There I was, cutting through a strange market crowd- not just people shopping for their salad greens, but beggars and butchers and thieves, prancers and Prophet-praisers and soft-sided soldiers, the newly-arrived and the just-retired, the flabby and the flimsy, sellers roaming and street kids groaning, god-damners, bus-waiters and white robed traders, elegant and fumbling…The day was fresher than a normal summer day, and I could feel delight turbaned around my head, like a Bedouin on his second visit to the city.
-The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away, by Bushra al-Fadil, from the collection The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction
Strange market crowds, how many I have pushed and dodged and cut my way through in countries where men wear turbans and when a woman appears in public the scene becomes even stranger than before. Big city markets are much stranger than village souks. I’m not talking about Khan al-Khalili, Cairo’s tourist trap, but rather like the old Bab al-Louk not far from AUC where I could walk past the live poultry stalls and learn twenty new and essential vocabulary words in five minutes. Gizzard, wing, neck, feather.
Or Souk Libya in Umdurman, where you could buy a camel, board the high clearance desert bus for El Obeid, or change a $100 bill into hundreds of thousands of Sudanese pounds.
My first walk-through of such a market was in Arequipa, following a step behind Emma Nunez whom I trailed as if I were her prized pet on an invisible leash, she explaining to her usual Andean Homburg-hatted Saturday lady vegetable vendors that I was her house guest, living in her son’s room for the summer to learn Spanish. She bought huge slices of orange squash and big-kernel corn, choclo, and various greens- I knew the cilantro from arroz con pato, which we ate at the Hotel Bolivar in December 1981 when we missed our flight to Arequipa and had to overnight in Lima- whose names I never learned, all for the simple condensed milk-based chowders- chupes, or sucks, she called them- she would make for supper after we had returned still full from our Sunday dinner in a picantería in Sachaca or Tiabaya where we’d have eaten the real deal, chupe de camarrones, a crawdaddy suck for which you had to really suck on those tiny Río Chili crayfish legs to get the meat out.
But those Sudanese markets were the best. I remember walking through the Dongola souk with KhairAllah after twenty days on the trail. I was wearing a rugby shirt and bluejeans and he a short riding tunic and loose pants, the araagi and sirwal which marked him to the townsmen as a real camel man, and the stall merchants all wore ankle-length gallabiyas which dragged in the street crud.
I wanted to buy fresh mint, sold in bunches and piled on huge green stacks of it. He said, better buy dried mint, crumbly and scooped from a gunny sack. Fooey, I said. I want it fresh. Everything green in the desert rots and goes bad, he said. Baayis, miserable. Everything dry, lives. Lazeez, delightful. He proved right the next day when my mint in the plastic bag went bad that fast and his mint lasted as many more days as I could stop myself from using it all in one pot of tea.
The secret police nabbed us and wanted to know by whose permission I was in Dongola. I showed him my journalist permit and passport stamps and he said they meant nothing to him. I told him I knew the prime minister’s family and he asked, so what? I showed him a letter of introduction from my host Bashir abu Jaib and he said, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, and he let me go. So we went back to the trail and left Dongola and its market whose fresh green mint I thought about for many days after.
Dongola