Sunday in Tirur

Yesterday entailed little beyond a stroll around downtown Tirur and dinner at Sabka. Jaime was not feeling too well during the afternoon and laid up in bed most of the day. Jenna and I walked behind JM school and took the back way to the bus stand. We went around the market and took a gander at the open fish market by the train station. It was quite a sight with quite a smell: shimmering, oily fish bodies laid out in profusion on a damp marble floor—carp and mackerel, a long-jawed thing that looked like sturgeon, bluefin and silverfish (I recognized these from the ones I had seen in Fort Cochin). Two vendors had meaty looking prawns and purplish baby squids.

A young boy demonstrated for us how he cleans the fish before selling them. He took one and laid it on a cracked wooden board. He grabbed a blackened blade the shape of a scimitar. He whisked off the scales on either side with a few vigorous swipes. Then, he cleanly chopped the head off with one well-placed cut, and did the same with the tail. He threw the reddened, naked carcass in a pile of others that looked as if they had been given the same treatment.

“You buy?” he said, pointing towards the pile of cleaned fish bodies. “Maybe another day,” I responded, not sure he could understand me.

Other men held up fish by their tails in front of our faces. Another vendor grabbed the snout of a particularly large species and lifted the top half of its body off the bed of ice on which it was laying, so that its mouth and eyes pointed directly at us. “Good!” he said. “Buy?” he asked.

In another nearby stall, men slit the throats of live chickens and dressed them for waiting customers. One man grabbed a squawking bird by its neck and feet and stretched it out like an exercise band. Another man quickly cut the chicken’s throat and the blood ran down into a giant blue plastic bin, which held the bloody secretions of dozens of other previously live chickens. Some red liquid splattered on the stone ground around the stall as the chicken went through its death throes. Then, the man who had been holding the animal took it inside a small hut and began plucking the feathers.

Beyond that was an open-air square filled with dried seafood—scallops, scampi, shrimp, clams, oysters, salted fish—all stacked in rimy, pungent piles on cotton mats and plastic tarps. Red Lobster this was not. The odor overwhelmed the senses and burned the eyes in the afternoon heat. Leathery men with white scarves wrapped loosely around their heads sat by the piles, not really trying to sell anything, just staring at passers-by with a well-earned air of disinterest. Maybe the ordure of the fish had finally gotten to them, seized them somewhere between the nostrils and the brain and said, “Stay where you are! No use fighting it.”

We made our way past a series of fruit vendors and were finally enticed to stop at the end of the lane when Jenna spotted some pink-colored pomegranates. We bought some along with a few oranges, bananas and a soft, wrinkly green fruit that the man said was an ‘orange’ but looked more like Gollum’s head.

We headed back to our apartment along Tirur’s main road, past the bus stand and our favorite bakery Lili’s, past the turnoff to JM School and along a section of road that narrows dangerously to the point that screeching buses pass within inches of your life, past the movie theater that looks more like an abandoned warehouse, past a field of idly chomping goats and over a series of drainage trenches filled with a putrid brackish liquid with an indescribable smell, until we finally reached our neighborhood: an area of town known as Payyanangadi.

A new bakery opened up on the corner of our street on Friday, which qualifies as big news in Tirur and big news for us, in fact. On Friday, we had spotted the new restaurant’s awning bedecked with streamers from the road that leads to JM. We had practically skipped the rest of the way and run up to the counter to gaze at all the fresh sweets in the glass cabinet and smell the sizzling rack of chicken spinning slowly in the corner of the store. We had shwerma—shaved bits of chicken mixed with tomatoes and lettuce in a wrapped pita—along with two 7-Ups. It was magical. (I now understand why people from small towns get so excited when a new restaurant opens.)

On Sunday, though, we merely surveyed the chaos of the bakery from the street as we walked by. It was still as busy as it had been Friday—adolescent boys pushing to get to the front of the counter to place an order, older men sitting lazily in the dining area, moremen and some sedate-looking women in headscarves milling around the patio along the street.

We continued the walk back to our apartment and whiled the rest of the afternoon in our room reading and thinking of Christmas break. Every so often, the smell of shwerma from down the street reached our nostrils and we were happy once again.