New Delhi and Purani Dilli: apart from their geography, the two cities have little else in common. The former is shiny and chrome, Capital to a nation on the rise; the latter is dust and crumbling mansions, a relic of empires long dead and gone. From the dialects spoken to the cuisines consumed, more differences than similarities betwixt the two, and the same can be said of the peoples that live in each. So, one year after a pandemic swept across the globe, ignoring borders, religions, ethnicities and socioeconomic status, how have the two cities responded to this shared threat? Differently, but of course.
As the nation caps off a year of living with Covid-19 as well as its consequences and complications, we visit two markets, each representative of the city they are in — New Delhi’s INA Market, filled with imported combustibles alongside exotic produce, and Old Delhi’s Khari Baoli, Asia’s largest spice market that is home to generations of merchants as well as mendicants — to see how the citizenry is coping.
Down in INA
“Do you deliver?” I ask, as I watch my order getting packed. “No, you want something, come here,” answers the owner-manager of one of INA Market’s several halal butcheries, his usually crowded store front now only buzzing from the sound of an old ceiling fan. “No pictures,” he snaps as I raise my phone to capture his neatly laid out wares.
Elsewhere the scene is same. Indian National Airways Market, Delhi’s go-to place for foodstuffs and groceries from around the country and the world, usually has scores of people of a dozen different nationalities browsing through its gourmet groceries, vegetable vendors, meat-seafood sellers, and specialty stores. A year since the country was first shut down one can see barely a dozen customers in toto, the sellers outnumbering the buyers.
“This used to be the only place in Delhi where you could get imported stuff. Ramen, balsamic vinegar, chocolates, seaweed... sab kuch milta hai (you get everything here). Then there are all the exotic fruits and vegetables. Things were becoming available online also, but people still liked to come and select their own purchases. All that is gone now,” mourns one of the few grocery store owners willing to talk, even as his employees stand at their storefront, as do those of every store, trying to the few shoppers passing by.
“Now you get everything online, straight at your doorstep. Shopping ke liye bahaar jaane ki naubat kahaan aati hai (To shop, where is the need to step out anymore)? Amazon, Big Basket is everything now,” he adds. And it’s not just Amazon and Big Basket.
Over the course of the Janata lockdown, and its later iterations, delivery and logistics systems in the country have taken a quantum leap forward, especially in terms of regional foods. Where once one would have to come to INA to buy Sindhi namkeen, Mangalorean pork pickle and Bihari Ool Chatni, all of these and so much more are now a few clicks and a cashless payment away, with usually efficient and pleasant customer service.
Meanwhile, my friend the butcher, excellent though the quality of his mutton may be, isn’t exactly amenable to moving ahead with the times. As I leave, one can hear him shooing away a hapless youth who wants some shins cut horizontally for an advertorial shoot. “Woh sab hum nahin kartein, aur yahaan aur koi nahin karega (We don’t do this, and no one else will over here either).”
Up At Khari Baoli
“Agar hum nahin badlenge, toh peeche choot jaayenge (If we don’t change, we will get left behind),” muses Vijay Kumar Gupta Bunty, President and spokesman of the Gadodia Market Traders Association, whose first-floor office I located in the twisting lanes of Khari Baoli, after asking the way, and being directed, to it in the several times since I have entered Asia’s largest spice market.
Here, the energy is noticeably different, though the smell of spices, dried and drying chillies and peppercorns peters through even a double mask. While elsewhere in the Capital, people tend to shy like startled horses when they hear someone cough in the elevator or restaurant, here the coughing is constant thanks to the peppery perfume of the spices. “Tabhi toh pata chalta hai ki sab kuch theek kaam kar raha hai (Only then we know everything is in working order),” grins Shiv, a runner for a California walnuts dealer, who’s taking a midday tea break.
However, there are definitely less people than as usual, the rate of vehicular incidence (wherein your two or three wheeler is constantly dinged by that of others) on the teeming roads is way down, and there longer pauses for the labourers between the hauling of sacks and packages.“Business is not as much as it usually is, but things have been getting inevitably better as the year has progressed,” he shares, pointing out, “This pandemic is nothing anyone in the world has seen. In the first few months everyone panicked. We took our cues from the West and shut everything down without any systems or alternatives in place, and so businesses collapsed.”And so, Khari Baoli, which along with Chandni Chowk, has survived centuries of conquest, war, turmoil, famines, and even previous pandemics, picked itself back up again. Gadodia Market, the 200-room heritage building that houses the majority of the spice merchants is still humming with activity.
“Whether you are an unskilled worker or a business owner, like say, a shopkeeper, who is slightly more educated, you have to be prepared for change. There’s a change in technologies and ways of doing business every 25-30 years, and you have to learn how to adapt along with it, or you’ll sink,” says Bunty, noting how his fellow spice merchants have switched to taking orders on the phone and even venturing online. Those who used to tend to customers have now switched to becoming delivery agents for their own stores or for the other burgeoning delivery services.
“The West, with all its scientists and technology, is coming around to realise that everyday ingredients, the very things Khari Baoli is famous for, from turmeric and cumin to almonds and figs help boost immunity and give natural resilience to infections, and want to buy it from here directly. Indian households have always known that, and are buying more of the same. We just have to update the way we service customers and maintain the high quality of our products. Vyapaar gaya nahi hai, vyapaari badal gayi hai (The business has not gone away, just the way of doing it has changed).”
Downstairs, Bunty’s words seem to ring true. Merchants and shop attendants chat cheerfully through their masks, periodically breaking off their conversations to take orders on the phone or tend to the few customers browsing their wares. Labourers haul immense bales and sacks of dried fruits, herbs, spices, and other consumables and combustibles, lowing to each other to move out of the way. Cycle bells ring, people call out with their mirth muffled only slightly by masks, someone bumps in to another person ahead, while someone else coughs behind. In Old Delhi, it’s just another new day.
Cold hard facts
Where once one would have to come to INA to buy Sindhi namkeen, Mangalorean pork pickle and Bihari Ool Chatni, all of these and so much more are now a few clicks and a cashless payment away, with usually efficient and pleasant customer service