Copyright pakobserver
A tale of our edible anxieties In the Valley of Margallas, everything has a price except laughter, which long ago went off the shelves. Last week, the markets of the capital turned into something between a stock exchange and a ministry of speculation. Tomatoes demanded six hundred rupees a kilo and respectful transport. Peas stood at four hundred, blinking with injured dignity. Garlic crossed a thousand and began speaking like private healthcare. Lemons behaved like foreign guests: handled carefully, released slowly. But it was coriander that broke the city’s heart. For generations, coriander was proof that decency still circulated. “On the house”, they would say, tucking in a handful with tomatoes and green chillies. A poor man’s flourish. A republic’s little bow to itself. Not anymore. In G-9, a grocer wrapped three dhania leaves in tissue and whispered, “Baji, I can’t keep giving it for free. They have privatized kindness.” The Itwaar Bazaar, once a carnival of bargaining, now felt like a complaint hearing. Housewives stood at stalls like litigants. “Four tomatoes only,” one murmured. “We will imagine the rest.” The vendors had grown philosophical. “Borders are closed, rains drowned the rest,” said one, piling chilies like contraband. “The trucks are in mud, and the government still wants price control.” Inside a sandstone building, the Price Control Committee convened. The agenda, printed on the back of an expired subsidy form, read: “Tomatoes & Other National Emergencies”. The Director Dairy & Non-Dairy Vegetation presented a roadmap for curbing edible insurrections. A task force on tomatoes was formed, chaired by a man allergic to salads. Nosy Mynah had already arrived, punctual as intrigue, gathering intelligence for the Deputy Director of Preventive Invisibility. She noted: one vendor calling tomatoes ‘imported heartbreak’. A bureaucrat’s wife reportedly keeping a tomato in political asylum between imported yoghurt and old party resolutions. Above the bazaar, Babloo circled on slow wings, overworked, soft-hearted, still believing in the city. His daily bulletin drifted down: “Coriander rising. Patience falling.Onions unstable.Households on alert”. That was when SharafatHussain sat down. A retired clerk, twenty-seven years in service and not one seminar to show for it, Sharafat settled beside a weighing scale, beneath a sun-faded umbrella stitched from old price lists. He cleared his throat and announced a hunger strike “until green chilli returns to the common home”. A small crowd gathered. Nothing draws attention faster than quiet defiance that looks like procedure. A shopkeeper offered half a lemon in solidarity, then reconsidered and took it back. A college student asked what he hoped to achieve. Sharafat smiled. “Nothing. I am retired. I just want chilly back.” The city administration took notice, as it often does, and notified: “Prices under review”. The citizens replied: “So is hunger”. After Maghrib, in a small ceremony witnessed by Babloo, ignored by Mynah, and certified on the spot by Mirza (who stamped it with his beak, per protocol), SharafatHussain ended his strike. A vendor ladled him a spoon of thin daal and, on top of it like a state visit, floated one solitary coriander leaf. Sharafat held it aloft, the leaf trembling in the evening breeze. He declared, in a voice that carried to the fruit stalls, “The republic has lost its garnish”. Babloo lowered his head. By nightfall, the task force had already scheduled another meeting “to review public sentiment”. Public sentiment, standing in line for half a kilo of potatoes, expressed appreciation for being reviewed. That night, a file marked “Urgent” shifted forward on its shelf. Not by hand, but by the sigh of a clerk who had gone home four hours earlier. The file will be reviewed next quarter. Coriander remains unavailable. Hope has been declared seasonal. The writer can be reached at bystanderinthecity@gmail.com
