Bargain Hunting

Downtown there is a stretch of stands that sell cheap clothes and knock off brand names (Begle Boy, Abidas, DKMY). It is called Fashion Street, and is long enough to be on my map of Bombay. There are hundreds of stalls lining the street here. And I really do mean hundreds. I bought a shirt there once. When I went in, the guy selling said 350. I don’t know how to bargain, but I knew that price was way too high. So I stood looking sad at how expensive the shirt was for a minute and said “Ok, thanks anyway.” and started slowly turning away. The guy stopped me, No, no, wait. What do you think you should pay? Sad silence. (Because I would say too much, and then I would be stuck paying that. That’s how they trick you.) I just stood regretfully looking at a few of the shirts, poking them and sighing, frowning and not making eye contact, until he said 150. Then I said ok. I figured 150 was within reason. I asked the women at the office what I should have paid, they said 100. But I didn’t feel too bad about that, my self respect can handle a 50% mark up. Just not a 250% mark up.

I wasn’t sure going in what a good price was for the shirt; a mistake I try not to make too often. I usually ask around for prices before trying to buy something at a stall. I like to walk up knowing what I should pay. At a stall near my house, a guy told me the price for some shoes was 50 rupees. That sounded about right, but most people tell me over double what the price actually is. I couldn’t believe that he really told me the real price, but I also couldn’t believe that he exaggerated the price that much and that they were actually supposed to be 20 rupees. So I polled my students. Turns out 50 was fair. It was weird- the guy actually quoted me the real price. He must have seen me walking by over the months and knew I lived around there and therefore probably had access to information from real Indians. Or he was super nice, or honest, in which case I am glad I found him before he went of business.

In one of my early forays into the stalls I bought a couple of purses. One guy said 500 for a purse, which I just found insulting so I didn’t bother to bargain with him. Down the street a woman quoted me 250 for the same purse and 150 for another. I said 300 for both. She agreed immediately, so I knew I had gone too high. Probably should have been 50 each. So I guess you could look at it this way, I paid 50 for each purse, plus 200 rupees for the lesson in bargaining. She was funny too- as I was sifting through the purses, she kept telling me that they were made my local artisans. I was like, oh, uh huh, wow. These must be some really busy “local artisans” because these purses are everywhere. So, local. . . as in made by an Indian factory worker? She must have been asked about the local artisan thing by some white lady so she adopted it into her patter. It was funny.

I went to Aurangabad for a few days to check out some sights there. At one of the sights this shopkeeper was really persistent, followed me up to the touristy stuff and kept telling me how great his stuff was and how nice he is and how he’s going to leave me alone, not like all the other shopkeepers, so I should come to his shop- not to buy, just looking just looking. I kept telling him he should go work one someone else because I wasn’t going to buy anything. I think he had a few people he was following anyway though- I saw him tagging along with a few women, (as I snuck around behind them to escape) trying to get them to buy a stone elephant for 800 rupees. The next day I saw that same elephant for sale in a shop for 50 rupees. Quite a markup.

Mumbai in Pictures Part 2

{I am heading home today! I am excited to be getting back to the US. I have a few more blog posts to put up, which I will put online over the next week. My return journey will take over 24 hours. Two 9hr flights and a 7 hour layover at Heathrow. I should be back in Seattle on Friday! Or Thursday, I forget how the timing works out. Either way, Kenneth has the flight info, so I should have a ride home.}

Why are all these guys standing?

On Friday nights I took the train to get home. I usually got in at around 8pm, about the same time the mosque at the train station held its evening prayers. As I got off the train I’d hear the call to prayer wailing over the loudspeakers. I think that Friday is the day you have to go to the mosque, it’s like their Sunday morning. I would weave my way through the crowd of passengers, moving towards the cry of the prayers, up and down the stairs and out of the station. At the exit there would be a wall of Muslim backs. The men were in rows, all facing east, from the mosque at one end to the ric queue at the other. The mosque is a small one, attached to one end of the station’s ticketing office. They would commandeer the pavement out in front of the train station by rolling out long reed mats, and the faithful would come and line up with their prayer mats. There were usually a lot of cops around too, to make sure there was no trouble, I guess. The first time I saw the whole process it seemed very exotic and foreign to me, with the chanting and the everyone in white kurtas and caps. No women though. I guess the kind of Muslim that people are here doesn’t allow women in the mosque. It seems that one kind does, one kind doesn’t.

