This story is from July 17, 2016

They came home with bangles, baubles

When the city was still a small town at heart, arrival of bangle sellers, rangoli girls and roaming cobblers was reassuring to families needing to buy trinkets or mend a tear
They came home with bangles, baubles
Women of the neighbourhood would assemble at one place to haggle with home vendors and snag a deal.
When the city was still a small town at heart, arrival of bangle sellers, rangoli girls and roaming cobblers was reassuring to families needing to buy trinkets or mend a tear
If there was one man who could get the neighbourhood women into a twitter, it was the tall, turbaned bangle seller. He would stride down the road, dhoti tucked up, the weight of his wares bearing down one shoulder which he manoeuvred carefully up our stairs.
He would gently let down his cargo wrapped in a huge white cloth — ropefuls of glass bangles that settled on the floor with a thousand domino tinkles, flashing, dazzling, catching the light.
His arrival would set off a tom-tomming in the lane — my sister Meher and her friends had a rudimentary alert system that involved much wild gesticulating and shouting across terraces and walls. Slowly, our verandah would fill up with young women holding out slender wrists and hunting for the right colours. Rank juniors like me were banished to the outer fringes, lest we put an enthusiastic foot on the fragile merchandise.
This was the excitement that afternoons were made of, around four decades ago, when Bengaluru was still a small town at heart. Travelling salesmen who brought simple joys to quiet lives. The bangle seller’s closest rival was the guy who pushed a cart with a sort of roof, strung up with fancy accessories –– pins, clips, scruncihes, bangles, beads, earrings. Girls would mill around him for hours.
The flower seller would come by every morning and evening, her basket of moist jasmine, kankambara, roses and tuberose leaving a fragrant trail. She would sit down cross-legged in a friendly home, chatting with the mistress and sipping a cup of tea as she expertly wove a gajra (strand).
Another favourite was the man who sold steel paatre (utensils) or simply exchanged them for old clothes. He would step into porches where women surrounded and harangued him, bargaining for vessels of the right size and gauge. Only Salem steel, insisted the traditionalists, and when the hubbub died down, each woman would hold up her acquisition with pride.

Then there were the more practical handymen — the ‘plastic repairee’ chap who loudly announced his specialization on the streets, usually once a week. Leaky plastic buckets were quickly collected for his healing touch: he would lay out his paraphernalia comprising a gas flame, old buckets, a sharp knife; then he would heat strips of plastic and stick them on to cracks like plaster, patting them as they grew cold and hard again. Fascinating for us kids, as we watched him do up buckets with garish patchwork, with colours that simply never matched. But it was acceptable then –– low quality and jugaad went hand in hand.
The roaming cobbler was another quick-fixer, whose bag of trade held an anvil, hammer, glue, bits of leather, needle and thick thread. School shoes needed him the most, and he would generally arrive on Sunday mornings. It is the warm afternoons that left an abiding memory, and even now a yearning for the stillness, when the calls of these salesmen cut through the quiet.
I don’t see them anymore –– the bangle seller, barber, rangoli girl, men repairing sofas and shoes, and selling fancy baubles. They no longer belong to our milieu, nudged out by our progress to a frantically commercialized world speeding on tech power, where needs are met in an instant. Maybe they still roam the streets in another part of the city, or have moved to small towns, where kids look forward to their impromptu visits and houses are still warm and open.
(In this column, residents of the city record their impressions of Bengaluru)
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