Chatsworth’s Bangladesh Market, a haven of exotic food

“Heads and trotters. Heads and trotters.”

The grizzled old guy shouting his product message stops when I pause to look.

“They’re good if you haven’t got teeth,” he grins, showing he still has a few. Unlike the jaunty geriatric I’d stopped and asked directions from earlier. She was shimmy-shuffling on spindly legs, carrying what looked like bulging bags of veggies that suggested she was coming from where I was going. If I could find it.

“I’m looking for the Bangladesh Market,” I say through the wound-down car window. “I think I’m close.” I’ve followed Google maps off Durban’s Higginson Highway and along Florence Nightingale Drive, which is manifestly less imposing than its name. Narrow. Uneven sidewalk. According to the GPS route, I have arrived.

When she flashes me a grin, I note the single tooth: a perfect-for-pulling-at-biltong eyetooth. Then she points me in the general direction of “down and over there”. Advising me to “park in the temple grounds. Just pay what you want. Your car will be safe”.

After a roundabout search, I pull in at what I think is the temple. But it’s a mosque; discreetly nondescript and with a R5 parking charge. Turns out it’s right next to the Hindu temple: embellished and colourfully adorned.

The temple, in turn, adjoins New Bethesda Full Gospel church property, erstwhile home of the Bangladesh Market, many people will tell me, before formal structures were erected and the market was given a permanent home some 12 years ago.

Thinking back to the “veggie” bags my one-tooth market guide was carrying: were they perhaps filled with heads and trotters?

Across from the temple, past the chickens and into the main Bangladesh Market trading area. Photo: Wanda Hennig

Bangladesh, KZN. Are you perhaps guilty as I am, or can be, or have been: of travelling to far-off countries, cities, regions and seeking out markets. Trekking miles sometimes to find them. Getting excited. Taking a gazillion pictures. Of 20 shades of heirloom tomatoes and luscious kouign-amann pastries in Oakland, California. “Gourmet” insects in Koh Samui, Thailand. All manner of fresh and squirmy things at the Luang Prabang morning market, Laos. Beautiful cheeses – beautiful everything – on market visits in the south of France. And always “market people” with the produce. Posting said pictures with enthusiastic captions on Instagram and Facebook.

All the while, back home, going to Woolies and Food Lovers and Checkers. Rarely even to Durban’s eclectic Warwick Avenue markets, even though I drive above them via the freeway overpass most days. Ignoring all but the closest, most convenient – most obvious.

The Bangladesh Market, in Chatsworth, I only heard about a couple of months ago. It has a website that does it no justice. But it is a neighbourhood destination for some tourists. And has a huge and committed fan base of regulars, many of whom live further away than I do.

An unlikely fishmonger is Rita Chetty. Photo: Wanda Hennig

If Rita Chetty were a contender on one of those “guess her career” reality shows, she would stump the team. Chocolate-box pretty in a lace-trimmed cerise top with lipstick to match, she’s serene and calm. Visibly unperturbed by the hustle going on around her.

Distraction most notably coming from close behind her where a courtyard is filled with chickens. Chickens that are mostly crammed, several per cage, into multi-tiered stacks. When a would-be customer thinks “chicken dinner” and points to a fowl, said bird’s feet are tied with plastic strand that is then used to suspend the target upside down from the large hook of a hanging scale.

Weight established, sale concluded, the bird usually disappears briefly. Reappears as a “late” and plucked chicken. The new incarnation visible as feet protruding stiffly from a plastic carry bag. Same as at many markets around the world, it’s a chicken’s life. Not.

And Rita Chetty? Dainty even when she holds up a slinger, she’s a fishmonger. She’s been selling fish for 30 years. Fish that come from the Eastern Cape, from Maputo (including prawns) and that are locally caught. Fresh and frozen fish. Also crabs and fish roe. To customers, mostly from Chatsworth and Durban, but some regulars who travel from Pietermaritzburg, Richards Bay, Johannesburg.

Chetty’s uncle was a subsistence fisherman out of the old Victoria Street Market that burned down in 1973. Then out of the “Old English” or “bulk” market near the Warwick triangle. Then out of the “new” Victoria Street Market. All in downtown Durban.

That was before the move to the “safer” Bangladesh Market environment – open only on Fridays and Saturdays. And where they always sell out.

Neela Subramoney, gadra beans and karela. Photo: Wanda Hennig

“What are these strange dried-out pods things?” I ask the woman scooping said items out of a box and piling them onto the counter next to chillies and near okra, which in turn is next to some strange gnarly veggies that look like prehistoric sea creatures.

Mid-scoop she introduces herself as Neela Subramoney, 70, who gets her produce from “the farms at Umzinto, Umkomaas and Stanger — and from all over”.

Subramoney was a teenager when she started helping family at Durban’s historic Early Morning Market. As an adult she worked as a machinist at a clothing factory. With the market in her blood, post-retirement she became a fixture at the Bangladesh Market.

“I keep myself fit and strong doing this business,” she says, praising “the Lord above” when I remark on her youthful appearance. “If you have the Lord in your life, you have everything,” she says. She could, no doubt, tell Him everything He would need to know to make a hot-as-hell or heavenly curry.

