In the Market Where We Sell Our Soul

In the market just by the river Naga, I saw them in their best evening dresses, in their coat and suit and tie stitched at the Rajen Dresses and in their elegant sarees handcrafted at the Ibecha Boutique. But clothes make no man, or woman for that matter; as it was apparent in the shimmering light of the evening while the perfume blended intolerably with the filth around.

There were countless heads: the sellers some of them into the evening of their lives and some others magically bright and young, selling their commodities, and the buyers of all hues flocking together to get the best deal. The coat and suit and tie and saree were neatly ironed, but the wrinkle on the sellers’ faces was glaring; perhaps with the fear that a profitable sale would invite more demand letters than they have been receiving from the landguards. I have seen the sellers’ little sons and daughters, crying for their parents, puking profanities at the landguards, appreciating the revolutionary ideals of Warren Buffet, calling themselves the Amerika and Korea and etc. and etc.  

Back in the market, where the Naga runs with the dump and stink that the town offers generously, it was beyond what we see every evening every day. The sellers were jabbing, persuading, gabbling, baying, asking, convincing theirs is the best, in a manner so directly contrast to their perceived gracefulness. As if the buyers are so foolish, when in reality before arriving at the market, they had thought more than twice, while pawning a part of their ancestral land, hocking a sizable amount of their wives’ jewellery and nosediving into a back-breaking debt which they grimly hope to return it back one day, once they get the exact commodity for their kids from the stylish sellers.

They call it the future, we call it the livelihood; the professors might mark it as the native kind of job available only in public sector in a bloody town. The Rajen Dresses men and Ibecha Boutique women are selling the future and the livelihood and the native kind of job available only in public sector in a bloody town. They had travelled across the world trying and testing their selling techniques but have found the haven here, in this market and so here they were in the evening by the Naga.

I saw later, the truckloads of bombs leaving the godown at the corner. For the day the sun also left, unable to put up with the sight of people, who live like the Amerika and Korea while the universe is coercing to name us as the marvellous anthropoidal creation.