If you are a little depressed about the cards life has dealt you and you've managed to build a little whining tower with them (like I have), City Market at 5 AM will bring it crashing down. However, that was not the stated purpose when my friend and I plotted to drive down to City Market at 4.30 AM one Friday morning. We just wanted to do something random. It was a bit of bad timing though - the morning of Varalakshmi Puja meant that prices and the crowd had as much as quadrupled overnight.
Our
bleary eyes turned wide when we stepped out of the car. Why were so many people
up and about at 5 in the morning? The only protective armor we had was a cloth
bag A had brought along. And our elbows. I've often wondered how people get
trampled to death in festival melas, and I got my answer here. In all
the melee, we couldn't really figure out what we were stepping on. It could
have been anything from rotten vegetables to a human head, I could not have
told the difference. It took a lot of elbowing and jostling and all the power
of our 5'2" frames to push through the crowd and get into the market.
The
early morning light and the orange sodium vapor lamps reflect off the reams and
reams of marigold and chrysanthemum laid out in tall coils like some unending
Hanuman's tail. No way to stand and stare though. There is every possible color
of roses stacked around. There are tens of flowers I do not even know the names
of. We jostled and elbowed some more and found that it was only the entrance to
the market that was so crowded. Once we are through the entrance, I make the
mistake of looking down. In the orange glow, I see that we had been stepping through
ankle-high muck all along. Perhaps a foot-high in places. I do not go in for a
closer look, it must simply be a rich mix of every possible waste you could
imagine. Hmm. I have had enough discomfort. This is not my playground.
A hundred bodies pressed against each other. The
stench of survival. Flowers in the millions,
but
the fragrance long gone. Here a young man struggles with a huge stack of
flowers over his head, a bundle much bigger than he should try to carry.
Flowers - a burden for him, a blessing for me. Two sides, as always. As
everything else. An old lady stacks up shriveled jacket potatoes, remains of
the previous day perhaps. A couple of nuns stand by the side, a little taken
aback by the crowd. We make eye contact and smile. Fish out of the water.
