $22.99 a kilogram and, at the Community Centre, the noticeboard advertises smart tech courses for seniors and Pacific handicrafts with Hone. At night, the smashed burger food truck on the edge of the village lights up with the legend “Eat. Love. Repeat.”
Kshitij Vatsa owns the dairy directly opposite that truck. A cage separates him from his customers. Bollards have been installed - in April, there was a 2am ram raid. A couple of years ago, four masked men entered his shop and took the till and cigarettes. He was out the back and he didn’t confront them.
“What would I have done?”
On Thursday, a customer entered his shop and selected an orange drink from the fridge.
“Hi mate,” said Vatsa. “Time for you guys to get guns, man,” said the customer.
Vatsa: “I have always thought New Zealand is pretty safe. And something like that happens in the area . . . "
On Wednesday night, as the news filtered out that a Sandringham dairy had been hit, Vatsa says he received texts from regular customers: “How are you? Are you safe?”
Outside the pink dairy, when Kaushal finishes speaking, people don’t immediately leave. It’s hot and windy. Blossoms are falling and conversation drifts.
“We should organise a barbecue . . . The berms are nice and wide . . . It’s good to reconnect . . .”
But, also: “Why can’t they work hard and come up, like he, and I, and her . . . Intergenerational trauma . . . He thinks, because of inequality, this man is dead. Can you believe it?”
The wind is really getting up now. A shock of bright red bougainvillaea bounces away from the neat row of bunched flowers. The sign on the dairy advertises the Black Caps versus India. A young woman is in tears. The wife of the man who was killed was her high school friend, she says.
“If you want the money, just take it. Don’t kill anyone. Everyone’s got things to do in their life, why would you want to kill an innocent soul? Take the money and go. Run fast, don’t injure anyone . . . how many more people are going to die? You tell me. This year, how many more people?”
More than two dozen firefighters battled the fire at its peak.