A boy my age squatted on his haunches high up on the shelves, and when Bappu stopped to try a new breed of seedless grape, the boy scuttled over to a brass water jug, washed three or four grapes quickly, and handed them down to us for a taste. “No seeds, you know,” the stall boss yelled from his three-legged stool in the shade. “Brand-new ting. For you, Bappu, we make kilo cheap.”
Sometimes Bappu would buy, and sometimes he would not, always playing the vendors off one another. We took a shortcut to the meat market, through the pet stalls and the cages filled with panting rabbits and shrieking parrots. The smell of chickens and turkeys hit you like a village latrine, the throbbing, clucking cages and the glimpse of bald rumps where feathers had fallen out in patches. The poultry butcher sang out from behind a red valley of slashes on the chopping block, a basket of bloodied heads and wattles at his feet.
This was where Bappu taught me how to look at the skin of a chicken to make sure it was smooth, and how to bend the wings and beak for flexibility to judge the chicken’s age. And the clearest sign of a tasty chicken: plump knees.
Entering the meat market’s cool hall, I erupted in goose bumps, my eyes adjusting slowly to the gloomy light. The first vision to emerge from the fetid air was a butcher mincing stringy meat with a massive knife. We passed rhythmic hacking, the air sickly sweet with death, the gutter-river red.
Sheep with their throats freshly cut hung from a chain of hooks at Akbar’s halal meat shop, and Bappu threaded his way between these strange trees, slapping the meaty hides. He’d find one he liked and butcher Akbar and Bappu would haggle, roar, and spit until their fingertips touched. When Akbar lifted his hand an assistant dropped an ax into the animal we had purchased, and our sandals were suddenly awash in a crimson tide and the gray blue tubes of intestines shuddering to the floor.
I remember—as the butcher expertly cut and trimmed the mutton, wrapping the legs in wax paper—lifting my head to the blue black ravens that intensely stared down at us from the rafters directly overhead. They raucously cawed and ruffled wings, their white trails of shit splattering down the columns and onto the meat. And I hear them now, to this day, whenever I attempt something ludicrously “artistic” in my Paris kitchen, this raucous cry of Crawford ravens warning me to stay close to the earth.
My favorite stop at Crawford, however, was in the fish market. Bappu and I always made the fish market our last stop, hopping the fish-gut-clogged drains that had backed up into oily-gray seas, and laden down as we were with our purchases of the morning. Our goal was fishmonger Anwar and his stall in the back of the covered quarter.
Hindus hung yellow garlands and burned incense under pictures of Shirdi Sai Baba on the concrete columns that supported the fish market. Bins of fish came clattering in, a silvery blur of wide-eyed pomfrets and pearlspots and sea bream, and here and there stood sulfuric heaps of Bombay duck, the salted shiners that are a staple of Indian cooking. By nine in the morning the early shift of workers had finished their day, and they undressed modestly under a robe, washing in a rusted bucket and scrubbing their scale-flecked lungi with Rin soap. Black recesses of the market flickered with the glow of coal fires, delicately fanned alive for a simple meal of rice and lentils. And after the meal the rows of men, impervious to the noise, settled down one by one for a nap on burlap bags and cardboard flaps.
What glorious fish. We’d pass oily bonito, the silver bodies with the squashed, yellow-glazed heads. I loved the trays of squid, the skin purple and glistening like the tip of a penis, and the wicker baskets of sea urchins that were snipped open for the succulent orange eggs inside. And everywhere on the market’s concrete floor, fish heads and fins sticking out at odd angles from man-high ice heaps. And the roar of Crawford was deafening, a crash of rattling chains and ice grinders and cawing ravens in the roof and the singsong of an auctioneer’s voice. How could this world not enter me?
There, finally, in the back of Crawford, stood the world of Anwar. The fishmonger sat cross-legged, all in white, high up on an elevated metal desk amid a dozen chest-high heaps of ice and fish. Three phones stood beside him on the desk—one white, one red, and one black. I squinted the first time I saw him, for he was stroking something in his lap, and it took me a few moments to realize it was a cat. Then something else moved, and I suddenly realized his entire metal desktop was covered with a half dozen contented cats, lazily flipping their tails, licking paws, haughtily lifting their heads at our arrival.
But let me tell you. Anwar and his cats, they knew fish, and together they kept alert eyes on the crate-skidding work going on at their feet. Just a little wobble of Anwar’s head or a soft click of his tongue sent workers scuttling over to a pink order slip or to a Koli fisherman’s arriving catch. Anwar’s workers were from the Muhammad Ali Road, fiercely loyal, and all day they remained bent at his feet, sorting lobsters and crabs, carving the beefy tuna, violently scaling carp.
Anwar said his prayers five times a day on a prayer rug furled out behind a column, but otherwise he could always be found cross-legged atop his battered metal desk in the back of the market. His feet ended in long, curly yellow toenails, and he had a habit of massaging his bare feet all day long.
“Hassan,” he’d say, tugging at his big toe. “You still too small. Tell Big Abbas to feed you more fish. Got nice tuna here from Goa, man.”
“That no decent fish, man. That cat food.”
And from him would come the rasping cough and hiss that meant he was laughing at my cheek. On days when the phones were ringing—Bombay hotels and restaurants placing their orders—Anwar courteously offered Bappu and me milky tea, but otherwise filled out pink slips and watched stern-faced with concentration as his workers filled crates. On slow days, however, he’d take me aside to an arriving basket of fish and show me how to judge its quality.
“You want a clear eye, man, not like this,” he’d say, a blackened nail tapping a pomfret’s clouded eye. “See here. This one fresh. See the difference. Eyes bright and full open.”
He’d turn to another basket. “Look here. It’s an old trick. Top layer of fish very fresh. Nah? But look.” He dug to the bottom of the basket and hauled a mashed fish out by its gills. “Look. Feel dat. Meat soft. And the gills, look, not red like this fresh one, but faded. Turning gray. And when you turn back the fin, should be stiff, not like this.” Anwar flicked his hand and the young fisherman withdrew his basket. “And look at this. See here? See this tuna? Bad, man. Very bad.
“Bruised, like heavy battered, yaar? Some no-good wallah give him a big drop off the back of truck.
“Haar,” he’d say, wobbling his head, delighted I had learned my lessons.
One monsoon afternoon I found myself with Papa and Ammi around a table in the back of the restaurant. They pored over the wad of chits on spikes that stood between them, determining in these scratched orders which dishes had moved more in the last week and which not. Bappu sat opposite us in a stiff-backed chair, like in a court of law, nervously stroking his colonel’s mustache. This was a weekly ritual at the restaurant, a constant pushing of Bappu to improve the old recipes. It was like that. Do better. You can always do better.
The offending item stood between them, a copper bowl of chicken. I reached over and dipped my fingers into the bowl, sucking in a piece of the crimson meat. The masala trickled down my throat, an oily paste of fine red chili, but softened by pinches of cardamom and cinnamon.
“Only three order dish last week,” said Papa, glancing back and forth between Bappu and grandmother. He took a sip of his favorite beverage, tea spiked with a spoonful of garam masala. “We fix it now or I drop from menu.”