At the market
I have discovered the meaning of life. It is a slow roundabout in the traffic around Crawford Market waiting for a place to park. It is a saucer of cut papaya. It is chilled falooda. A bunch of lichees. Bengali food at Howrah restaurant. A crate of Fosters from Shah Wines, Devgarh hapoos from the market.
Yes, heaven must be something like this twenty-four thousand square feet display of fruit, vegetables and groceries (I’m leaving out the meat, being a vegetarian). If you’re squeamish, or snobbish, go back to your aging supermarket bhindis. If not, you can make a morning of it at Mumbai’s largest produce market. Lauki, cauliflower, cabbage, padwal. Gnarled yams, bearded carrots. Tangled kadipatta, snarky hara mirch. A wall of fat purple brinjal. Feel free to touch, but don’t press.
Stalls decorated with tinsel and cellophane, lined with glitter paper. The mushrooms that my husband loves. Pale green and orange pasta shells for sale by the kilo. Cheese, olive oil, khakras and Granola bars. And my beloved Tamil vegetables – Madras onions, snake gourd, and even the smooth violet banana flower. The only thing I’ve never found here is the kind of pale green stubbled squash I used to get in Bangalore, oddly known as the Bangalore kathrikai or the Bangalore brinjal.
Inside the market, you’re walking inside a part of history - and you don’t even have to navigate a shopping trolley. The building was completed in 1869 and donated to the city by Cowasji Jehangir. It was named after Arthur Crawford, the city’s first municipal commissioner, and later renamed after the reformer Jyotiba Phule. The architecture, which includes a clock tower and steeple, is a quirky mix of Norman and Gothic in brown Kurla stone with red stone from Bassein.
At the main entrance is a frieze designed by Lockwood Kipling, father of the novelist, who lived in the School of Art campus just down the road. The stone fountain, also designed by him, is now dry. But the roofs are high, and sunlight pours in from a glorious fifty-foot skylight awning.
In 1892, this building was the first in the country to be lit up with electricity. It feels as if they’ve never switched off the lights since then. Luminous naked bulbs spill generous pools of yellow and neon-white light over pyramids of oranges, apples and chickoos. In the grand hall, however, is the piece de resistance – the Alphonso display. Mango heaven.
I love this curious mixture of smells: the sweet, warm scent of hay, the woody fragrance of fruit boxes, and the intoxication of mangoes. The chatter of voices, the roar of traffic, the barking of dogs, the silence of tired hamals asleep inside their baskets, all combine to form a symphony that plays ceaselessly in the background as you wander from one lane to another. The voice of a child becomes a trumpet entering the music; the song on the radio becomes a violin adding another nuance to this living composition.
*****
(In Mumbai Mirror, May 2006)
