One of the interesting aspects of living in an independent house in Bangalore is having the push-cart sellers and their wares at your doorstep allowing you to ‘shop’ without having to plan a day out.
So you can get fresh veggies and greens and fruits, you can buy potted plants, you can get your clothes ironed, sell your old newspapers, you can get your knives sharpened or even buy a carpet or if you are in a generous mood donate to an ashram in cash or kind…..
The difficult part is to ‘understand’ what they are selling and to train oneself to recognise and decipher the sounds that actually declare the wares that they are selling.
For the first few days I ran to the window to ‘see’ the ‘sound’. Some voices are shrill, some others deep, some singsong, some grunt.
The milkman and his ‘aaa, eee, oh….’ amuses me early in the morning.
The lady veggie seller in my opinion has the best voice that, if trained, would perhaps be able to sing at the same pitch as the famous Hindustani classical singer Begum Parveen Sultana.
The tender coconut seller actually grunts and I have not been able to relate the product with the guttural sound that emanates from his deep throat 🙂
The potted plant seller goes, ‘poh-O-tt-ed plaaannnttttsssss, tulseeeee, flaaaverrrrsssss…….’.
The greens chappie’s is ‘keeeerrrrraaaaiiiiiii, naaaaateeeeeee kothambaleeeeeeeee’.
The male veggie seller is a loud ‘tharkaareeeeeeee’.
‘Madam, caaaarpeeeeet’ announces the carpet seller.
And so on and so forth. I enjoyed the guessing game and still do….especially when a new seller comes down the street 🙂