Notes from a market where I had nothing to buy

• You get down at Chickpet metro station instead of K. R. Market, to go to K. R. Market

• Apparently this where it all began - four bulls running in four directions as Hiriya Kempegowda laid the foundations of Bengaluru in the territory marked by the spots where the bull runs ended

  • Yelahanka in the North and Domlur in the east had existed event before the wooded middle became Bangalore

• The appetite of the city is on display in the mounds of fruits that you will walk past - the apples, the pineapples, the berries, the guavas - all in their own clusters of negotiations as retailers pile up their scooters or tempos

  • Like we have our dresses, fruits have their own - the imported thai guavas have the expanded polyethylene foam made mesh jacket, the capotas are in gunny sacks, but the papayas only have newspaper coverings

  • You can only buy 6 boxes of strawberries at 650, no less

• You do not need to pay first to access the public toilet, they charge you per your discharge

• The cows that roam around the market are in good health, feasting on the freshest of leaves and vegetable discards that the BBMP workers keep accumulating at regular intervals

• The area that sells flower arrangements is not the same as the area that sells garlands which is also not the same as the are where loose flower is sold

  • Inside the building there are stalls, just like Gariahat market in my hometown, but instead of fish they sell flower

  • It is as if someone has arranged flower vendors in shades of colors - light pastels to bright marigolds

• The baskets that are briskly carried around overhead are shaped like the coracles that you would see in the rivers of the south, only much flatter

  • And they are so much different from the ones that our mute used to carry monthly groceries in my childhood

• The Jame-ul-uloom mosque runs an english medium school in its campus

  • No need to knock, you can gently press against the metal gate with the front wheel of your scooter to open it

• The market is built in layers of pete - from Ragipete to Balepete - selling finolex cable binders to hypnotic bathware - in lanes after lanes that criss-cross and spread like shockwaves from the epicenter

• The market weaves around the mosques, the dargahs, the temples; Babasaheb's statue is in the periphery, looking up at the flyover

• Traffic here is one universal flow - you stop and walk as the auto on your left and the car ahead of you

• Someone is always offering a bowl full of pulao or biriyani rice, in case you are hungry

  • Also, Santa's here

• There is still charcoal and wood that heat the iron-press and fuel the fire in which naans get made

• Sparrows are not extinct - they are happy and chirping in the loudest of voices all around K. R. Market