This tiny Kendall grocery was the heart of Miami’s Indian community. Now it’s closing

When he opened his tiny Indian store almost 40 years ago in a West Kendall strip mall, Suresh Sheth knew he wanted to do more than sell groceries.

He wanted to offer strangers hope — and a sense of home in Miami.

So while they loaded up on lentils and rice, curries and chutneys, impossible-to-find Indian spices and vegetables at the Indo American Store, immigrants from India and Pakistan and Bangladesh could fulfill other needs, too. They could get help finding a place to live or a lead on a job. They could receive friendly guidance on how to negotiate complicated Miami bureaucracy. They could rent VHS tapes of Bollywood movies that reminded them of home, the ones they couldn’t find at Blockbuster. Most importantly, they could experience a strong sense of community at a time before cellphones and the Internet made the world feel smaller.

Some got free groceries until they could get on their feet. To others, Sheth gave money with no expectation of being paid back. “Just do the same for someone else,” he would tell them.

Now, Sheth — for decades a grocer and philosopher, herbal specialist and health advocate, therapist and matchmaker for Miami’s Indian community — is closing his store at 13760 SW 84th St., another victim of rising rent and other expenses in South Florida.

“The rent goes up, that’s the main problem,” says Sheth, 78, adding that his rent increased from $3,100 a month to $5,000. “The light bill goes up. We have to have insurance. Where can you get that kind of money? Everything costs money.”

Losing a Kendall institution that survived Hurricane Andrew and the Covid pandemic is hard, but the closing also means a major life change for Sheth, who has lived with his wife Niru in Kendall since 1982. He has worked seven days a week for 39 years, rarely taking vacations, missing his now-grown childrens’ soccer games and Odyssey of the Mind competitions, all to follow a family tradition of helping others.

Sheth, whose family is from Mangrol, a town in the state of Gujarat, India, says he learned the importance of serving others through his grandfather, who was a sort of caretaker for his village.

“Everybody came to my grandfather with any kind of problem,” Sheth says. “My mother did it, then my brother did it. Now I’ve done it.”

Daughter Sushma Sheth Ray, who lives in New York and works for Planned Parenthood, has been in Miami to help with the closing. She said her father’s devotion to his community has been a “big sacrifice” for the family.

“He’s not trying to push products,” she says. “It’s because God forbid someone comes here looking for him and doesn’t see him. . . . My father feels like he’s on call and has to be here for people all day. We love that, but it’s been tough, and we also want him to have a break from that.”

Sheth’s son Alpen, a venture capitalist who lives in Miami with his wife and young daughter, agrees that his father’s attitude toward his store is not merely transactional.

“We had to negotiate quite a bit to get him to come to our wedding,” he says. “He’s from a different generation. He thinks about his job as ‘I need to have a personal relationship with people,’ whereas now when you open a store you don’t think about that. You just think about the business.”

The examples of Sheth caring about more than the business have become legends in the community. He became an unofficial marriage counselor, his wife Niru says, encouraging couples to talk to each other and following up to see how they were getting along. He’d help single customers find partners and call the offices of local politicians to keep customers from sleeping on the streets.

Parth Pahchal, who arrived in Miami 16 years ago at the age of 21, calls Sheth his “father away from home.”

“Suresh was always here to guide me,” he says. “Being new in the country, I didn’t know where to get anything. He guided me through everything. One time I was so short of money I couldn’t pay the rent, and he just gave me the money. It was a big favor. I said, ‘I don’t know if I can repay you for this,’ but he said, ‘Don’t worry — you’re like my son.’ ”

Pahchal, who owns his own business now, visits Sheth every couple of weeks.

“He motivates me with his experience and his good aura,” he says. “You see a person with positive energy, you give positive energy back. He is that person.”

The growing interest in wellness and herbal supplements expanded Sheth’s reach into Kendall’s changing community over time. Non-Indian customers would come in asking for turmeric and about how to make golden milk (milk with turmeric in it). As alternative medicine grew more popular, his clientele became more multicultural, Sushma Sheth Ray says.

A firm believer in homeopathic remedies — “Anger is the root of sickness,” he says adamantly — Sheth collects the testimonies from customers who have tried his herbal remedies and found them successful.

Marysella Castillo, who lives in New York, heads to Kendall every time she’s in town to buy Salvo, an ointment for pain. Her mom, she says, drives from Miami Lakes to pick up the product whenever a friend complains about soreness or an injury.

“I took it back to New York — I loved this product!” Castillo says. “It’s like a strong Vicks Vaporub. But I’ve used Vicks, and it never cured anything. . . . this year I came here early and bought a dozen Salvos and sent them out as little Christmas gifts to everyone.”

As the store is slowly being emptied, long-time customers stop by to mourn the loss of what felt more like a community center than a place to shop for ginger paste or rogan josh (an Indian cooking sauce).

Nirmala Prakash, who lives in Kendall and has been shopping at Indo American for 35 years, says the store has been a vital part of her life in Miami, adding that the familiarity and friendship Sheth provided can’t be found in any other store.

“I’m vegetarian, and he has all the Indian vegetables,” she says. “But I will miss him because he’s very nice and friendly. It’s a community. You come, you buy the things, but it feels like family here.”

Helen Dawn Osborn from London, who went to boarding school in Darjeeling, says the store carried the bath soap her mother once used, which she can’t find anywhere else.

“I’m going to hold out hope he opens somewhere else,” she says. “Anything you want he has. He knows his clients , and they know him, and they’re loyal to him.”

For Chandra Aswani, who has shopped at the store for 38 years, the real loss is Sheth himself.

“He’s a selfless person,” he says. “I guess all good things like this, they come to an end. But he’s focused on serving the people. He told me many times he has a purpose, that he was sent by God to look after people. He gets pleasure out of doing things for others. That’s a great quality that very few people possess.”

While more stores carry Indian products and customers can rent Bollywood movies on streaming services now, the real question is what Sheth will do without his beloved store. A quiet retirement seems unlikely, his family admits.

He might set up shop at a neighboring business to sell supplements and dispense advice, a new spot to chat with old friends and advise customers about their health.

All he knows is one thing: “God will decide,” he says firmly.