Welcome  FAQs
Links  News

SevenUp 2023

An unusual trip to the Indian subcontinent for two months in Spring 2023 starting and ending in Kolkata.

We toured six of the so-called Seven Sisters, the seven states of northeast India: Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.

Read on to learn how we fared.

Full map of all SevenUp 2023 pages

Other Things

Translate & Share

Path: Blog > Meet the Locals > Lakshmi in Imphal
Tags: India  SevenUp  2023  News

Lakshmi in Imphal

 

(thomas;2023-June-25)

Lakshmi on the right holding in her hand what she called Monkey Rice. The woman on the left is her sister. Lakshmi on the right holding in her hand what she called Monkey Rice. The woman on the left is her sister. Imphal is the stone-ugly capital of Manipur, with more and deeper pot holes even than Basingstoke (not an easy feat but they managed it). Customers at last. Will they buy? They did. Customers at last. Will they buy? They did. The main attractions are a great fort and the so-called Ima Keithel or Women's Market. This is a huge market in three giant concrete buildings and only women are allowed to sell stuff there (everything from fruit and veg to clothing and household goods). There are around 5000 sellers though we did not count them. It's an impressive, colourful and lively site, open from 7am to 7pm. And one of those 5000 women is tiny Lakshmi (right): she sells shawls and scarves with her sister Indira (left) and is a very chatty and very friendly person.

The buyers are overwhelmingly Indian tourists from mainland India and because they don't speak Meitei (the local main language) and Lakshmi (like many if not most Manipuris) doesn't speak Hindi she has over time acquired a good command of English... frequently the only common language between sellers and buyers. (Foreigners find it often amazing that English -- after all, the language of Empire -- is still playing such an important role all over India, but with nearly 1.4 billion people, 100s of local languages in daily use and many people unable or indeed unwilling to speak Hindi... English is often the only common ground.) The two tourists in the photo are actually from Tamil Nadu -- and spoke English with Lakshmi.

Lakshmi did not like being photographed very much. We had to promise one thing: no posting on Facebook. Lakshmi did not like being photographed very much. We had to promise one thing: no posting on Facebook.It was our good luck that Lakshmi spoke such good English because that day, there was a great national holiday (Meitei New Year) and all restaurants in town (yes, all!) were closed for business (even the market was half empty). The only sources of food we found were in the market itself: women in a dozen makeshift stalls selling... interesting things. Some of the foodstuffs were unidentifiable but fish in all shapes and sizes was really a big (and smelly) thing -- in India we're careful though with fish as well as meat as we have seen too many markets where those are processed.

Enter Lakshmi who would walk us through a few of the stalls so that we could a) learn what all the strange bits were and b) tell the lady cook what we wanted or didn't want (no fish and meat and no other local delicacies). So she found us a very good lunch spot and made sure that we got refills of rice and lentils and even some fried bhajis.

[Go to Top]

Want to read more? Go back to The Dancing Queens of Agartala or go on to Ali in Kohima or go up to Meet the Locals


$ updated from: Blog.htxt Fri 16 Aug 2024 15:40:09 trvl2 — Copyright © 2024 Vero and Thomas Lauer unless otherwise stated | All rights reserved $