What Bazaar Taught Me About Belonging

By VB Bonny

The bazaar is never quiet. 

When your feet ache from walking all day, it feels like swaying with the surging tide. People chatter in numbers, their eyes linger on price tags; some printed, some voiced.

Even the oldest faces lean closer to the items, vegetables, fruits or household items with curiosity. It’s not about what they need, it’s about participating in the bargain with delight. The air smells with savouries, the samosas or jalebis, the smoke from the tea that curls around the chapped lips, fogging the glasses of grandpa’s who have seen much and forgotten every detail.

Every Sunday, I pause by a wall that says Buy More with the word Discount in a font so little. My day has just begun, I watch, wait and learn. The rhythm of urgency, the way the currency travels through the smallest palms to the learned palms and how they buy not in grams but in kilos. This noise doesn’t bother me anymore; the eyes move from store to store and the tea I finished in a sip of four.

My home has always been by the bazaar. As a child, I remember the orange sugar candies in translucent wrapper; the kind that stuck to your fingers when they melted into tangy sweetness. I returned as a woman, who changed three cities, jobs and rented houses but still finds peace among the vendors and dusty tea stalls.

The chair I reclined on, whines underweight but never gives up on supporting my vision. Leaning against the chipping wall paint, the noise that once felt overwhelming when I was kid, is now the only language that feels mine. The words chase my mind, and it comes out as a story or a dark poetry.

It’s strange; the older I get, the more this moment I crave, the nostalgia how the bazaar keeps me busy in ways silence never could. When the breeze travels through the corner, it ruffles my adulthood, lifting the dust off my childhood. 

I remember how the bazaar taught me about belonging. The vendors aren’t selling; they are surviving. They whisper so loud, that belonging doesn’t mean to be seen, it is about hearing the strangers and realizing that they have been speaking to you all along.

By VB Bonny