I've not updated my blog in a few days, so here's a story about an unnerving shopping trip, all in the name of my continuing effort to make friends...
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Last week, my Polish colleague, Ola, invited me to join her and some colleagues for a do at her condo tomorrow. Ironically, Fusionopolis will be closed for its opening ceremony, where Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is to officially declare Death Star 2 operational. We mere plebs who work there have been told to stay at home and watch the ceremony by video link, lest we turn up and be rugby-tackled into pancakes and possibly shot by the Prime Minister's bodyguards. So, of course, we're having a party of our own! Now duty calls and the time has come to cement my fledgling office alliances, and so I turn to the one thing that always gets people coming to my parties, my spinach and paneer samosas. I decided that if I make enough of those and take them along to the party to distribute to Ola et al., then it might buy me at least one more week of lunchtime conversation.
After singularly failing to get to the Tesco in Johor Bahru (Malaysia's second city) to buy ingredients yesterday, I had no choice but to shop for my groceries much closer to home today. So, this afternoon, I took the 67 bus from Lorong 34 to the neighbourhood known as Little India, in Rochor district, about 20 minutes away.
Little India is named for the Tamil Muslims who settled there between the 1950s and 1970s. You can't miss the Indian influence. Everywhere you turn there is a food stall selling parathas stuffed with anything you can think of and Tandoori everything, shops selling exotic spices and fine fabrics, women browsing the shops in saris, and cafes pumping out Bollywood music as people scoff ras malai and barfi.
The most famous attraction in Little India is the appropriately-named Mustafa Centre, an all-consuming leviathan of a department store. Mustafa has six distinct sections plus an eponymous kebab restaurant (serving actual kebabs, not Portswood takeaway kebabs) occupying nine floors, and is open 24 hours a day; that is how long you'd need to be there to get through two of the sections! When I got off the bus, I was just outside the entrance to section 6. Thinking I would get lost if I didn't do things right, I decided it would be better to go in through section 1 (as per Google's orders when I looked up the directions before leaving), which turned out to be a 15-minute walk away from where I was, around two corners of the block of which Mustafa is the sole occupant.
Outside each entrance is an attendant behind a desk. Before you go in, you are obliged to have all your bags tied shut by the attendant. I wasn't sure why. I thought it might be because the shop is so big that they just can't see who might be stealing what, but then I thought it might be because they can't see who is being stolen from! Either way, it was another indication as to the magnitude of the place.
I'm not sure how to describe my initial impression when I got in. Before arriving, I had imagined something like a John Lewis blown up by a factor of ten. What it actually resembles is a cross between John Lewis, Aldi and Argos. It has all the fancy-pants jewellery, clothes and gadgets a la John Lewis, arranged in sometimes random order like Aldi, and with the occasional sight of something resembling a catalogue item out of Argos' Elizabeth Duke. But it's all there, no matter your taste or price range!
My fellow expats told me it was the only place to buy genuine British chocolates, not the local knock-offs that have the same labels but actually contain lesser-quality chocolate. And, my, they weren't joking! At the back of section 1, you find 25 whole aisles - yes, 25 aisles! - of nothing but sweets, chocolates and biscuits, stacked five shelves high. When you hear the old saying about being a kid in a sweet shop, only this could be what they're talking about. Alas, I wasn't there for chocolates and biscuits. As tempting as it was to slot a couple of dozen bars of Dairy Milk and ten boxes of Ferrero Rocher into my basket, I had come with a shopping list and was determined to stick to it.
They say that you can think of any item you like, and if you can't find it at Mustafa, then it doesn't exist! It was with this sage advice in mind that I had decided to venture there. Despite the large Indian population, paneer is quite hard to come by in the general supermarkets. But all the online advice swears by Mustafa...if you can get to the right part of the right section of the place. I beat a hasty retreat from section 1, turning on the sweets and doubling back through the five aisles of kitchen appliances, five more of cameras and telephones, and the sea of wall-to-wall watches.
