The Marketplace

McLeodganj, Upper Dharamsala, India

34°08’43.18”N, 77°34’03.63”E, Elevation: 5,172 ft

The main streets of the village serve as a busy marketplace, a central bazaar, lined with vendors and stalls selling hot steamed buns called momos, chai tea, wool sweaters, incense, postcards, religious objects, instruments of carved wooden flutes and hand drums, prayer flags, silk screened t-shirts printed with ‘Free Tibet,’ rosaries strung with beads in every hue and stone, hats and socks knit from yak wool, flat breads wrapped in newspaper from a basket perched on a corner, spicy samosas, steel mugs and china teacups, silver jewelry, countless artifacts from old Tibet, paintings, Kashmiri decoupage boxes and pashmina shawls, framed photos of the Dalai Lama, fur lined hats, miles of scarves. Tibetan vendors. Kashmiri vendors. Indian men with chai stalls, pour thick, steaming ribbons of nutmeg scented milk tea into small metal cups to sip on while they cook an omelet or slap a chapatti to sizzle on a skillet.

The marketplace is a festival of sights and scents and sounds passing through town each morning and each afternoon. There are huddles of Tibetan women with long braided hair and monks in cinnamon red robes inspecting lettuce and radishes spread out on newspaper on the ground. They choose carrots and spinach and slender stalks of long green onion to add to their baskets. Swaddled Tibetan babies are tied tightly to the backs of their mothers. Indian girls carrying infants walk the streets with their hands out, palms up, begging for rupees. Indian beggar children materialize and tug on shirtsleeves, on scarves, on pockets of pants. The colors are brilliant and close everywhere.

Brightly painted prayer wheels that line the walls of a Buddhist temple on the main road are always spinning urged by the hands of people passing by, rattling assuredly around and around.  An apple red rouge tints the round cheeks of the newest arrivals from Tibet. The five colors of the cloth prayer flags are draped and tied and flying everywhere. Street dogs sprawl out on sun-splashed stoops. India’s holy cows lumber slowly through the crowds. An old speaker in an upstairs window plays a solemn voice chanting a buddhist prayer on a repeated track, every morning, every afternoon, all day long across the marketplace.