Dear all,

A long one, this week.

The first time I ever sold something for money, I was about 20 years old. I was working for Dastkar Andhra for the princely sum of five thousand rupees per month. We were travelling to Delhi for an exhibition, where we would display the production that Dastkar Andhra Marketing Association bought from the weavers’ co-operatives we worked with.

It was then that I understood that selling is a particular activity, quite different and in many ways unrelated to its counterpart, buying. When I had bought, there was no question of whether I could. I pointed at what I wanted, and I paid for it. If the supermarket did not have what I wanted, I did not argue with the supermarket - it would never have struck me to do so.

Selling is not like this. To sell is fundamentally to be in a position of both power and weakness. On the one hand, it is you who knows the product, you who can give the customer what they want, and you who will enact the process of cutting, billing, and handing the goods over. On the other hand, customers are rat-bastards can be impatient, unwilling to accept ‘no’ as an answer, and and utterly convinced that they know better than you.

Apart from the theory of selling - the ways that the market works, the idea that money being exchanged for goods and services is the rule around which our world is organised - there is the practice of selling. And that practice is exhausting, but it is also unfortunately very compelling.

When I first sold, it was like a rush. There were so many things going on. So many people who looked at me like I was going to solve a problem they had, and if I did solve them they were going to pay for my trouble. I still don’t have very good Hindi but in the days that I sell in Hindi-speaking places I have to get good very quickly, so I do.

But two weeks ago, I was in Bombay to sell cloth, more than ten years after the first time I did it. It is like this:

You stand in a large room that has been arranged like a maze. It is a పద్మవ్యూహం, an inescapable labyrinth. Customers enter on one end and traverse the entire length to get to the end. There is no natural light here, no clocks by which you can tell time. In this way, this exhibition resembles a casino - a place where we would like you to spend both time and money without regard for the outside world.

It is not possible to sit in an exhibition and feel good about it. To sit is to accept that there are no customers, and that there might not be for a while. If you stand, you must be selling. So you pull cloth, match colour, deliver spiels that sound lovely in my mouth because you speak English. A customer sees one hundred stalls. All you see is a parade of customers.

There is something strange that happens after a few hours of this. Time begins to flow strangely. The unceasing onslaught of where are the duppattas?, This is 450 rupees per meter, no, we don’t offer discounts, ma’am please let me bill this lady first at once makes time everlasting and utterly inadequate. But the worst of all is knowing that this is when the work gets done. So you’d better be grateful that there are so many people who want to buy from you, because if they didn’t you’d be sitting down, wondering where the customers are.

You do three, four, five things at a time. You bill one customer while placing another’s order in a bag. You ask your colleague to cut something at the same time that you tell him you need the product code of a different thing. You ask for change, talk about wash care, explain why the thread count matters. You wear the product you’re selling so they can see what it looks like after it’s been washed.

No customer is interested in your troubles. They are yours, after all. So the fact that there are three other customers also clamouring for your time simply does not make a difference. It is their time that matters, not someone else’s. You do this all day. You count up how much money you made. You count the number of notes you have, the number of bills you wrote, and the ways customers paid. You eat lunch standing up, but quick and careful so that nothing falls on the cloth. Your ankle hurts, because you fell badly six years ago and you’re still recovering.

Yes, everything is naturally dyed. No, we don’t sell silk. Discounts only for bills amounting fifty thousand rupees or more. Of course we have that colour, give me a second.

And amid all this, you hold on to one basic fact - these people, for whom you find yourself having nothing but contempt, are buying. They are buying what you are selling and they are going to use what they buy. They are going to wear it. That’s why the weavers weave, isn’t it? That’s why the dyers dye, the spinners spin. Because the point of things is to be used, and these customers are going to use them. So even though you cannot stand the way they ask, you know they travelled in the awful Bombay traffic all the way to Cuffe Parade so they can see craft.

You are grateful for this much, at least.

Next week, my favourite Arrested Development joke.

Cheers,

mvs