| Subir Roy: Up the down market | |
| Subir Roy / New Delhi April 08, 2009, 0:05 IST | |
 When our daughter arrived and my wife and she were still at the nursing home, my mother gave me detailed instructions as to what kind of bedding — mattress and pillow — a baby ought to lie on; soft naturally but not without form, something that would yield but then take the shape of the baby and weave around it a supporting firmness. I figuratively scratched my head and decided to do the best I could.
Particularly important was the pillow, my mother explained. Too hard or soft and your daughter will grow up with a head that would not turn other heads. In the old days, we made a baby’s pillow at home, stuffing it — there she went again, so that it was neither too hard nor soft — with mustard seeds. Then the pillow took the shape of the baby’s head and thereafter kept it firmly in place.
Noticing the expression of impatience on by face she stopped reminiscing and said a very soft cotton pillow would do. But my relief was shortlived. I searched most of the good, which meant posh, markets in south Delhi and all I could get was fancy-looking pillows at fancy prices all stuffed with foam. Even I could make out that they were no good by the standards laid down by my mother. My asking for an old-fashioned cotton pillow earned me only a dismissive smile.
The markets in Greater Kailash and South Extension had long ago travelled with the times and discarded cotton for foam. I eventually found the people who made and sold cotton pillows, mattresses and quilts, just next door to Nizamuddin West where we lived in down-market Bhogal where the working class and the middle class happily shopped together.
This was of course in keeping with my discovery that when it came to buying vegetables, Bhogal offered better value than most other markets. The clincher was of course my landlord’s advice, in keeping with the values his Punjabi refugee stock was well known for. Go a bit late in the evening and buy form the reriwallas (push cart vendors) and not the regular shops, he had added.
Delhi has changed a lot since then, I have assumed. It now has a spanking new metro which is the envy of the rest of the country and a few other countries too and it has more five star hotels and specialty restaurants charging NRI prices than you can count. So I held my breath when our daughter declared that she would have to get a blouse stitched double quick, in a day’s time, to go with the saree she would chose to wear out of the two best ones of my wife we couriered to her from Bangalore, for her college graduation dinner. If Delhi and its youngsters today were posh beyond measure then god help their fathers who have to foot their outfitting expenses.
But what she narrated to me later showed that some things in life never change. She first tried all the good (read posh) shops in Kamla Nagar next to the university campus which is the haunt of the kids. They wouldn’t even look at her, being more concerned about what would happen to their standing if they agreed to deliver a bespoke garment in a day.
Then as she journeyed down the social pecking order of shops the attitudes changed from disdain to helplessness. The refrain now was, we would help if we could but one day is too little to do justice to something that will look good on you beta. So it went until she came to the eighth shop which was as modest in look as in dimension.
More important, she had by now left Kamla Nagar and was in neighbouring down-market Malka Ganj. And then the gods smiled. Yes why not, said the shop assistant, if masterji agrees. He did, with all the gravitas of a head cutter. And the next day the blouse was ready and delivered to satisfaction; at a price of course but properly explained and broken up into normal cutting and fitting charges and quick delivery premium.
Our daughter is filled with the same kind of wonder about Malka Ganj as I have been by the wonders of Bhogal and the dargah areas of Nizamuddin which were like a bit of old Delhi plonked onto the middle of south Delhi, giving an area like Nizamuddin the best of both worlds. There isn’t anything in the world you cannot get in Malka Ganj, she declares, with all the hyperbole that blind love brings.
The ultimate was when one cold winter’s evening she and her hostel mates decided to light a bonfire on the terrace. There in one corner of Malka Ganj they actually found an apology of a shop that sold the wood and, would you believe it, there was another shop nearby from where they bought a terracotta angeethi in which to light a fire and keep it disciplined and confined.
So much of the sight, sound and smell that make up life, not to speak of colourful humans and mangy street dogs, are found in such abundance in down-market shopping areas which have not known the ravages of glass and vitrified tiles.
subir.roy@bsmail.in
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