The Flea Fair Of Forgotten Men In Kashmir

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer) By Jamsheed Rasool

My friend Kamran introduced me to the flea market in Srinagar twelve years ago, though perhaps reintroduced would be the more accurate word, as I had experienced a few fleeting encounters with the“Sunday market” during childhood.

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This market provides the most basic human necessity, attire, to those in the valley who can ill afford upscale showrooms or online stores. It is hope against hope, protection against the biting cold, a source of original international brands for wardrobes otherwise filled with their imitations, a silent guardian of self-respect for the downtrodden, and a livelihood for those who trade within its crowded lanes.

Coming back to Kamran, then a 24-year-old, unassuming uptown boy, he would rummage through the carts like a desert fox, determined to unearth an original H&M turtleneck sweater or perhaps a Canada Goose jacket.

“Here is your original Baracuta sweater, donated by some kind Christian Samaritan in Europe,” Kamran would exclaim in triumph, lifting the prized piece in his hands like a trophy. He insisted his clothing be different from what everyone else wore.

The showrooms in Srinagar largely stocked variations of the same men's attire, while women, even then, seemed to have far more choices at their disposal.

“It smells like forgotten goods in the basement of my home,” I chimed in.

“Of course it does! Where do you think we are? This is a flea market, brother,” Kamran said, laughing.

“Don't pluck them out one by one, that wastes time. Feel the fabric as your hands dive into the pile of clothes. The smoothest fabric is always the foreign brand,” Kamran suggested, pointing at my forehead.

They come in waves - the losers nursing unspoken defeats, the averages counting every rupee twice, the poor with folded lists in their pockets, daily wagers with dust still clinging to their cuffs, blue-collared men smelling of engine oil and cement, idlers drifting without pressing need, boys hunting brands they cannot pronounce, fathers measuring sweaters against growing sons, widows fingering wool for warmth not fashion, dreamers bargaining like generals of small wars - all threading through the narrow lanes of the Srinagar flea market, for survival, shield, and something that lasts another winter.

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The countryside shopkeepers and the owners of the shops that have sprouted at the fringes of Srinagar city arrive early, elbows sharp, eyes sharper, pushing through the lanes before the real crowd swells. They do not browse, they seize. Fists clamp around stacks of jackets, arms sweep trousers into hurried piles, voices cutting through the air:“This one is taken... that one is taken... all of these are mine.”

A lone buyer reaches for a single piece and is waved off without ceremony. The claims are loud, territorial, and terse. Commerce is stripped to instinct. Around them the market roars. Customers call out sizes, prices, curses, and bargains. A hundred negotiations collide at once. Dust rises with every scuffle of sandals and boots, hanging thick in the afternoon light. The smell is a mix of sweat, damp wool, old fabric, cheap perfume, and fried snacks drifting from somewhere unseen.

Salesmen, shirts darkened under the arms, sweat beading and sliding down their temples, shout at full throttle over the din, their throats raw but relentless. Money changes hands in crumpled notes, jackets fly from cart to sack, and for a few frantic hours the flea market becomes less a place of trade and more a battlefield of survival.

Miserly women squat beside rolled stacks of second-rung machine-made carpets, fingers pressing into the synthetic weave as though testing truth itself, voices sharp, relentless:“Too thin... too faded... last price.” These carpets are for the spare rooms where hardly anyone visits, and the curtains are bought just because you have to. Their colours are too bright, and the threads are cheap.

Above the bargaining din rises the still, indifferent silhouette of Shankaracharya mountain, watching the ritual below: rupees counted twice, thrice, withheld. Around them, cars honk impatiently, vehicles soon to be packed tight with second-rate goods and the faint, stale mingling of sweat, plastic, and damp fabric.

Hopeless idlers linger near pirated book stalls, flipping through glossy covers to see the printed faces of pretty girls. Greying bachelors drift through the crowd, seeking only proximity: a hint of perfume, a brush of fabric, a reminder of warmth in the crush.

Teenagers from the countryside stand wide-eyed at first, taking in so many bodies and so much noise, the city unfolding like a spectacle. Soon, they burst into motion, gamboling through the lanes, laughing too loudly, touching everything, hill boys tasting the frenzy of urban life for the first time.

Among them, the stalls display their wares: jackets that are almost branded, sweaters that survive winter, trousers with city cuts at village prices, sneakers full of ambition, shawls to keep warm in the cold, pirated novels full of love and crime, kitchenware that's dented but works, toys made of plastic dreams.

Read Also Cheap Clothes Matter Despite Cold, Sunday Market Bustles with Shoppers

The men who sell these things move with practiced skill. Part-time labourers by dawn, mechanics by afternoon, porters between seasons, or entirely untethered to any schedule, their throats are trained to shout and their palms trained to calculate, living from one crowded Sunday to the next.

When rain falls on the flea market, it does not cleanse but reveals. Dust turns into a slick paste underfoot, tarpaulins sag and drip, woolens darken and cling, and the lanes shrink into narrow, glistening corridors where bodies press closer for shelter.

The scene begins to resemble Dickens' London, with“narrow streets and courts, at length so close and filthy, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter,” where damp brick and human fatigue share the same odour.

