Two scenes from Mumbai. April 2025.
Onion Sellers
In the tiny but densely populated market near this working-class residential neighbourhood in Mumbai, one finds neon coloured combs, mirrors which have just a piece of cardboard backing their ground glass plates, nail-clippers, rather suspicious-looking slender ear cleaners, and vegetables, and fish, and meat. And fried chicken looking more red than red itself. And dried fish. And onions.
Some people have a traveling onion-truck. In small pick-up trucks, two men in their mid-forties, or late-thirties sell onions in five-kilo plastic bags. ₹100 for a five-kilo bag.
Then there are onion sellers who have their own shacks which are loosely tied plastic sheets making up a tent resembling a shoe box turned on its side. Contrary to what the tents might suggest, these sellers have heaps of onions spread out in front of their shacks. One would imagine that they sell hundreds of kilos of onions every day. They are the small dons of the onion kingdom.
The market has a minimum of fifty of these onion sellers. In the middle of these onion sellers is a woman, who must be about fifty or sixty years old, who has found a spot between two shacks. In front of her, spread on a sack so that they wouldn’t touch the ground, is a tiny heap of onions, maybe five or six kilos at the most. Sitting alone by the road, in between a nonexistent gap between two equally shabby tents, this woman. I do not remember her face. In Mumbai it is easy to forget faces. You look out of the auto rickshaw and the faces keep whizzing past the door. But I remember how I felt when I saw that woman. It is an image that will haunt me for a while.
Domesticity
I believe that becoming the head of a family (in a usual patriarchal husband/father oriented setup) will interpellate the individual (the one interpellation I can see in real life) into the role of a caregiver/lover/provider. And this transformation is so strong that one cannot see past it. It rules over all other domains of one’s life to the extent that an alternative is unthinkable. The most terrifying thing about this transformation is that it makes one enjoy it. It makes one feel proud, happy, and it makes one feel successful in their life. What sort of trap is worse than a trap which disguises itself as paradise?
Imagine that you have a kid born out of your conjugal setup. You will feel better when you teach the kid a new word, a new skill. You will feel the sense of achievement when you can buy her a toy. You will feel like a warrior when you hold her when she falls asleep next to you. You want her to drink the tea before it gets cold. You want her to eat things she likes. You want to be able to provide for her. You want to protect her. And this gives you a sense of satisfaction and achievement. This is a trap.
Imagine that you are sitting in the bedroom alongside your wife. You want to take care of her, make love to her, defend your bed against other men, drive her to her workplace, get her a necklace, take her to the movies. You want to make sure she gets the best doctor to treat her when she falls ill. You want to massage the knots out of her back. You want to make sure that the umbrella covers her better than it covers you when it rains. You do not want to have to use the umbrella when it rains because you want her to travel in a car when it rains. You want her to not take the bus. You want to be able to take her to good restaurants. And all this gives you is the sense of achievement. Another false sense of achievement.
This is the trap of the family. A trap which makes you feel better. It is not a gilded cage, but a cage which makes you want to stay. You actively resist being displaced from the relations that make up the family.