(The cops are the guys in beige. It is hard to see how big this all was, but I didn't want to be to obvious about taking pictures.)
My last Sunday at work I took a ric to the station, as usual, but the driver couldn’t get me up to the train station’s drop off point because there was too much traffic. No one could get through the congestion. It was Eid,(rhymes with weed) a Muslim festival. (Right at the end of Ramzan, but I don’t know that the two are related. I guess I could look it up.) There were so many guys there. Oh wow. Like four times as many as I have ever seen at that mosque. And they were all wearing gleaming white clothes and it was early, 8:30 in the morning, so the sun was shining all over, turning them into this bright, clean, snowy mass. -Really, it was more than I was prepared to deal with at the time.

I guess you have to have to have to go to mosque for Eid, so people go to whichever one is closest, and the mosques have to accommodate them because the Muslims have to have to have to go to mosque. So the whole road in front of the station was lined with guys in white praying. It was sort of eerie walking through all the guys praying, like I was intruding, wandering down the aisle at their church while they are trying to have a service. But then, they did set up their church in the middle of the train station’s parkway. I think the Eid service must take about as long as my train journey, because when I got off the train downtown one of the mosques near my station was pouring out guys in white. They were about the only ones around that morning. Just me and the Muslims. They were all in white because everyone is supposed to be equal before God- no signs of wealth. So you have to wear the same white thing as everyone else. But of course some guys had nice embroidery and stuff on their white kurtas. .

I heard that in Egypt someone said that the white clothes thing was a misinterpretation and that you don’t have to wear white, you just have to not be ostentatious. You can wear white if you are able to, but only if you are able to. So there they wear regular clothes to mosque, on principle.

One Friday, when I got home, I walked out of the station through the Muslim prayers while reading a newspaper article about some Jewish festival that had been celebrated by the small but entrenched Jewish community in Bombay. The ric I took home that night had a bunch of Catholic crucifixes plastered all around the dashboard, along with the requisite Hindu deities. As we drove by all the Muslims praying, the driver started blasting Hindi music to drive to. It almost felt like culture shock, but it was more like a bizarre cultural hodgepodge confusion. India is weird. Lots of flavah.

It was like when I asked my friend why we had gone and paid respects at the Hindu mandir, before going to her Sikh place of worship, the Gurudwara. (guru=god, dwar=door) Is she Sikh or Hindu? And, come to think of it, why we had hit a mosque the day before? Pick a religion and stick to it. I kept asking her why she could go to each one, I was trying to figure out if there was some religious overlap or something. She didn’t understand my confusion; she didn’t even get my questions, initially. “What.” she said. “It’s all god.” Oh, ok. That’s cool. She was surprised that in the US, a Jew wouldn’t go to a Protestant church to worship. I don’t know if this bleeding of religious stuff is typical or unusual or how far it goes, but it isn’t just with her. I saw at least some of that blending of cultures and beliefs in other places too. But at the same time, people seem to prefer marriages to take place within the same religious group. (Here I use the word “prefer” to mean anything from an expressed opinion by parents to absolute- no discussion- you are dead to us otherwise- requirement by family.) So there are differences. Recognized, clearly delineated differences. But then there is also deep mutual respect. Except, of course, when the riots happened in the nineties and people of different religions tried to kill each other. And perhaps excepting the occasional bomb blasts. And the fact that when the Muslims pray at the train station, there are cops around. But besides that there really is lots of tolerance. From some people. But there are pockets of crazies. I am still not sure I get it. It’s a complex issue.

I went to a street cobbler! The monsoons disintegrated the glue on the bottom of my birks so I got a cobbler at the train station to repair them. My friend asked him to fix them for me. He said 20 rupees, because he had to sew them, he couldn’t just reglue them. I said, Wow, yeah! That’s like 50 cents! Sweet! She quietly motioned me to shut the hell up, and bargained him down to 15. (I think you need to be brought up with that bargaining instinct.) Then while he sewed them I asked if I could take a picture. He thought that was odd. He gave my friend a “crazy foreigner” look. It is a look I have begun to recognize.

I got tiffin lunches for a week. But the tiffin people decided that it was too much of a pain to come just on the days I was at the downtown office and refused to continue, so I only got it a few times. Then I had to order from yucky restaurants again, until one of my coworkers started letting me order extra food from her mom. Which was a big relief, because the restaurant food was edible, but only just. And it was greasy, real greasy. I am done with Indian restaurants for a long time. I am cool with Indian food, I can eat Indian food til the sacred cows come home, but not restaurant food. But, back to my point, I did get real live tiffin lunches a few times. Hand delivered and everything. In true Indian style, there was lots of food. 2 vegetable dishes, one daal (lentil), rice, chappatis (flatbread) and a buttermilk (which I passed on). All the food came in little metal tiffins lined up in a thermos thing.

This is a group of dabbahwallahs (tiffin carriers) that I saw chilling at the train station after duties. The one dabbahwallah appears to have an issue with his foot.

A Jain birdfeeding station.