Meaning of gram-vendor in context

Reading Shame (1983) by Salman Rushdie, and here's such a sentence.

For five, six, seven days films played to an empty house in which peeling plaster and slowly rotating ceiling fans and the intermission gram-vendors gazed down upon rows of undoubtedly rickety and equally certainly unoccupied seats.

Searching the internet I found two explanations.

• Gram-vendor is a person who sells small things during intermission.
• Gram-vendor is a vending machine where you put a coin and get small things.

So which of these two is a better match, or any other explanation?

Where and when? The book describes =~1947 year, India

Probably only a partial answer, but...

Black gram is another name for the Vigna mungo bean

-Wikipedia

...and Green gram is another word for the Moong or Mung bean.

Their dried seeds may be eaten raw, cooked (whole or split), fermented or milled and ground into flour.

These are an extremely popular ingredient of a variety of tasty dishes from India.

It is possible that your example is a semantic syllepsis.