People stop to fill their bags, to chat, to ask questions about the vegetables. You can bet any market trader here knows his or her corianders, cumins and curry leaves and will give expert how-to advice on purchasing and prepping.

The dried-out things are gadra beans, she tells me. “More like peas than beans. But better than peas. Same nutrients. They work better in a curry.”

When I Google them, I discover they’re what I know as Borlotti beans, which I have usually bought in cans. Imported from Italy.

The “sea creatures” (that aren’t) are karela, aka bitter gourd. “Like anything bitter, they’re good for diabetes,” Subramoney advises. Which claim an online search corroborates. As does Early Morning Market flagbearer, Romila Chetty, who tells me eating karela “brings down the sugar levels”.

“If you like the bitterness, you can add it to any meat dish. But I simply steam it, cut it in half, throw the seeds away and eat it as bitter as possible. Or wash it thoroughly then boil it to drink the water. Don’t add salt or you lose the nutritional value.”

Nteza Mbambo elicits hairy mango memories. Photo: Wanda Hennig

All the traders here are spirited entrepreneurs. You hear it as soon as you start to chat.

Nteza Mbambo from Umkomaas, for example. For 20 years she has been “open” on Thursdays and Fridays selling what is available and in season.

Today she has plastic plates piled with mangoes. The type of mangoes that fell from trees, or we climbed to pick, as children growing up in Durban. Sweet and succulent to bite into if you could endure the dental-floss effect of the hairy pip. Which feature led to a craze in what perhaps would now qualify as sustainable – recyclable? – jewellery. After you had munched and sucked, you would scrub and dry the pip, comb out the “hair”, add decoration by way of paint and stick-on glitz. And wear your unique artwork on a strand as a necklace.

The trees that bore those mangoes: I cannot think of where I last saw one in Durban. But clearly they’re growing somewhere. And someone is selling the fruit at the Durban Fresh Produce Market, informally known as the Clairwood Bulk Market. Which is where Mbambo gets her produce for her two-days-a-week business.

Pickle ‘aunty’ Farida Gafoor started with four atchars. Now she has 30 and counting. Photo: Wanda Hennig

Peanuts. There they are, piled high and in their shells. Same as those mangoes-from-the-past, growing up in Durban, peanuts came in their shells, unsalted, unroasted, sold in brown paper bags. I don’t know when I last saw a pile like the one overseen by Tony Naidoo: congenial, kindly, keen to share stories about the market and art of a good curry.

He tells me he is the grandson of an indentured worker; one of many who came from India to KZN between 1860 and 1911 to help develop the sugar industry. “The family has always done markets,” he says, encouraging me to sample a litchi: “Very sweet!”

“My granny used to operate at the old Durban market. We had a big farm at Umkomaas. Pineapples, mdumbi (amadumbe), sugar cane. My grandfather gave the farm to my dad’s sister. My aunt and cousins still farm. They supply the bulk market (Clairwood) on a very big scale.”

Pickle ‘aunty’ Farida Gafoor started with four atchars. Now she has 30 and counting. Photo: Wanda Hennig

Farida Gafoor is reclining, fanning herself, taking a brief break. Soon as I ask a question about her pickles, her atchars – “same thing”, she says – she is on her feet. Telling me about her mango pickles, her sweet and sour lime pickles, her mixed vegetable pickles.

On Friday she typically brings 18 varieties to the market, which she scoops from their holding containers into plastic bottles for customers. On Saturday she will have 30 different kinds. Full stock. She sells out every week. Takes orders.

At home, she says, she has two helpers. “The cutting takes a lot of time.” Easy to believe. The selection is vast. “I’m famous,” she says, citing a story on her pickles that ran in a Durban newspaper just weeks before.

She decides I will probably make her more famous if I write about her. So will not accept my R20 for the pickles I choose. A copy-cat choice, I confess. A mix of her figs-from-Cape Town pickles and her sweet and sour bor aka ber, a red berry with a huge pip, the fruit imported from India. “They’re the best – and better together,” the chunky middle-aged male customer says when I ask his advice on choice.

Gafoor is cool. Someone I’d guess it would be fun to spend a day with. Although a day in her kitchen is likely to be hectic. “Spices, salt, ginger, garlic, mustard seeds, curry leaves, braising…” are some of what she shares about the process. She started at the Bangladesh Market when it was informal and across the street, with four varieties of pickles, 27 years ago. Her early pickling skills, which she has expanded on and experimented with over the years, she learned from her late mom. “She was a top cook at Manjra’s, (a restaurant and takeaway) still well known in Durban to this day.”

“If you write about me, tell people who come to the market to look for the yellow gazebo and they’ll find me,” the “pickle aunty”, as some call her, says cheerily.

Multi-tasking Rani Durgapersad’s stall is a magnet. Photo: Wanda Hennig

In the food corridor, a covered section where the cooks who sell prepped food are at their stoves, Rani Durgapersad’s stall is the magnet. She has been cooking for 30 years. In the early days across the road and for the past 12 years, right here.

