street – Pickpocket Bob Arno

A small fraction of the flower market behind Dadar train station in Mumbai.

What’s in all the brilliant-colored baskets? Spice? Dye? After witnessing the most amazing train-boarding process ever, we descended from the “flyover footpath” and found ourselves behind the Dadar train station. As we cautiously came down the dilapidated stairs, we saw a vast, chaotic marketplace bustling in all directions and under the highway overpass.

It was a huge flower market with endless baskets containing every color, and shifting fragrances of marigold, rose, mint, carnation, jasmine, lilies-of-the-valley, something like lilac, and more. In places it just smelled very green. A few steps away the scent of sewage rose to overpower the flowers. Everything was overpowering: the noise, the smells, the colors, the commotion, the press of the crowd. Someone accidentally kicked my toe and made it bleed. I looked down at my dusty foot, a thin buffalo skin away from the filthy ground, and wondered what germs might find their way into the wound. The crowd swept me forward.

I sent home a few photos and got back questions that surprised me: “Who has the money to buy flowers? I can hardly spend the money to buy cut flowers. Do they just put them in vases in their homes? If it’s just for the wealthy, would it be their help going to make the purchases?”

The questions made me realize how much I take for granted. Because I’ve been to India so many times, and read so many books about and taking place in India, I forget that much of what I’ve learned isn’t common knowledge. Cow manure patties are used as fuel; betelnut is chewed with lime; the backs of all trucks say “Horn OK Please;” children call strangers “auntie” and “uncle;” and flowers are offerings to the gods. Even a man with only ten limes to sell will have three fresh flower heads on the corner of his spread-out rag, as an offering.

I’ve been fascinated by India since the late 70s, when I had daily lunches at a tiny Indian joint in Sunnyvale. That led to my study of Indian cooking and reading Indian cookbooks padded with details of regional family life in India. I’ve since read so many books about the country, both fiction and non-fiction, that I forget I might be a little more familiar with some of the country’s peculiar customs.

Over the hotel's front entrance. — Over the hotel’s front entrance.

So to answer those excellent questions: everybody buys flowers, rich and poor! Most of the flowers at the market are just the stemless heads. They’re strung in long or short strands in different combinations and offered to the god of choice. Every business, from the biggest bank to the humble man with only a box-top of moldy oranges to sell, displays a flower offering for luck. It may be an elaborate living chandelier of multicolored blossoms strung fresh and fragrant, or a single wilting marigold head. Scrutinize any truck or taxi and you’ll find a string of three fresh carnation or marigold heads and a couple of chili peppers swinging from the front bumper. The police car we rode in so many times this trip had on its dashboard a tiny altar to Ganesha draped with a string of orange flowers.

There’s often fruit, too. An orange, some sliced coconut, a few pomegranate seeds, whatever. So most of the flowers in the flower market are just the blossoms, ready for stringing. Workers sit on the ground everywhere stringing and selling pretty strands.

Our grubby hotel has a long strand over the entrance, rose petals on the lobby floor around candles, a little altar on the front desk, and a small heap of flowers on a front entry step.

Professional beggars who understand the power of eye contact.

I’m a sucker for adorable beggar children on the streets of Mumbai. It’s impossible to look away, not reach for a coin. Now that I understand that so many poor farmers from faraway villages flock to the big city in desperation after their crops fail, that they can’t find work, have families to feed and debts to pay, my heart breaks for adult beggars, too.

But begging is also an industry; one that can sometimes net a better living than many honest jobs—hard labor earning barely enough money for food. A Mumbai local explained that these professional beggars know exactly where to hang out for the biggest return. While the locals may offer a rupee, tourists will easily hand over a 100 rupee note. Though only worth about two U.S. dollars, it’s a windfall to the panhandler. This sort of begging is so lucrative, my friend told me, that it for some it is a career. He described seeing beggars don shabby costumes, muss their hair, and dirty their faces before going to work.

And there are begging scams, too, like the mothers-with-babies (rented) who beg for milk powder, lead you to a nearby shop where you buy milk at an inflated price, and when you leave she returns the milk to the shop and splits the money with the shopkeeper.

Makes a person skeptical, even suspicious. And confused, because Mumbai has severe poverty, destitution, despair, and wretchedness. Heartstrings tugged, or legs pulled?

Beggars can be compelling. I fell for this family, a mother and her three boys, at Mumbai’s Dadar train station, in a chaotic crossroads like a Third World Times Square, an area far from any tourist zone.

The woman made a continuous loud honking noise by rubbing a stick on one side of a drum she carried hanging from her neck, and beating it on the other side. Meanwhile, her gorgeous painted boys turned their enormous eyes up to me. The boys had rope whips slung on their shoulders, wore bright skirts and anklets of bells. I was transfixed; couldn’t be bothered with a camera—I fumbled for coins. Bob, as always, had a video running.

Why the whips? Why the awful racket scraped on the drum? What’s on the woman’s head?

The heavy load on her head causes perfect posture and slow, elegant movements.

These are the Potraj people, seldom seen nowadays and said to be fast-vanishing. They are nomads who represent the goddess Kadak Lakshmi, or Mariai. When the Potraj are heard in the neighborhood, superstitious and religious women, of which there are many, run out and give alms. What is frightening about the ritual performed by the Potraj is the fierce self-flagellation practiced during trance-like dances to the “music” produced by the woman with the drum. A wonderful description of a child petrified by the mysterious Potraj is told by that child grown up. He called his nemesis the “boogoo-boogoo man,” and although he had nightmares about the Potraj as if he were a bogeyman, he refers to the sound of the scraping of the drum: boogoo-boogoo-boogoo-boogoo.

Watch the video if you dare. The sound may haunt you.

The male beats himself—hard—while his wife or mother stands by like a one-man-band and takes offerings. She balances a heavy wooden altar on her head, in which sits a statue of her goddess. Children begin as trainees at a painfully young age, and have their own little whips.

Disappearing into the crowd, the woman takes one last look at us.

I saw one of these Potraj in Chennai a few months ago. He was on a tea break. I didn’t notice if a woman was with him. I had no idea what he did, either. His colorful costume was arresting, and the long yellow rope whip slung over his shoulder fascinated me.

A Potraj on a tea break in Chennai last January.

beggar bombay children India mumbai street

PICKPOCKETS, CON ARTISTS, GANGSTERS, THIEVES, AND TRAVEL

Mumbai flowerhead market

Mumbai beggar family