Bengaluru's City Market in the ’40s

As years go by, I think about the days when, as a young girl of ten, I used to go with my mother, get into our old faithful Chevrolet car for a smooth drive to KR Market or the City Market, as people called it, once a month. It is a memory I cherish till today.

As we stepped on to the freshly washed floor, cool to the feet, the market was a feast for the eyes and an overwhelming aroma of fresh flowers enveloped us. Flower sellers, on either side stringing flowers while nonchalantly speaking to each other, would greet us with broad smiles. Well-groomed and freshly oiled hair, parted in the middle, round red kumkuma, striking to behold, and an armful of green bangles fascinated me, and I would gaze at them.

The variety of the flowers came in all hues and colours. To name them in Kannada seem to me to give more fragrance – mallige, jaji, roja, shamanthigae, sugandaraja, sampigae, kenda sampige and many, many more, a veritable feast for the eyes. Alongside were shallow baskets filled with fragrant greens of maruga, davana, panneerele, pachchethene, all glistening with the drops of water sprinkled on them.

Jasmine garlands, intertwined with maruga or davana, hung on either side, swaying in the cool breeze. The buds yet to unfold, in no time, when fully blown would surely vie with the smile of the flower sellers! Carefully wrapped flowers, in wet broad leaves, changed hands and both of us walked a few steps into the mild sunshine.

A personal atmosphere all around, a sense of camaraderie, a sense of family kinship. Not an impersonal world of malls ad supermarkets that I now see all around. My mother, a regular visitor, inquired about their well being, on every visit. Same old familiar faces.

Fruits like oranges, apples, bananas, papayas, guavas were not to my taste and when my mother was filling up her bags with fruits and vegetables, I made a beeline to the corner shop that had glass jars with lids filled to the brim with pineapple slices, juicy and inviting. Even before my mother came, I would be relishing the pineapple slice savouring every bit.

How can I ever forget the short, chubby, squashed face with a red cloth wound round his head amidst heaps of pumpkins, orange and red, and the huge white ash gourds that I sometimes failed to notice the round headed seller!

Unpretentious world, a shared and cherished experience for both the seller and the buyer. That was the world in which I grew up.