Most probably all those clothes had been brought there for sale by the parana coat karayas, men who go from house to house collecting suits of tweed and wool and silk sarees disintegrating with age, taken out of almirahs where they must have lain for years, with camphor moth balls or dried fragrant savendara roots in their folds. Once a friend of mine had given away her husband’s wedding suit in exchange for some new plasticware. ‘At any rate, it was out of fashion and didn’t fit him any more,’ she had excused herself.

All of us need to discard a great number of things we have accumulated through the years. It doesn’t matter where they all go, bits of our lives go with them too, lessening the burden we have to carry.

‘Haven’t you chosen yet?’ my daughter asks, bringing me back to the present. I can feel the impatience welling up inside her. ‘I’m tired,’ she says. She looks elegant in her imported jeans and T-shirt, her hair sleek in a carefully combed pony tail.

‘Wipe your face. You’re perspiring.’

I embarrass her sometimes, wearing the wrong colours, staring at the wares of pavement hawkers. The young have a certain decorum which their elders lack. They want fewer possessions, they have fewer memories, their lives are relatively uncluttered. There is still time for them to give their discards to the parana coat karayas. How many of the young sons and daughters are earning more than their parents! One young person had said: ‘My first salary amounted to more than my mother’s who had been teaching for twenty years.’

I have chosen nothing yet. I can’t. What am I doing here anyway? Shariff throws another saree over my head and says: ‘Sixty rupees but no colour guarantee.’ The saree is a virulent magenta. Loud enough for his audience to hear, he keeps on talking: ‘These people are strangers. If I don’t tell them the truth they will blame me and never come back again.’

‘Come in, come in, come in,’ the man at the entrance invites all and sundry.

Shariff suddenly calls out again, ‘You purses, your handbags, your umbrellas. Be careful.’

I can’t move out. My elbows seem to have been pinned back.