A pair of bright blue slippers loose in a confusion of other footwear; now hidden by a pair of black Bata shoes; now showing ahead of a pair of Kolapuris; a never-ending hide and seek. The kid follows it, head bent, eyes screwed with concentration, the object of his fancy now within and now at the periphery of his myopic vision. The din of the roadside vendors crying out their wares, each trying to outdo his neighbour in decibel, reaches higher and higher to a crescendo of chaos. For now, his ears seem to have blocked everything out, the brain ignoring the messages from the eardrum.
The slippers loose in the sea of feet. Scratching his head, he looks about. This has caused a small traffic block. Hundreds of feet scurried this way and that, like ants on an important mission, not one pair stopping in the middle as his did. A dhoti clad man issues an expletive in Bhihari as he collides with the small inconspicuous body that formed a rock around which eddied the sea of feet.
Another collision renders him in front of one of the stalls selling a myriad of things; safety pins, handkerchiefs, cheap colourful sunglasses for kids, leather belts, Abibas pants and Live’s jeans. There is no perfect order in the arrangement of the stalls. An open air barber sandwiched between two cloth stalls offers to cut your hair for Rupees 3. An autumn astrologer sits with an air of authority near a tea stall; the cards with written horoscopes as ancient but stately as the man; the green parrot who would rather be flying in the open relegated to the small cage, which has after years of moving about clipped most of his tail feathers, with a small cup of water-soaked chana. A small shack offers sweet Indian tea and cookies, a rupee for the tea and 50 paise for a cookie. A cobbler has found a place too; new soles hang from strings behind him; old shoes, polishes, brushes rest on the wooden box that contains his tools of trade. Despite all this chaos, the explosion of colours, people and noise, to the little boy, everything put together makes one interesting symphony, with an invisible conductor, a symphony of life. This is a poor shopper’s paradise, Jaigaon.
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