Juna Bazaar, Pune, 1986

Pune’s weekly junk market. I rode past this bazaar all the time, and finally got around to spending a couple of hours there with a camera, sometime in early 1986. I have always loved the bustle of street-level commerce; this place epitomizes a wonderful mix of high event density (on a moment-to-moment level) with the calm sense that “we have been trading in other people’s discarded objects for hundreds of years.”

In 1988 I went there and bought a suitcase for my return trip to the US. It failed catastrophically, bursting all its seams, between Pune and Bombay, en route to the airport. Anticipating this, I’d bought a giant needle (4-5 inches long) and some string, and I sewed up the suitcase. It lasted until I arrived in New York, at which point I was able to borrow another piece of luggage for the trip to Boston. If this story has a moral, it’s probably something like, “Don’t buy shitty luggage.”

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