बाजार

Dear Diary,

What adventures I'm having in India!  Sorry I'm not updating so often anymore--I've been occupied with math projects, now that my Pune interview is over.  I've been getting into a routine:  the sun wakes me up in my apartment, I try to snap a photo of the lizard (more on that later), I watch some Indian television, I go to the canteen for cereal with boiling hot milk, I go to the library to do math, I go to the canteen for rice and curried vegetables, then more math, then I go to the canteen for chai and cakes, more math, maybe a seminar, I go to the canteen for chapatis, rice, and dahl, then I cross the street and go back to my apartment for the night.  See?  You haven't missed much.

Except you may want to about what it's like to randomly wander around Mumbai.  Alright, well the other day I ran out of soap.  There's one store that's in the TIFR Housing Complex, but doesn't have much.  I had previously purchased laundry detergent and some weird cookies from there.  So, I needed to get on a bus and go "downtown", walk into the right store, grab what I needed and then split.  How hard could this be?

What I do to go "downtown" is take the free TIFR bus, and get out when anyone else does.  This seems to always be the Victoria train station.  So I've gone there a couple times and have walked around a bit to familiarize myself with the area.  Which is evidently called "Churchgate".  I had earlier eaten at a nice restaurant (Shivana) I found in this way.  This time I wanted to pick up several things, so I had eaten beforehand to prepare myself for a lengthy quest.

So here's what was like, at first.  There seem to always be lots of people hanging out on the sidewalks in groups.  This makes sense, since the weather is very nice when it's not raining, and perhaps employment is scarce.  As I walked along the sidewalks, I passed by lots of little stands with folks selling shoes, watches, food, kids' stuff, and cigarettes, but nothing I was really interested in.  I had heard stories of tourists being overwhelmed by beggars, swindlers, and Artful Dodgers, but noone really paid me any mind.  Of course, I've lived in cities for much of my life and I probably don't look like a target.  And, you know, they are probably used to foreigners in Colaba.  Still, most of the time I didn't see anyone who looked like me on the streets, and the ones I did see were clearly not from the States.

So I didn't buy anything from the stands; I was looking for stores I could walk into and put things into a basket.  Well, my first couple of efforts put me into (guarded) stores which sold nothing but saris.  Later I found a nice looking pharmacy which seemed to have what I wanted.  I saw a box of tissues locked in a cabinet, so I told a woman behind the counter that I wanted to buy it.  She said I had to ask someone else to unlock it.  It was not clear who that was.  But someone eventually unlocked it and I had to purchase it right then.  I saw some soap in the display under the counter, and I told the woman I wanted to buy it.  She said, you should try this special soap-free cleaning bar.  I said I wanted some soap.  Perhaps I should mention here that the locals have trouble with my english.  Dearest Diary, I hope you will forgive me when I admit that I purchased this special cleaning bar because of this woman's stubbornness.  It was about ३०० rupees.  She went on about how great soap-free products are and I signed her form to get advertisements about more expensive merchandise.   Anyway I got my "soap".

I wandered around some more, bought a notebook from another cabinet, and found a yoga mat at an exercise store.  The mat had a pricetag of ४५० rupees, but when I asked for it, the guy finally actually gave it to me for ३५० rupees.  Am I supposed to haggle, even when there is a pricetag?...

After this, I wasn't sure exactly where the train station was.  The streets aren't in a nice grid like in, say, Philadelphia.  Now I could have asked someone for directions at this point, but I thought I'd be adventurous and try to figure it out myself.  So I wandered around with a vague idea of where north was, and a vague idea that the station was to the north.  Eventually I was truly in the classic "marketplace" scene or bazaar which one associates with India and maybe some middleeastern countries.  More shoes, watches, food, kids' stuff, and cigarettes.  There was a long street full of paper stores, but they didn't seem to sell notebooks...

I constantly had to decide whether I would walk on the sidewalks, which were very crowded, or on the street.  The streets were really unpleasant due to the parade of cars which honked their way through the mass of people.  Probably there's some social class thing going on there.  But the sidewalks had their troubles: at one point I was somehow in an alley packed tightly with delivery trucks, and stuck singlefile in a line of deliverymen carrying heavy loads on their heads.  The path I was stuck on had an increasing amount of bad water which I had to sidestep while moving along.  For a little while I followed a poor old soul carrying a huge wagon behind him, until he got in someone's way and got yelled at.

At any rate I was impressed at how endless the Colaba Market is, and totally lost.  At some point I asked some folks where Victoria Station "VT" was, and they pointed me in the right direction.  I later found out I was significantly northwest of VT.  It was tough getting there; there were several large streets I did not want to cross, even though other people were weaving through the traffic full of faith.  Not many walk signals.  I discovered a "subway" area where pedestrians can walk underground; this was extremely helpful, and I made my way to the station.

From there, I took the red bus home, where I discovered I had lost my key.