I re-entered the building at section 2, which had more electronics in it. Down in the basement level were rows upon rows of cottons, silks and linens for clothes-making. I hadn't the slightest idea which way I was going. I only knew that I had seen photos of the in-store supermarket. I just had to get to the right section, past all the fabrics and electronics and appliances and sweets and clothes and shoes and musical instruments and furniture and bed linen and pharmaceuticals. Going down into the basement, I pressed on through crowds of excitable sari-clad women arguing over the correct choice of cloth and arrived, somewhat inexplicably, at the luggage area. Mustafa's luggage collection is no less impressive than its sweet tooth. I counted 17 aisles of bags, backpacks, hand luggage and suitcases of all shapes and sizes, among them Samsonite but many other brands I had never heard of. Some of them must not have been selling very well, because part of the section resembled an Argos conveyor belt, with cardboard boxes of items piled high and waiting to be collected. Usually, these were hidden behind show items, but there was so much merchandise that I wondered if they could very well have got rid of the boxed-up stuff and just sold the show items at no cost to their profit margin!
Here I caught a lucky break, a young Western family debating the easiest way to get to the supermarket. They thought they were in the right section but that the supermarket was on level 4, so that's where we headed. We shuffled back through the luggage towards the escalators. The trip up to level 4 took 15 minutes and required going around to opposite sides of each level to get to the next escalator.
When I arrived, I encountered another problem. Level 4 has at least three stepped sub-levels, and there are four supermarkets to choose from. As far as I could tell, there was no distinguishable start or end point to any of these, and they just merged into each other at random places, where you'd suddenly go from aisle 4 of one to aisle 12 of another. The first one I came to was, I assume, the biggest. I assume this because I couldn't see to the end of it. I could only count 29 aisles of goods several hundred yards away before things went blurry and my eyes started to hurt. Fortunately, the aisles are numbered (or else you'd never find your way out), and I had got off the right escalator and was perfectly poised for my mission at aisle 1. So, off I went on my trek. I went down every aisle I could find. It took over two hours. Sometimes when I shop back home, I have to visit two or three shops to find everything I need. There's always something that isn't available. Folks, I can guarantee that what they said about Mustafa is true. There is everything in the world that you could ever think of and then some, right here under this one roof. Even the most specific items like ginger-green chili paste (which would normally require a trip to Portswood's International Foods, where they might have one or two varieties) was available in 12 different varieties and degrees of ginger-ness and chili-ness right here! Same for dried mango powder, of which I knew of only one variety back home, but which was to be found in six different brands here. As for the paneer...well, going from a position where I was not aware of any supermarket that sold any paneer at all, I found in Mustafa three entire freezers, each one the length of a large bed, devoted to all manner of paneer: blocks of paneer, cubes of paneer, fried paneer, spiced paneer, paneer stews, paneer in things, things in paneer!
An occasional problem in Singapore is that you can't find a particular item because it is advertised in Mandarin Chinese but not English. In Mustafa, this was no problem, because almost nothing is written in Chinese, but even where some items were advertised using English spellings of the Hindi word, like "amchur" for mango powder, my passable grasp of the language helped to confirm that that was, indeed, what I was looking for! And some of the produce is of genuinely very high quality. In the fruit aisle, I found some of the reddest, shiniest and perfectly-ripened apples I have ever seen.
When you have recovered from gawping at the sheer size of the place and made your weary way around all the aisles, you arrive at the unexpectedly tiny tills, which all looked to be too small to cope with the amount of shopping most people had. I did most of my packing on the floor afterwards. Before you leave, the cashier will once again tie your shopping bags shut, and the attendant at the exit will glance at you to make sure that they are duly tied as you leave.
I wasn't entirely sure how to get out again. Every time I turned another way, I only came out at one of the other supermarkets. Eventually, peering over a balcony, I spotted the fabrics section again, and so I was able to retrace my steps for the 15-minute walk out of the building at exit 6, which was where I had disembarked the bus.
Mustafa is an awesome place, a must-see for visitors! I only got to explore one small part of one small section. I'll need at least another two trips if I want to see all the parts of it that might interest me, and two more after that to stock up on chocolate. It's just as well I still have 712 days.
Tomorrow morning, I will make the samosas, and we'll find out how my attempt at reeling in friends goes...
By
The Imperial Orange,
18th October 2015
