Peeps at Many Lands—India

by John Finnemore

A BAZAAR, DELHI. Chapter XVI.

The shops are, as a rule, of the simplest nature in form—an archway, a booth, a hole in a wall. Upon a low platform the trader spreads his wares, squats beside them, and waits for customers. Let us stroll along a row of shops and see what they have for sale. The first shop has a crowd of customers, for it is a confectioner's, and the Hindoo, big or little, old or young, has a very sweet tooth. The confectioner spreads his wares on tiers of shelves or on a counter made of dried mud and rising in steps, and at the back of his shop is a sugar-boiling furnace, where he is busy on fresh supplies, pulling candy or making cakes of batter fried in butter. He sells toffee covered with silver-leaf, candy flavoured with spices, and many kinds of a sweet called luddu, made of sugar and curded milk. This stall is not only a great attraction to the children who have a pie (about one-third of an English farthing) to spend, but to the flies also. The latter come in myriads to settle on the sweet stuff, and though a boy is always at work with a whisk trying to drive them away, he can never keep the place clear.

Opposite the confectioner's is the flour-seller, and he, too, is a very busy man, for from his stall the everyday wants of the people are supplied. Great numbers of the Hindoos never touch meat, and the bunniah (the grain-seller) furnishes the whole of their food. He has a great number of baskets, and these are piled high with barley, wheat, lentils, flour, sugar, peas, rice, potatoes, nuts, dried fruits, and the like. He also sells ghee (clarified butter) and sour milk. He has a big pair of scales to weigh out his flour, sugar, peas, or whatever may be called for, but no bags to pack them in: he leaves that to the customers. One brings a cloth, another a basin, another a brass ewer for milk. Many have nothing, and they carry away their purchases in their hands, or, if that be impossible, flour is poured into the corner of a shawl or the fold of a robe. One man unwraps his turban and knots his purchases into various corners of it, twists it into shape again, and goes off with his day's supply on his head. Butter and milk are carried away in a green leaf dexterously twisted into the form of a cup.

The next shop is one which finds the grain-seller a very convenient neighbour, for it is a shop which sells parched grain—a bhunja's shop. At first glance there seems nothing in the place, then you notice a large shallow pan set on a mud platform. Under the pan a fire burns, and a woman steadily feeds the fire with dry leaves and husks. A second woman is stirring the corn in the pan, and as the grain parches and crackles a delicious smell fills the place, and passers-by sniff it, and stop and throw down a small copper coin on the mud platform, which is also the counter. Then they hold out their hands or a fold of a robe, and receive the sweet-smelling parched wheat or maize, and go on, munching as they walk.

Next comes a goldsmith's. Here is no glittering shop with ornaments and precious vessels in the window, as in a London street, but an archway or a booth of mud exactly like his neighbours'. The goldsmith himself is at work with his blowpipe at a little brazier, softening and shaping a piece of gold into a bangle for a customer. He is a busy man, for the country women bring him their silver to be made up into the ornaments they love, and he has always a store of ear-rings and bracelets to sell.

He sells his goods by weight, and weighs them in a most delicate pair of scales, which he keeps in a sandalwood box. His weights are the oddest things in the world—"tiny scraps of glass, a bean perhaps, an irregular chunk of some metal, a bit of stick, a red and black seed, an odd morsel of turquoise, and a thin leaf of mother-o'-pearl." His customers thus have to take the weight on his word; and they do not always care about that, for, as the saying goes, a goldsmith would cheat his own mother on the scales. So that hot words often fly to and fro across the mud floor of his little shop, and passers-by pause to listen to the fierce dispute.

Beyond the goldsmith's stands the shop of a cloth merchant, and this is a very fine shop, one of the grandest in the bazaar. So large is the merchant's stock that his booth is really big, or he fills three or four archways with his piles of calico and woollen. Here you may buy the strong woollen and cotton cloths of the country, made well and dyed in quiet, tasteful colours—goods which will wash and wear for year after year. But, alas! you may also buy from an even greater store of the poorest and cheapest goods which Manchester can turn out—cottons which will be of the flimsiest as soon as the dressing is washed out of them, cheap gaudy woollens made of shoddy, and silks of no greater strength than the paper which enwraps them. For the craze for cheapness has invaded the Indian bazaar as elsewhere, and the splendid old silk muslins, the brocade which would last for a century, the woollen shawl that was handed down from mother to daughter, find few or no buyers nowadays.

The druggist (the pansari-ji) contents himself with one small room, but it is packed from floor to ceiling with a thousand odds and ends—drugs, medicines, spices, one can hardly tell what. He wraps his more precious wares in scraps of paper, and stows them away in baskets, boxes, pots, and pigeon-holes in the wall. He prides himself on keeping everything in stock in his line, and one writer speaks of testing a pansari-ji by asking for cuttle-fish bone, "and lo! there it was—just two or three small broken pieces in a paper screw." The druggist may be the doctor of his quarter as well, and a favourite method of cure will be to write a mysterious talisman on a scrap of paper or a betel-leaf. This is rolled into a pill and swallowed by the patient. Opium he sells largely, and at evening he dispenses the sleep-compelling drug to knot after knot of customers.

The fruit-dealer's shop makes a beautiful patch of colour in the bazaar, with its heaps of golden oranges, of purple plums, of speckled pomegranates, of jackfruits and guavas, and many other kinds. But, as a rule, the fruit-dealers and greengrocers like a stall in a more open place, where they can pile their big melons up in a heap, and spread their wares in the lee of a wall, and throw an awning over to keep the sun off.