The Sunday Shopping, Done on a Thursday

Sunday at eleven, which is when I always went, is the market at maximum. Every stall is out, everything is there, and so is everybody, and the whole thing takes an hour and twenty minutes of which perhaps twenty are shopping.

Thursday at nine there were maybe fifteen people in the entire lane. Fewer stalls — the fruit man was not there at all, which cost me — but the ones who were there had time, and one of them told me which of the two kinds of tomato was better this week and why, unprompted, for free.

That has never happened to me on a Sunday. Not once in four years. It is not because Sunday sellers are unfriendly; it is that on Sunday there are nine people waiting behind me and the entire interaction is priced accordingly.

The trip took thirty-five minutes. I got about eighty percent of what I wanted, which I have decided is the correct trade, and I will go back on Sunday only when I need the fruit man.

The middle shelf holds what I will eat in the next two days. The door holds condiments, half of which are older than I would like to say in writing. That is my working fridge and it is about a quarter of the volume.

The bottom drawer and the top shelf are where things go when I have bought them without a plan. They do not spoil there, exactly. They wait. And then at some point they cross over from being food into being a small ongoing obligation, and I move them to the middle shelf out of guilt rather than appetite.

This is the actual mechanism by which one person wastes food. It is not forgetting. I know precisely what is in that drawer. It is that buying something and cooking something are two separate decisions made by two people in slightly different moods, and only one of them is standing there at eight o'clock on a Wednesday.

The fix, which I am trying this week, is to not buy anything I cannot name the day for.

It had not curdled. It was at the stage before, where it is technically fine and everybody involved can tell.

I noticed as I handed it over. He took a sip, and there was a pause of about a second and a half in which we both knew, and then he said it was very good and drank the entire cup.

I have thought about this for two days. He was right to do it. I would have done the same. But there is now a small permanent thing between us and neither of us will ever mention it.

One knife. I have three and I use one, and it had gone dull so gradually that I had adapted to it without noticing — more pressure, slower, and a small amount of dread about anything that needed to be cut thin.

There is a man near the market who does it. Forty rupees. He does it in about ninety seconds on a wheel and hands it back and does not make conversation.

That evening the onions took maybe three minutes instead of seven. Not because I got faster; because the knife stopped requiring a decision. A dull knife makes you choose what to cut and a sharp one does not, and I had been quietly avoiding half of what I know how to cook for most of a year.

Two years is absurd. The whole thing cost forty rupees and a walk I was already taking.