From the notepad: City Market
I spent yesterday in City Market, a kind of a sprawling open-air marketplace sitting in the shadow of a flyover. Sights and sounds came hard and fast there, but one image struck me. Somewhere between the mother and child selling coconuts and the old lady rearranging greens, the bearded man selling cheap watches and the father and son selling cheap radios, I saw a woman, seated, in a turquoise dress with black hair pulled back in a red tie. She sat on a blue tarpaulin with her simple wares: three locks of black hair.
I raised my camera with a glance in a body language interrogative. She declined politely with a shake of her head; I lowered the camera and walked away.
My mantra since I got here has been simple: I need to find the story before I can tell the story. So for the past week and a half I’ve been letting Bangalore unfold before me; I’ve been taking in the soul mix, listening to the people I meet. One of our newfound friends here commented on India’s glut of labor: “It’d be cheaper to hire 1,000 people than to bring in one machine.” I think that’s one of the things that’s become stuck in my head. Every living thing has to eke out an existence somehow, and here it’s out front and exposed; from the man outside our apartment pressing shirts with a wood-burning iron to the women selling mangoes and curry leaves.
But then there was that woman with the hair. Something about her got stuck in my head too; was this real hair? Was it her hair? For a moment I imagined her with her black hair shorn, carrying to the marketplace one more bundle to place on the tarp. The imagining was easy, but as a journalist, I couldn’t be satisfied with imagining. I had to find out.
India has several hundred languages; a recent Indian census suggests that 29 of them are spoken by over a million people. The majority language in Bangalore is Kannada, so it didn’t surprise me all that much that the woman selling hair might not speak English. But faced with it, I realized: without a translator I would not be able to talk to her; without talking to her I could never discover the story of the hair; without discovering the story of the hair, I didn’t have anything.
I walked away.
Elsewhere in the market there were easier pictures to take, pictures that at some basic level I understood. The business of business is simple enough; carrots go from farm to market; pepper makes its way from plantations; a young girl looks to pedestrians from behind piles of turnips and okra. Everyone’s got to eke out an existence somehow.
I soon found myself at the other end of the market, in front of the very last merchant who had set up by a local bus stop. He had books splayed out on his tarp in the shade, but these were not the ubiquitous pirated Harry potter books I so often see along the roadside. These were books on the languages of India.
In the end I paid 25 rupees for the book, “Learn Kannada in 30 days.” I didn’t need the whole language, just enough to ask about her hair and her name. I spent the better part of an hour sitting in a patch of sunlight near the bus stop, working out the details from the poorly-organized paperback. At a certain point I felt confident enough to walk over and ask my questions.
Fighting my way through the push of people, I stooped in front of the woman and asked, “Kannada?”
She shook her head. I was struck for a moment; if not Kannada, then what?
“Do you speak Hindi? Tamil?”
She repeated the motion vigorously; the man sitting next to her took an interest.
“Does she speak Kannada?” I asked the man.
“No,” he said.
And that was that.
—
In hindsight, I don’t know whether she didn’t speak the language, or if she just didn’t want to speak to me. Regardless, I came away with no photo and no answers.
It’s tough to see clearly sometimes; it’s tough to find what you need in order to understand. You can do all the research and see all the things around you, but you can’t talk to everyone. Hell, everyone can’t even talk back to you. So what do you do. You keep on going, take good notes, seek what you seek and find as finding comes — and if you have the right questions, you gotta hope the answers come with time.