Carts stand like broken carriages in a poor quarter. Water trickles along the uneven ground as if it were the refuse-laden gutters of Bleak House, where“fog everywhere” blurred both the skyline and the destinies of those trapped beneath it.

Salesmen, coats soaked and collars darkened, shout through the downpour. Their voices are raw, and their goods are protected by thin sheets of plastic that flap like surrender flags. The crowd thickens rather than disperses, shoulders hunched, eyes wary, transactions hurried but desperate, as if retreat were not an option.

In such weather, faces appear carved by fatigue: pale, strained, and watchful. They recall Dostoevsky's prisoners in The House of the Dead, men condemned to labour in Siberia,“crushed, as it were, under the weight of some inevitable misfortune,” their existence reduced to endurance.

Here too are men who seem condemned without any formal sentence: luckless husbands abandoned by circumstance, suitors unable to earn enough to marry, drifters who once rode campaign buses waving party flags only to be forgotten the morning after victory.

They return every Sunday, hopeful but uncorrected, their upward mobility stalled like a clock that has forgotten how to tick. In many cases, the family line has sloped downward for generations. Some from the inner quarters carry the frailty of poor inheritance and poorer nourishment, lacking the strength for manual toil, but too proud to admit defeat.

They resemble Gogol's forgotten figures in Dead Souls, names counted but never valued, men who traded their agency for illusions and mistook the two-minute privacy of a voting booth for emancipation.

The rain, indifferent and unrelenting, binds them into one damp mass, the underbelly not of London, nor Siberia, nor provincial Russia, but of democracy's unkept promises, where survival persists, hope flickers, and history repeats itself in wet wool and tired eyes.

“Take these solar-powered lamps,” the greying cart owner would call out whenever a fresh cluster of customers gathered around him.“They're rechargeable. They won't vanish like twelve free gas cylinders, and they're certainly not free electricity. That manifesto was a fairy tale your grandmothers once told you.” His voice conveyed both mockery and fatigue, built by years of watching promises dissolve.

Among the most relentless bargainers are the widows, and there seem to be so many of them. I once overheard one explaining to a shopkeeper how her carpenter husband had fallen from a rooftop while reaching for a matchbox to light a cigarette.“He loved cigarettes and died with one in his mouth,” she said, miming the act of smoking, as if grief could be folded into anecdote.

There are also women who were never brides, their faces mapped with early wrinkles, buying imitation dresses with the modest wages they earn as low-paid computer operators or sweepers in office buildings.

On Sundays, they purchase cheap copies of party wear and rehearse bridal gestures before cracked mirrors. And once, Kamran told me, he saw a woman buying clothes for her dead son!

She was particular about the colour, though he no longer remembers which one, only that she would not compromise on it.

These days, the calls of the cart owners are lively shouts of price and fabric, mixed with twisted Bollywood hits and whatever meme is trending on Instagram. When women approach with children in tow, the vendors break into filmi lines, urging mothers to buy something for their little ones and turning salesmanship into street theatre.

Kamran, meanwhile, plays the role of resident expert. He warns that many brands arriving from Southeast Asia are inferior, sometimes poorly stored, sometimes suspect.“Always go for American or European labels,” he says, phone in hand, cross-checking names with quick, practiced swipes.“This one was made for a fishing company in Ireland, meant for deep-sea winds, so it must be water-resistant and warm. This jacket was used by skiers in France. It will hold up in our bleakest winter.”

To the mostly illiterate cart owners, he is like a walking encyclopedia, even guiding them on where to find sacks of donated second-hand clothing. He insists on one rule above all: arrive early.

Those who come at dawn claim the best pieces, while the rest make do with what remains.

Amid the frenzy stand the movie CD sellers, relics of an earlier appetite, their tables spread with faded covers and sun-bleached titles. People whispered that there was a time when they supplied the city's idling bachelors, men resigned to lives without marriage, with“hot” films discreetly wrapped in newspaper.

In a town said to hold tens of thousands of women above marriageable age, these men drifted through crowded Sundays alone, their loneliness louder than the market's din.

Overpowered by restless desire and idle afternoons, they turned to flickering screens for borrowed intimacy, mistaking pixels for companionship. The CDs spun in dim rooms long after the market shutters fell, offering the illusion of warmth in lives otherwise pared down to habit and waiting.

These cart owners grow paler with every passing season, their faces thinning into the colour of unpaid dues. They carry debts older than themselves, from reckless spending by fathers and grandfathers, loans never settled, and interest compounding silently until it rose higher than the single-storey homes they inhabit. They speak, almost stubbornly, of beginning the climb upward, of correcting the arc of a family history that has bent downward for generations.

One young aspirant shopkeeper, dazzled by bumper-to-bumper traffic, once clicked a photograph of a passing Scorpio, mistaking it for the Range Rover of a revered scholar-turned-politician. Later, it emerged that his great-grandfather had donated an acre of orchard land to that religious leader's grandfather, holding him in profound esteem.“We still invite him to our feasts,” the young man says with pride.“He comes with his entire entourage. We feel blessed when he honours us.”

