a walk in the mall

I took an early day at work, mostly because Georgie and Divya are out of town, the former visiting her boyfriend and the latter on tour with Dharohar (are you in Bombay tomorrow? Check them out at the Kala Ghoda Festival). After work I went to Bapu Bazaar near New Gate in the old city to purchase a pair of sandals.

Before I tell the story of buying a pair of shoes, a short aside on my philosophy of consumption. When I am in a foreign country which is considerably more poor than the United States, I am considerably less stingy with my cash than I am back home. This is not because of any half-hearted bourgeois attempts to 'sympathize' with the people I interact with. In fact it comes down to my own particular brand of American laziness: Knowing that each and every time a shopkeeper harangues me with 'Sir!'s and 'Young sir!'s he is expending considerable amounts of his caloric uptake in his (probably vain) attempt to catch my attention for even an instant, in the even vainer hope that this will translate to my giving him a middling sum of cash for a manufactured product of unknown origin (hence the toil which went into making which product will remain unknown to me), I do not spend any more than an instant haggling over the price of a good I want to buy.

Thus, today: After a short walk around the bazaar to gain some kind of understanding of the number and price of sandals for sale, I went into a shopkeeper's stall off the bazaar on a side street, across from a man selling cotton candy and fried peanuts. This particular stall attracted my attention for the paradoxical reason that its owners did not even acknowledge my presence: one was in the front attending to two rather skeptical-looking women in sequined dresses, and the other was in the back praying to a small shrine erected to Ganesh.

After I walked into the stall, the worker who was busy called the the one in prayer to help with this newly-arrived customer. The salesman did not acknowledge this call, and continued in prayer. After about two minutes spent poking about the seemingly limitless collection of leather thongs, jhatis, sandals, and loafers, he turned around and told me, "You looking for shoes?!"

"Yes, I am. Some sandals, actually." I said. Spurred on as if by divine inspiration, the salesman began rummaging through the piles of shoes, as if some cadence on my utterance of the word "Sandal" had somehow revealed to him the exact size, shape and colour of the sandal I would ultimately purchase.

He produced a few pairs of shoes, and I tried them on. They were either too small or the wrong colour, but this guy seemed to know what he was doing, and definitely seemed to have a method to his maniacal way of picking out shoes at random from the wall of shelves near him.

After I found a pair I liked, the haggling began. This is where my philosophy came into play. The salesman said: "Today is a good day, you are my first customer in the morning," he said. (It was 12:30 pm.) "Normally, these shoes are 825 rupees. I will give them to you for 500."

Although I lay claim to certain proclivities about buying goods in foreign lands, here is a pretty safe generalization for someone who is buying something in a stall in a bazaar, no matter where you are. Before embarking on any trip, find out the average weekly of a middle-class (in my case) Indian. Assuming an average middle-class Indians make 4-5 thousand Rupees a week (I have come to this conclusion anecdotally, so it is in no way grounded in actual fact. But as you shall see, that is not important.) When a shopkeeper offers you something at any price, divide the average salary of a middle-class Indian by the price. In this case, this would translate to roughly one-tenth the weekly salary of an upper-middle-class Indian. You can see the use of this. Someone making a salary of $36,000 in the United States is making $700 a week, roughly. Now, imagine if a cheap pair of leather sandals you were attempting to buy from a street market in Atlanta were labeled with the price of $70. Absurd, no?

Hence, I insisted on bargaining the shopkeeper down. Although laziness is often a consideration, the foreign traveler also knows that bargaining is a chance to prove one's worth. Thus anything which can be construed as a ripoff, even if it does nothing to damage ones' pocketbook will almost certainly damage ones' pride and estimation among friends.

I made the salesman lower his price to Rs. 300. Knowing the shoes were probably manufactured at a cost of 1/10th that amount, I was about to negotiate him further when my other motivation, laziness, reared its ugly head. I resigned myself to spending Rs. 300 on this cheap pair of sandals which would probably fall apart in a month's time. This is the part I like so much about my philosophy of purchase: It surprises the shopkeeper even more than it satisfies my urge to prevent unnecessary expenditure of effort. My salesman took the three crisp, clean 100-rupee notes and held them up into the sky, kissing them as he lifted them above his forehead.

This left me doubly satisfied: Not only had I landed a pair of serviceable sandals, I had also reaffirmed one man's belief in divine intercession.