You get everything, even on the move

Kuch chahiye, Madam? The words woke me up. I immediately looked outside the window of the moving train to check which part of the world had I reached and found a little girl who was waiting anxiously for my answer.

She was holding on to two boxes of bindis.  What passed my mind, I have no idea, but I bought two of them, maybe I wanted to thank the girl, who was not more than 6 years old, for waking me up.

The bindi girl hopped out at the next station to make business in some other train like the thousands of women who make a living out of selling wares in the Mumbai local trains everyday.

I am five-months-old in the city and to the surprise of all my friends and family, for whom crowded locals are the first thing they associate with Mumbai, I have pretty well managed to travel by them. (Luckily, I can afford to travel by first-class, which saves me from getting sandwiched between two strange women, who are nonetheless smiling at me.)

Steering back to my thoughts on the chalti-firti dukans (moving shops) whom I meet everyday, I have to tell you that in their trade they are as good as businesswomen in suits. The style and poise in which they manage their stuff in lids of cardboard boxes, stashed one on top of the other, is really impressive.

They have it all displayed for you — from safety pins to hairbands. They add colour to the otherwise drab compartments. There is something about the way in which they sell their stuff. It tempts you to take a look and you end up buying something. Why? Because you don’t really get time to shop for these.

“You get all kinds of accessories with them,” said one of my co-passengers, who was checking out a heap of plastic hair clips. I smiled in agreement.

For most of these women, this is their only source of income. Many are young mothers but they can’t sit at home nursing their babies, so they tag their little ones along.

Jaya, with whom I had got a little friendly, does business everyday with her one-and-half-year-old girl tied by a cloth to her belly. “I make decent profit,” she told me.

I continued feeding my curiosity bug. I gathered that they get their stuff from wholesale markets. “Dadar,” Jaya told me.

But all’s not happy and lucky in their story. There are people she needs to appease to go about with her business. “You have to give hafta to cops or else they will make life difficult for you.”

Each day a new face comes to try their luck in this world of market. So, do they make profit despite hundreds of hands selling wares here, I asked Jaya.

“There is room for everyone, Madam,” she said, smiling before getting down at Vile Parle. She lived there, she had told me.