Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [74]
While hawkers open stands on the sidewalks and a man ties a cow to a tree, traffic barrels through the streets, daring pedestrians to dally. Many of the vehicles are black-and-yellow Ambassador taxis made in India some thirty years ago. Rusty and battered, with meters welded on the top of a front fender, they look completely unreliable, but according to an English-language paper at the hotel, the drivers resist government efforts to modernize because they can repair the old cars themselves and fill them with the cheapest gasoline on the market. The taxis, as well as the buses and trucks, flaunt strings of marigolds and other flowers, palm fronds, and spirited ornamentation, often in gold, orange, red, and fuchsia shades.
Apart from seeing the city come to life, Cheryl wants to do a little browsing and Bill hopes to find a particular restaurant in the area, which turns out to be closed. No such luck for Bill on the stores, as open and abundant as any shopper might wish. Cheryl looks briefly in a number of places but gets engrossed for more than an hour in one warehouse-size emporium, a government-sponsored business selling handcrafted products from cottage industries across the country. She picks out some jewelry for herself, our daughter, Heather, and our granddaughters—“You’ve got to show respect for local traditions, okay?”—and together we round up a collection of festive Christmas ornaments for ourselves and friends, all small enough to fit in our undersized luggage.
With Bill’s chosen lunch restaurant shut, we decide to eat by the hotel pool, keeping it simple with grilled pomfret and a fresh mango lassi for each of us. After a quiet interlude in the sun, sorely missed much of our time in Thailand, our butler arranges a driver and car for us to sightsee farther afield. Sebastian, the chauffeur and guide, takes us through the built-up and bustling core of the city, pointing out museums, government offices, and the main train station, the Victoria Terminus, a large and lavish nineteenth-century structure. He tells us, “Two and a half million commuters pass through those doors every day.” Hundreds of beggars hang around waiting for them.
Sebastian pulls up eventually at Crawford Market (now officially Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Market), our first destination. Mumbai’s biggest food bazaar, it operates in another colonial-era building from the 1860s notable for a bas-relief frieze designed by the father of Rudyard Kipling, a native son of the neighborhood. Sebastian stays with the car and hands us off to a Crawford guide who will show us around. Like a good leader, the guide asks, “Do you have any special interests?”
Cheryl immediately answers, “Dried spices.” He escorts us first to that section of stalls, loaded with cardamom, coriander, turmeric, black mustard seeds, whole star anise, aniseed, ginger, cloves, canela cinnamon, Ceylon cinnamon, ground chiles, black peppercorns, and masala and tikka blends. At one stand, he asks the vendor to let us smell his tandoori mix, saying, “This man blends ninety-two different ingredients by hand to make it.” The robust, freshly ground scent almost takes off our heads.
The extensive fruit selection also fascinates us. Alfonso mangoes, especially luscious when ripe, dominate in one area, and early picked green mangoes, eaten in that form, reign in another sector around the corner. Other stalls offer cus-tardy cherimoyas, intensely orange persimmons, papayas, watermelons, plump heavy figs, and remarkable pomegranates, some shorn