After a short bus ride, the market, a great hall whose sopping lanes Ma and Dadu knew well, appeared before them. Naked bulbs illuminated the interior. Sparrows, awake even at night, chittered in the rafters, high above men who sat with meager scatterings of eld mushrooms and pond greens, buckets whose bottoms were populated with shrimp as slender as pins, and snails collected from village porches. Among these wares, the men waited on low wooden stools, some seated cross-legged, the soles of their feet the color of sand from years of potato dust, their lean arms holding scales up for weighing, the scale pans floating up and down as if in water, before the men collapsed them and tucked them away. These were the same men who had presided over what Ma thought of as true food—tomatoes and eggplant and bunches of spinach upon which they once sprinkled water with the sieve of their ngers. Those days would come again, if in altered guise, in Michigan.
In the fish lanes, scales of synthetic rui fish flew in the gutters, the true rui having become scarce, slow to thrive in the warmed waters of the ponds in which they were raised. Yet the elderly customers who roamed the market—they were nearly all elderly; the young people went to the grocery stores that had aisles of products, air-conditioning, bright lights, labels for all goods, and no negotiation, that is to say, no sparring with a stranger—persisted in their known gestures.
They examined the false fish for bright gills, touched their silver scales, and looked them in the eye, until what they saw disturbed them Tarp on the floor held sheets of seaweed, dark as the bottom of the ocean, giving of an odor more mineral than fish. People inspected the sheets, their voices hushed as they selected bunches, negotiated with a woman who sat in a corner with a calculator and a lockbox, and paid. The boy, perhaps her son, ran back and forth between the entrance and the interior, functioning as a security guard, an usher, a shopkeeper who answered rudimentary questions. Every now and then the woman, with her alert eyes upon the store, held a phone up to her ear, listening to a drama narrated on the radio. Dadu bent to a stack and inhaled. It felt like an absurd iteration of learning to pick a good fruit or herb at the market. How much give should a ripe mango have? How fragrant should cilantro stems be? But it was stranger than that, the thought of eating greens that grew underwater, waving their long arms in the currents, acquainted with creatures of ns and tails, the light around them muddy. “I can eat many things, but I can’t eat algae,” said Ma crossly.
(Excerpted with permission from A Guardian and A Thief by Megha Majumdar, published by Penguin Random House India; 2025)
