The thing that makes England truly foreign is the food supermarket. This is particularly true for people from Delhi who do all their shopping for fruit and vegetables from vendors who wheel their produce to their homes, or from makeshift stalls in shopping areas designed to sell other, less perishable, things. When fresh produce is sold in air-conditioned brick and mortar shops in Khan Market or Defence Colony, the customer can be certain he is being gouged but he’s so rich he probably doesn’t care.
Bangalore and Goa aren’t like Delhi; you can do your shopping in self-service shops large enough to need shopping baskets and trolleys, but the supermarket as an emporium of fresh produce where you can fussily choose from seven different kinds of potatoes or shop for cuts of animals raised humanely outdoors before being slaughtered, that kind of shop just doesn’t exist in India.
British supermarket chains like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Aldi are temples dedicated to the only kind of citizen who counts in modern democracies, the comfortable consumer. For Indians like me with just enough disposable income for the occasional visit abroad, the supermarket is what you never find in India; a secular realm where no taboo, no shibboleth, is allowed to come between the consumer and his food preferences, where every kind of meat is brazenly available.
I browse my way down the meat aisles like a neo-literate visiting a library. What, I wonder, is the difference between corned and roast beef? And why is the ground beef so far away? The answer isn’t complicated; raw meats are displayed separately from processed meats. There is a system at work, as rigorous as the Dewey Decimal Classification and as baffling. Why are ‘Eggs’ an island unto themselves, when they could be sitting next to the chickens that laid them?
When you shop for meat in Delhi, it’s like buying something unclean. Meat shops are poky places unburdened by air-conditioning or much refrigeration. The sawn-off tree trunk that serves as a butcher’s block, the big knife that surgically disassembles a haunch into its component morsels, the goats hanging upside down on meat hooks like sleek, headless greyhounds, are too close to death (or life) to be entirely comfortable.
But the medallions of meat in Waitrose, the ground lamb from New Zealand with ten per cent fat, the sirloin of Wagyu beef from Japan, all of these come labelled and shrink-wrapped in a way that mitigates the fact that they were killed for us to eat. Steaks are sold in marbled slabs like valuable artworks in a way that perfectly disembodies them.
Supermarkets instal omnivores like me as their default customers. It’s the vegetarians and vegans and beef-shunners and pork-avoiders who are the food minorities that need to be specially catered to. There is a consolation in being, if only in my food preferences, Average Man. The Indian cosmopolitan, if there is such a person, is a shallow creature whose spiritual home is Tesco.
There are, of course, great displays of fresh produce in Delhi, but they occur in its fruit and vegetable mandis. Only the poor, the thrifty or the truly discriminating take the trouble of shopping in these daily cornucopias. For decades I drove past Okhla mandi, one of Delhi’s great fresh produce markets, on my way to work, but never once did I stop to shop. This was partly because it was inconvenient — parking, congestion etc — but mainly because I knew that in a wholesale market, the individual consumer was unimportant.
And Indian consumers like being important. The vegetable vendor who is allowed to bring his cycle-wheeled cart into your neighbourhood and up to your door is, despite his usefulness, a supplicant. The relationship that Delhi’s middle classes have with him is mutually beneficial but unequal. You’ll often hear women (who mainly do the shopping at the gate) speak of their long-term vendors with something approaching affection. But this doesn’t stop them from haranguing the phalwala for delivering an insipid, unsweet watermelon.
It is routine and completely acceptable to ask the fruit seller to carve a wedge (a tanka) out of a watermelon to taste for sweetness before buying. As a child, I used to be embarrassed by the unreasonableness of this: how could the phalwala guarantee the sweetness of a fruit he hadn’t eaten and what would he do with the rejected fruit? As an adult, I rationalised it away as negotiation, the ‘give and take’ between buyer and seller, but it isn’t that. It is a form of intimate oppression, where unequal familiarity is used to wring out the last rupee from every transaction and, not incidentally, rehearse the simple pleasures of inequality.
For a middle class that has long relied on the poor selling goods and services at rock-bottom rates, the new excitement about precarity and the gig economy is curious. I recently bought Spanish oranges on a delivery app. Inside five minutes of making the online payment, the app’s courier was at my door with three oranges boxed in cardboard. I marvelled at the convenience of it and wondered how the traditional phalwala would compete with the last-minute convenience of this service. But an app can’t meet your need to see and squeeze and smell fresh fruit before buying, so I expect he will survive.
Meanwhile, I grow daily more adept at navigating my local supermarket. I’ve learnt the euphemism Waitrose uses for the cheapest version of every item of food: it is ‘Essential’ as in ‘Essential Mature Cheddar’. Instead of puzzling over the inexplicable variety on display, I just hoover up the ‘Essential’ version.
I’ve learnt not to ask supermarket associates, obsessively stacking and restocking shelves, for directions because it seems rude to interrupt their iron routines. I now wear a lambswool sweater to keep out the Baltic cold that supermarkets need to arrest decay. I’ve even tried to self-check-out and failed. The machine told me to wait for an ‘associate’ who didn’t arrive; relieved, I hauled my essentials to a check-out operated by a human.
Walking home with two carrier bags cutting into my fingers, I dutifully thought about how alienating the process was, purpose-built to eliminate human interaction. As a tourist, though, I could live with that for the privilege of (briefly) being a modern consumer. Sometimes — and this is one of the pleasures of being a resident desi — alienation is its own reward.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