In that blessing lies both devotion and the faint, unspoken hope that proximity to power might one day tilt fortune in their favour.

After leaving the flea market, many of the men drift toward the nearby shrines, as if commerce must end in confession. They stand silently before the sealed donation boxes and slip in folded notes, sometimes more than they had planned to spend, grateful simply for having had enough money to buy something at last. Their murmured thanks rise softly, almost shyly, into the cool air scented with incense. Faith for them is an anchor that steadies what earnings cannot.

In lives measured by shortage and uncertainty, belief often nourishes more deeply than bread, offering a sense of worth where circumstance withholds it.

Shabbily dressed men and small-town dandies from distant districts pull jackets over their shoulders, peel them off, try again, hunting for that rare“purple squirrel” hidden somewhere in the heap of torn, greasy, faintly sour misfits. They examine collars, stretch sleeves against thin wrists, turn toward fractured mirrors in search of a version of themselves slightly improved.

Around them, the crowd thickens with older men and women who have just stepped out of the nearby chest-disease hospital, prescriptions folded carefully into pockets. A persistent wheeze punctuates the market's roar, coughs cut through bargaining calls, and breath comes in measured, reluctant drafts.

The cold makes pulmonary illness crueler, with phlegm heavier in the lungs and each inhalation negotiated like a truce.

Many of them perhaps understand that the antibiotics, bronchodilators, corticosteroids, and mucolytics prescribed that morning may be among their final courses. The sweaters and coats they purchase here, after long hesitation and careful counting of notes, might be the last garments they will ever buy, chosen for one more winter of breath.

Their breaths in the bustling bazar arrive late, whistle faintly, and leave with a tired rattle. Phlegm clings stubbornly to the chest, and coughing is a vicious cycle: gather air, choke, clear, repeat.

The flea market becomes an expedition of careful steps. Three steps, and lean against the wall. Five steps, and bend forward and summon breath again.

The winter air feels metallic, slicing into lungs already lined with fire.

This is preceded by a long wait at the chest-disease hospital. In the queue, they stand with pro-forma prescription slips clutched like permits to survival, eyes flicking nervously toward the desk.

There is always the silent fear that an influential man will arrive, flip the pile, rearrange the order, and slide his own paper to the top, turning hours of waiting into nothing.

Answering the call of nature in this flea market is no small ordeal. The public washrooms stand nearly half a kilometre away from the main hub, and restaurant owners rarely welcome men with muddied shoes and untrimmed beards into their tiled interiors. It is common to see people weaving through the crowd asking for directions in hushed compulsion, some patting or pointing toward their bellies to explain what words need not.

The search becomes another small struggle layered over the day, bargaining for space, for warmth, for a sense of worth, and now for relief. In a market bursting with goods and noise, even something as simple as a restroom feels distant, rationed, and almost something to be bartered for.

These are the undisguised commoners, belched from the underbelly of a city that prides itself on an unbroken civilization of two millennia. They gather in this nameless, temporary sprawl of tarpaulin and cartwood, pitched defiantly beside the city's permanent, polished market, a boulevard of glass fronts and measured smiles where permanence, pedigree, and upmanship are etched into every façade.

The upscale shopkeepers resent the Sunday market. It siphons off what remains of their local clientele. Most have long since exported their ambitions, trading in the Gulf, Europe, Southeast Asia, their sons and daughters settled in villas in Dubai, standalone homes in Los Angeles, condominiums in New York City.

And yet, every Sunday, thousands of haggard, wind-burned faces flow in and out of the flea market's lanes. Overpowered by capitalism and bruised by democracy's unkept promises, they arrive once or twice a month with skeletal purchasing power and stubborn hope. They count their notes carefully, bargain fiercely, and when they finally secure a jacket or sweater, they lift it like a trophy, proof of acquisition and endurance.

For a brief moment, holding up that fabric against the indifferent skyline, they appear victorious before a world that has long since disowned them without apology.

After a day of trade, when purchases are done and bargains settled, the cart owners fold their worlds back into coarse sacks. The heavier the sacks, the thinner the profits, a muted arithmetic of disappointment that hangs in the evening air.

Kamran and I climb the worn steps to the Bund and stand looking at the river as it meanders on, slow and self-absorbed. In our thirties now, half-amused and half-desperate, we mark imaginary destinations on a mental world map: Dubai, Doha, Istanbul, New York, San Francisco, London, places where we tell ourselves we might begin again or at least grow bored more elegantly.

Then comes the persistent question: what would men like us do on Sundays in those cities?

Kamran answers it himself, letting out a small giggle.“Those cities have flea markets too. Men like us live everywhere. And where men like us live, flea markets thrive.”

Below us, the river curves on indifferently, as if instructed by the city's power corridors, calm, unconcerned, and immune to the small miseries of undisguised commoners who stand upon its banks and imagine elsewhere.

• Jamsheed Rasool is a senior scribe and short story writer from Srinagar with more than 15 years of experience in media, education, and corporate sectors. His work, published in various outlets, focuses on the human stories and changing dynamics of his homeland. He can be reached at [email protected].

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