Day 20: Alone, Shopping

When we think about shopping, what do we think about, at least the "we" that grew up in the West. Maybe if it's food we go to the grocery store, or a supermarket, or if we want to be ultra-chic, to a "farmer's market", like the olden days. Other items, our local convenience store, TJ Max if we are cheap, or Macy's. And of course, nowadays we can get both kinds of things from the Internet. What makes it different, and therefore for me, so hard, when it comes to shopping is that I don't know where anything is. Fruits and vegetables are not so hard as their vendors are clustered not too far away from you (you just have to wander around to look for them). But we don't live only by fruits and vegetables. For example, I have not seen a single place that sells meat. Let's say we decide to be vegetarians. But even vegetarians need salt, sugar, milk, and, you wouldn't think of it, matches to light the stove! Where would you find these things? Your heart begs for a supermarket, but markets (forget the prefix "super") aren't really for India except for the upper-class people who have a car and, more importantly, servants that would fetch all their needs for them. Whenever I see a "Spencer's", a chain of "supermarkets" (really the size of most mom-and-pop grocery stores) catering to the middle class that doesn't have a servant to run around the city for them. So whenever I see one, I get a strange sensation of elation, a sense of, wow, life just got easier. But Spencer's doesn't have milk! It doesn't have matches! You an live without milk and develop an intolerance for lactose, but you can't live without matches to light your stove! In the end I relied on a colleague who bought me a box of matches from a "betel-wallah". "Betel" is this leaf that forms the base of the nasty "paan" people chew here (I've told you this already). Who would have thought that a paan seller would have matches. I guess it makes a little sense; paan is like the cigarette of India, though fewer percentage of Indians, from my personal observation, smoke cigarettes than even in the nearly smoke-free USA. Now, what about a mirror? When you want to put sunscreen up, how do you do it without risking stares and laughters from people who see blotches of cream on your face? But where in the world does one get a mirror? I walked down this street market near the office and I didn't see a single place that seems to carry mirrors. I suppose I could ask, but I didn't know the word for it, and the street market comprises mostly peasants who don't even know how to read Hindi. And doing a charade for "mirror" takes more than a few seconds needed for a cigarette lighter (which I had to perform several times before giving up and resorting to matches, whose Hindi word is simply "maachees"). So I will try again. There is a place that would sell mirrors, probably. It's in a mall, a zoo of middle-class people. A zoo reminiscent of TJ Max where people run to bargains and clothes are stacked messed up in a pile despite the ubiquitous workers that try to fold them as fast as they can. Unlike TJ Max, there is a guy on each floor blaring out through a megaphone all these sales. It's where we got our pots and pans and stuff. But this store is far away, on the other side of the river in the shopping district. There is no subway to get there, no bus that I am familiar with. So to get there I would have to find an auto rickshaw, haggle to no end, and maybe, just maybe, there is a mirror there (there is no lighter there, that's for sure!). And once I am done, how do I get back? Addresses don't mean anything here, as it's the case in most developing countries. And forget GPS. So I am alone in my shopping adventure. I am not really part of this society where there are rules people know about that allow them to get the things they need, depending on which social stratum they belong to. I don't belong to any stratum; I am obviously still a videshee (foreigner). But I can start understanding the rules by at least walk around and observing what people do, where the different things are, and maybe I can find my mirror and whatever else. But it's terribly hard to do this in the blistering heat. In other developments: Every few days people start burning the garbage on the streets. It's a very rudimentary, wait, more, very cave-man sort of way of getting rid of refuse. It was fine for the cave man, but now in such densely populated area we are talking about densely dumped garbage everywhere. I can't really convey with enough words how much garbage there is here. It's really everywhere! I have never seen so much garbage per sq meter in memory. And, though I haven't witnessed it yet, or perhaps I didn't recognize it, they also set the sewers on fire as a way of reducing the volume of junk and crap (literally?) that fills the sewer canals. While photographing the garbage burning, I encountered a few boys who were very curious about me. Children are always so fascinated with me, despite my attempt to blend in. I guess when you're wearing a Tumi bag and Ralph Lauren sunglasses, your dumpy looking T-shirt and pants and the turban against the sun don't hide your idiosyncrasies. So I got to practice my Hindi. Rickshaw drivers haven't been giving me any trouble, no bargaining, no speech. Weird. I made dinner for myself, the first time in India! I bought vegetables from the market and stirfried some of it with left-over pasta from our Western food splurge yesterday. It was good. Now I need to get some masala to spice it up! I made chai this morning, and I almost died from the chai masala I put in; it was too much!

boys in the hood burn burn burn all that garbage for Mother Earth