Like so many at this market, you can tell that years of practise have gone into an extreme form of multi-tasking. In her case she’s smiling, chatting, listening, serving. Music is blasting from a huge flashing boombox atop the fridge. Every so often she takes over at the big pots of oil where a helper is flat-out dropping this prepped item or that in to spit and sizzle. Samoosas: cheese and corn, mince, and other variations; her pumpkin fritters; savoury bhajias and sweet gool goolas. Bites with potato; with brinjal; and chilli bites. Things her customers know well and, as I stand there watching, are telling me to try.

And I do buy a mini-feast – four paper bags filled to the brim: R10 each. Durgapersad adds a bag of pumpkin fritters, on the house.

Ani Naidoo, left, and Cindy Govender engage over loofahs. Photo: Wanda Hennig

Heading back towards the fish, I catch Cindy Govender and Ani Naidoo chatting behind a pile of loofahs, another previously unfamiliar vegetable. (I know the bath variety, which I read is the fully developed fibrous veggie dried out.)

Govender, 63, is a 30-year market veteran. Naidoo, 80, the daughter of banana farmers, spent 30 years as a machinist at a national clothing company then “retired” to the market.

“I love it,” she says. “This is so much better than staying in the house. My daughter-in-law drives me to pick up the produce and then here to the market.”

For the customers I watch her engage with, she is clearly the market expert on “gravy soakers”: the correct potato for the perfect curry.

Govender meanwhile shares the loofah aka luffa story. The ridged gourd must be peeled, just along the ridge. Then sliced and braised with onion, garlic, oil, masala, brinjal. Added to mutton, chicken or mince curry. Govender buys her loofahs from farmers at Umkomaas. Her chillies, she grows in her garden.

‘We’re offal here,’ says Grace Mundri, who sells her sheep heads cleaned and ready to cook. Photo: Wanda Hennig

“Do you ever go to the Bangladesh Market?” I message a journalist friend when I get home.“My gran shops there every weekend,” she WhatsApps back. “Buys vegetables; cleans and packs them for all of us: her family in Joburg, Pietermaritzburg and Durban. We grew up in the market. I’ll ask her if you can chat to her, if you want. She knows everyone at the market.”

So it is that I get to speak with Mala Pillay who tells me she has lived in Chatsworth for 55 of her 73 years. Walking distance from the Bangladesh Market.

“We locals love this market because you get everything in one place, under one roof. All our vegetables and every type of fruit. Chickens, eggs, nuts, fish, trotters and sheep head – all cleaned and ready to cook. Also clothing, shoes, curry spices, pots and pans and cosmetic products.”

She reprimands me gently for having visited the market on a Friday. Fewer stalls than on a Saturday when “you can walk from one side of the market to the other and get everything…”

Pillay was recently back from Johannesburg. “I took a flight,” she says. “I have two sons there and their families and a sister and her three daughters and a brother and his family.”

She did a market shop before she left. “I couldn’t take for all of them because of the weight limit. But I took for my two sons: sheep head and trotters; masala and biscuits. They don’t get the lamb feet and sheep head cleaned and ready to cook in Joburg and these are my favourite curries to cook. So I take them and make them for my sons.”

Grace Mundri is a first-generation market trader. “We’re offal here,” she says. “Tripe, livers, trotters, sheep and lamb heads – which we generally sell cleaned and prepared, with the hair torched off, the glands removed and cut into pieces, ready to cook.”

The heads she advises cooking “like mutton curry”. With fried onions and Kashmiri masala; tomato, ginger, garlic, curry leaves, turmeric powder; potatoes and gadra beans, “which are like sugar beans but fresh”.

How spicy is up to individual taste. “We Indians eat spicy. Africans like less spicy. You choose your spiciness. Just add more or less masala.”

Bangladesh bliss for garlic and ginger lovers. Photo: Wanda Hennig

Back to Pillay. She says: “We Indians do a lot of cooking. Monday, Thursday and Friday I don’t cook meat. On Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday I cook chicken or fish or trotters or sheep’s head.

“Fish, I look at the market for where it is cheaper. I fry it or make fish curry, with tamarind, which is sour. A fish curry you want to make a bit sour. I put in baby brinjals and extra garlic – whole garlic cloves for fish, crushed for other curries – and tomatoes. And I serve it with pap: mielie meal. For fish curry, pap is tastier than rice.”

She crushes garlic and ginger and bottles it for her daughter in Pietermaritzburg and her journalist granddaughter in Durban. “They have good garlic and ginger at the market.”

And that’s no understatement.

Pic: Supper_Hennig

Heading out of the market, I detour back past my new fish friend, Rita Chetty. She recommends the butterfish and I select two slices to cook; other fish to freeze. The butterfish to have after Rani Durgapersad’s assorted nibbles and with Gafoor’s atchar.

Before driving home I WhatsApp a friend I “owe”, tell him to bring a bottle and come for supper. For something to get our teeth into while we still have them. DM

Wanda Hennig is a food and travel writer based in Durban. She has worked on newspapers and magazines in South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area and freelanced extensively. She is author of Cravings: A Zen-inspired memoir.... Reach her via her website wandahennig.com.