HAL Market in east Bangalore, just off the Old Airport Road, sits on a prominent corner of the public sector giant’s huge stretches of real estate that could have earned Bangalore the sobriquet of HAL City, until software came and began to hog the limelight. The market is fascinatingly poised between the informal and the formal economy and in many ways symbolises India in the making, both promise and loose ends showing.
In about a quarter of the total area over which the market sprawls in the mornings stands a single-storeyed structure, its yellow paint long faded, with shops lining a couple of lane-cum-corridors. That’s the pucca part. The rest of the space, both front and behind, is made up of sheds of varying degrees of permanence or space left open where fruit, flower, vegetable, egg and fish sellers camp and decamp to a well-thought-out timetable.
Early in the morning, the open space in front of the pucca market is full of fruit sellers, who have stationed their push carts till it is past 9.30 a m and they are gone elsewhere. Similarly, the open space at the back is full early in the day with people with odd lots of fruit and vegetables, desiring to quickly be rid of their produce at semi-wholesale rates and go back home. The fish sellers, all in a row at the back, mostly surface on weekends, in keeping with the lifestyle of their Bengali patrons for whom the weekend begins with a pilgrimage in search of fresh-water varieties, of which the locals knew little till not so long ago.
HAL Market was a sleepy company town kind of place until Bangalore became a boom town attracting software and other crowds from all over the country. East Bangalore, being less built up and with the huge offices coming up in Whitefield next door, automatically became the preferred abode of the outstation crowd, and HAL Market their bazaar of choice.
Locals complain bitterly that the outsiders have ruined the market, causing its prices to skyrocket. The north Indians have grabbed all the vegetables, the Bengalis all the fish that money can buy and everybody all the fruit that horticulture-savvy Karnataka can grow.
At least three languages are prominent in the market — Kannada, Hindi and Bengali. All three can be heard in the fruit and vegetable area but along the fish stalls it is Bengali that predominates. It is fascinating how some of the more enterprising fish sellers have picked up snatches of Bengali and keep yelling Kolkatar bhetki and Bangladesher ilish grinning away at both their own pronunciation and their spurious claim.
The fascinating thing about Bangalore is that at 3,000 feet, it is technically a hill station and you keep getting what are considered winter vegetables elsewhere in phases round the year. Just when you have stopped buying the cauliflower because it is well past its prime, there comes a new crop of small budding bouquets that in time will reach the full glory of a 10-inch diameter.
The fruit that is uniquely available in all seasons, unmatched anywhere in the country for taste, is the papaya. In contrast, the seasonal king is the table grapes, vying with Nashik in this plateau of vineyards, which reign supreme in the early months of the year. One prima donna that is missing most of the year, presumably because it is unable to cover the long distance from the north, is the Himachal apple. Its place has been usurped by imported Fuji or Washington varieties.
Bits of the foregoing will be visible elsewhere in the country and the city, but in its entirety, HAL Market is so much like today’s India. There is more cash floating around than there is produce to match it, thus causing prices to zoom. But the owners of all the cash, whose week will not be made without a visit to the market, will not lift a finger to ask for a cleaner and better organised marketplace.
The covered area between the pucca part and open space at the back usually has on the pathway a carpet of discarded spoilt vegetables and leaves, left to rot. This is just about bearable except when it rains and the mud and rotting vegetables make a unique and rich slush which will drive votaries of composting ecstatic. But what really takes the cake – or the fish – is a large corner next to the row of fish stalls where the discards of cleaned-up fish and sundry other refuse are left to rot for days. The stink is authentically small-town India.
The only people who are a little more better organised and tidy are the stall owners in the pucca part of the market, selling mostly fruit, local and exotic. They are usually a sulky lot, put off like the old gentry whose better graces have been swamped by the owners of new money. My favourite is a shop specialising in every kind of mango. It is difficult to say which is superior there: the langra or the alphonso?
In the age of organised retail, it is easy to find all the fresh produce you care for in large, neat and tidy stores at competing prices. Those who come to old-style markets like these tell themselves the stuff here is more fresh. The mud that comes with the palak is certainly authentic and takes unconscionably long to wash away but, surely, upwardly mobile health-conscious Indians can ask for and get a cleaner place to shop for what is supposed to be garden-fresh.
