The Chasing iamb

Really what are the chances that I stayed up till two in the morning watching gigantic shrimps stewing in their own juices becoming a spectacular seafood stock? Slim, slim but that is what happened last night.

There is something fascinating about big, open markets. In Bombay I used to fall out of the bus and trains when we passed the sabzi mandis with green mountains of watermelons and sturdy piles of orange carrots and shiny baingans. In Saath Bangla one side of a long, narrow street is lined with Koli fisherwomen on low, wooden platforms selling fish all day long. If you stand across the street you have the kind of great picture that look like the banquet scenes from Asterix and Obelix. The Kolins are loud, witty, wear bright coloured sarees, yards of jasmine in their hair and show plenty of bosom. (Just like in the movies? Really, whole city is full of people who make you wonder, "Did the movies get here first or their clothes get here first?") They sit in grand indolence flanked by piles of fat and little fish. And under every wooden platform are cats of every colour and every degree of hope. Happy is the eye of the beholder of Saath Bangla.

Thatha and Toady are the ones who showed me that open markets are not just beautiful and great fun. They took me to Russel Market in Bangalore and told me how the mighty, insomniac market runs. Toady is particularly passionate about the politics of food and open markets. Under her tutelage I spent three months reading and writing about crops, GM foods, pesticides, the slow food movement and kitchen gardens. She really changed how I see markets.

Before I came to Dilli I was feeling miffed about how I would have to give up my open markets but luckily I was wrong. The city is swarming with the most juicy mandis. Last evening I was taken to the INA market, Spellcheck warned me its not really the most politically correct place to be in seeing that it stocks Korean sticky rice and shitake mushrooms and extraordinarily expensive seafood. All that turned out to be true but the market has the live wire energy and enormous charm of great, fascinating markets. Every kind of vegetable and fruit you could imagine. Shops stocking only products shipped from the Middle East with product descriptions only in Arabic. Buckets rippling with moustached, muscular catfish and a bay full of bright blue and pink prawns. Have you noticed how butchers are silent and fish-sellers chat you up with shark-like, deeply cynical smiles?

I could hear Malayalam from the moment I entered which made me grin but I fell about laughing when I saw large signs advertising uniforms for nurses headed to Saudi Arabia. Oh the peculiar Mallu joy.

Now I have to hang around waiting for the delivery boy to arrive with the fresh cream. Ahoy, biscuit pudding. Come on over.

Flaneur is too grand a word for it. I am throughly enjoying my village bumpkin-ness in the Rajdhani.

The metro covers 30 kilometres from my little Russia to Connaught Place in sterilised organised comfort in one hour. It has smart-cards and tokens and security checks and disability access. I think its best feature is the whoosh sound it makes when it leaves each station letting you imagine that you are headed to Mars and not to Rameshnagar.

At Nehru Park, on a green hillock couples make out in stylised poses silhouetted against the sky. MP and I giggled thinking of the happy lemmings huddling on the wet rocks of Bandstand.

The Capital should be jaded by the abbondanza of Things-to-Hear-See-Do.But they are not because luckily they arrive late and leave early. Even for Kishori Amonkar.

MP and I craned our necks each time we saw double strings of pearls and silk kurtas bowing and scraping. Mani Shankar Aiyar, Ambika Soni, Sudhir Dhar. Was that Vinod Mehta? Mark Tully for sure. Don't point, MP admonished. My inner bumpkin grinned.

A man leaped up from the posh-er seats in front of us for a hatchet-faced couple. He had been warming their seats for them so they could make an appearance at the Kishori Amonkar concert but not suffer any musical affrontery from the small fry who preceded her. The dismissed flunkey ran away after several bows and listening to some sharply hissed instructions.

The pudgy silk-sareed MC was afflicted by near-orgasmic professional huskiness as she read from a hilarious script with enough hot air to power a Richard Branson ascent. After she 'facilitated' the flashy sarod player Parthosarothy whom she coyly called Partho she introduced Kishori Amonkar creating small Mexican waves of winces. "Kishoriji was a doyenne, a Saraswati, she dives into vast oceans of musical notes, she is part of a deep spiritual realm, she needs silence, she is a...."

Kishori Amonkar took a good long time to appear. Which was sensible because Parthosarathy's jamming was ringing in our ears for ages after he left. Also Kishori is a true fire-breathing tempermental diva. One who has in the past stopped mid-note and said to a chattering woman in the audience, "Either you leave or I do." Who a week back in Patna walked off the stage 20 minutes into the performance because of a noisy audience.

At Nehru Park she was brisk and polite to the bhaiyyas doing the heavy work on stage but barked at the organisers to switch off all the lights glaring in her face. When listening to her even musical donkeys such as I could see what they mean when they say "Its not in the voice its in the gayaki." MP says if Kishori deigns to sing you go down on bended knees and thank your good fortune. But this is the Capital where 74 year old divas who frowns at organisers and bark at video cameras are not too popular. After a bit the taunting claps began.

And this potential storm in a swarmandal was handled in the most foolhardy, so foolhardy that its almost adorable, manner by the MC who chattered into the night air. Because of course silence would be unbearable. She talks about the importance of silence for artistes for some time longer in the manner of a bunch of men I once saw entering the Bahai temple and exclaiming, "Kitna silent hai."

She goes away briefly and reappears bright as a magpie. "Please wait for a few more minutes as Kishoriji needed to go the bathroom." Rows of bhakts jumped in outrage. The princess pee? Terrible. Terrible. I had images of the diva hearing about this and the MC facing a wall at dawn. MP wondered aloud where they had got this dunderhead. But the Punjabi aunty next to MP chose that minute to tell her husband in admiring tones "Bolti bhi achchi hai. Angrezi bhi achi hai." Ah innocence, I cackled to myself.

In the sabzi mandi last night I reverted to halli-gugu. I was trying to remember what the Hindi word for garlic is. A scrubbed, trimmed, moustachioed flower of Indian manhood appears next to me with an anal retentive gleam in his eye and a green army camouflage (!) shopping bag. I thought I had imagined what happened next but Spellcheck says that he heard it too. The Man-flower tells the skinny, tired hawker, "I am from the SPG. What is the price of the gajar?" I goggled but the vendor ignored him and his increasingly shrill demands.