Bleary-eyed Indians carry Sisyphean sacks, strapped to their backs with headbands which furrow their foreheads. Cooking pots and cauldrons bubble, sending huffs of smoke through the half-light. The applause of tortilla-baking women as they flatten the dough from palm to palm and back again echoes through the marketplace. Crying, sleeping or wide-eyed children loll in slings on their mothers' backs. Over stalls and across the cobbles, apples, oranges, mangoes, lemons and limes tumble from their pyramids.
Colours run amok in the market.
Impossible combinations of scarlets and vermilions, pinks and purples, blues and rainbow hues storm the senses. Impossible to tell people's clothing from wares to sell, merging in the melee with malevolent masks and painted effigies, while ceramic whistles, pipes and flutes are laid out in higgledy piggledy logic from every vantage point. Age-lined men, weary from their all night vigil, swing incense from old powdered milk pots tied to string. They squint down the steps of the white washed church and wail laments and prayers to the steely-sharp morning air. The embers of the night's fires glow dimly, palls of copal incense billowing.