Last night I was having dinner at a little Italian restaurant close to my building. It's a low key sort of place, very casual with a small menu consisting of simple dishes like panini, pizza, spaghetti, and calzone. It's a quiet neighborhood place of the sort where you can grab a quick meal when you're too tired to cook. Nothing fancy, but quite good.
I was sitting and waiting for my calzone when saw the most extraordinary thing: a man walked into the nail salon next door holding a giant bunch of asparagus beans and bitter melon. These are not your typical vegetables. In fact, I can't recall ever having seen a bitter melon before living in South Asia. The man was, it appeared, offering to sell these vegetables to the women working at the nail salon.
The first thought in my head was, "my God, that man has a korola (bitter melon)." My second thought was, SHOBJI WALLAH! A shobji wallah is a vegetable hawker. This is not something that we typically see in the US, but is not unusual in some parts of the world, particularly South Asia.
I walked next door to the nail salon and asked the man if he had any more vegetable to sell. This astounded both the vegetable seller and the women at the salon, none of whom, I'm certain, ever expected someone like me to walk over, cash in hand, offering to buy exotic vegetables from a man on a bicycle.
I quickly negotiated a deal for some vegetables, paid the seller, and returned to the restaurant to enjoy my dinner. For the rest of the evening I could not help but fantasize about my neighborhood being treated to all variety of street vendors. I began to recall waking to the sound of the wallahs navigating their routes through village alleys, their voices coming together in a chorus of wares - fish! brooms! vegetables! beautiful dresses! - and looking out from a rooftop to see women leaning out of windows to pick the fattest fish they could afford from a wicker basket atop the head of the neighborhood maach wallah.
This is an unthinkable model of commerce in most parts of the US. We have licensed and regulated away the neighborhood vegetable seller, replacing him with the produce manager at giant chain store. Local farmers markets provide a glimpse at the old ways, but what is more beautiful than a bicycle basket filled with garden fresh produce?
Shobji wallah
Labels:
Food
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Sounds fantastic. Here in Austin, I once spoke with the owner of a snow cone wagon who told me about nearly going bankrupt one summer after locating her truck in the heavily-trafficked center of the Hyde Park neighborhood; she nearly went bankrupt for lack of business. This bodes ill, I said. She agreed, and shortly thereafter, the governor's mansion burned down.
More civilized, progressive neighborhoods aren't afraid of street peddlers, though. You can find taco trucks and paleta wagons all over north, east, and south Austin. It's not much, but it's not nothing, either. But good fresh produce is upscale, perversely, and I don't think I'll be seeing that sold out of anybody's bicycle basket any time soon.
(You can actually find bitter melon in at least one supermarket here. It's a mere 15-20 minute drive up the interstate.)
One of the reasons I prefer to be on this side of the Thames. We still have mongers of many ilk: iron, fish, meat, bread, fruit and veg, etc. Luckily, the produce is so crap in supermarkets I believe the green grocers are here to stay.
Post a Comment