Tamarind Mem
stay for the night,” said Dadda, “the stationmaster warned us that the Railway rest-house was haunted. An English mem had died there, waiting for her husband who had gone boating up the Ganga. In the middle of the night, she started to play the piano.”
    “Then what, Dadda, then what?”
    “Is this man any better than that stupid Linda?” demanded Ma, who only seemed to hear Dadda when she disagreed with his words. “Scaring the child with ghost stories!”
    Simon’s Market consisted of one main road with several narrow alleys branching out haphazardly. Cows blocked the traffic for hours, and dogs scavenged and fought in the piles of garbage outside restaurants. The pavements were occupied by vendors selling everythingfrom American visas to fountain pens that stopped working as soon as you took them home. We walked in the middle of the road with cars and scooters, bicycles and trucks inching their way before and behind us, honking futilely. Shopkeepers sat like greasy maharajas on elevated platforms inside windowless stores and measured out rice and sugar,
dal
and spices. We always bought our provisions from Theli Ram’s store, a dank, lightless hole of a place with several assistants dashing about in the gloom like rats. Ma found Theli Ram himself disgusting, for he had a habit of scratching vigorously at his sweaty armpit while he repeated her grocery list to the scuttering assistants, but he also had the best groceries in town. Sometimes when we arrived he would be finishing off food from a tiffin-carrier which looked like it had not been washed in years. When he saw us, he swiftly wiped the yellow oil from his fingers on to his fleshy calves and beamed a welcome. He snapped his fingers at his assistants, the movement making his loose, pouchy breasts quiver, his belly jiggle up and down, and yelled, “Railway Memsahib’s order,
phata-phat!”
He always reminded me of the wooden dolls you could get at Waltair station—squat, round things that you tapped on the head to set off a chain of dancing motions.
    Behind the grocer’s lane ran Sabzi-wali Gully which had nothing but vegetables—glistening purple aubergines, polished tomatoes, plump gourds, piles of tender beans that snapped crisply when Ma tested them for freshness.
    “Come on, sister,” called the vendors. “Fresh-fresh, straight from the fields, and for you, a special early-morning rate.
Bauni
rate!”
    If Ma did not buy, their tone would change, they would sulk and mutter, “Squeeze all our vegetables to death. They are for buying, not for touching only! She wants us to give it to her for free!”
    Another lane was thick with the stink of ripened fruit. Here flies and sticky black mango insects buzzed and hung like a miasma over the baskets and pyramids of fruit. If you did not watch your step, you could slip on banana slime or step into a pile of rotting papaya. My mother bought oranges here, carefully picking out the ones with big-pored peels because they would be the juiciest. She usually wanted the ones at the bottom of the pyramid and the vendor would glare at her, reluctantly dismantling the tower of fruit.
    I hated the fruit-and-vegetable lanes but dared not grumble because then Ma, already puffing and irritated by the dust and noise, might refuse to take us to Gadhbadh-Jhaala. This tiny street was an Aladdin’s cave of glittering jewellery, shiny ribbons, beads and baubles.
    “Ma, pleaseplease, I want this and this and this,” I begged, gathering up handfuls of stringed beads, tinkling bangles. I darted in and out among the clusters of
burkha-clad
women who filled the market, drifting like shoals of dark fish, haggling with the shopkeepers. I could see nothing of them but brightly slippered feet flashing in and out of their heavy robes, ringed hands and the gleam of eyes. They moved slowly through the sunny lane, squatting before baskets heaped with Anarkali necklaces, Hyderabad earrings, Sholapuri bangles, nose-pins and hair-clips,

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