A Storm of Spices

 

 

On Saturday evenings, Mumbai,

I would often be alone –

My consultant room-mate, over-zealous,

Would refuse to be flown

Back to base, and I

Waking up groggy in the evenfall,

Feeling lonely, morose, melancholic

Would wonder what to do at all

 

That is when, one dusky day,

I wandered off in the lanes afar,

Stumbling on an ocean of spice,

Rainbow colours in a sea of jar

Glow of turmeric, powders of gold

Chilli in scarlet, cinnabar red

Cumin, cinnamon, anise in brown

And cardamom pods in pistachio-jade

 

Heaps of hues, as if Holi was here,

Gulal gathered in the gloaming’s glow

But more than the colours, the whiffs ablaze

Waking me up, steady and slow

The air suffused with a pungent sting

Piquant aroma, even acrid a bit

The colours, the smells that brought back warmth

Just as the market lamps were lit

 

It turned my norm, each Saturday lone

To head to the market, the storm of spice

To shed my world of loneliness

The heady whiffs, an amazing splice

Holding together broken days

Shaking me up, screaming me awake

Buzz of busyness, thoroughfare of tang

In hills of flavours, and zesty flake

 

It was as if my wonderland own

Taken from the pages of an Arabian tale,

Or an oasis rich from the Silk routes lore –

Samarkand, Registan, caravan’s trail

How many weeks had I not spent

Rejuvenating myself in that bazaar of scent,

When Mumbai turned Muziris, Bombay-Bukhara

While inner the gloom would turn more faint

 

Until that strength of the sea of spice

Changed myself, to be bereft of gloom

A single thought, and my spirits would lift

In Saturday’s Cairo, or my Chembur’s room

Despair dissolved like a peppery dash

I no more had need for zeal to find

I could snuggle on dusks with a cup of tea

And marvel that a market could mend my mind

 

But even today, when I add a pinch

Turmeric, pepper, leaves of bay

I go back to the joy of the hills of spice

I wake afresh, just like yesterday

A clump of cloves, a mass of anise

Garam Masala for the warmth to rise -

Not just flavours in a dinner’s dish

But the zest of life from a street of spice

Inspired from my days of spending weekends alone in my Antop Hill rental – friends were yet to land in Mumbai to start their jobs, while my roommate would stay back in the ITCs and Sheratons in other cities on his consulting gig instead of heading back to town. Which is when I would feel the pangs of new found silence despite the noise of the streets, and would wander to find a slice of life – found serendipitously in a spice market that would bring back the mojo in my melancholic Mumbai…