Mrauku Market

8.30am, I go to market - prime time, for by 11am it’s ransacked and sad. Produce is hoovered up in a frantic push-and-shove of shopping basket, hand and banter. Plum-sized aubergines are weighed out, to jumble next to a fish or a bound crab; white radishes are piled like stupas; fat green truncheons of kalabash gourd with white marrow flesh are grabbed like they’re going-out-of-fashion; freshly made rice vermicelli is bundled into banana leaf. There’s much weighing out of flower heads, pinky-crimson umbels of pan chey puit (flowerbuds with a sour taste to add fragrance to clear broths); petals, the ochre-yellow of bird’s foot trefoil and bitter herbs, shin bau, used in soups. The milk of scraped coconut pools in the cool areas, under propped umbrellas, between pockets of unshaded heat. There’s sweet rice flour puddings baled and shaggy in shredded coconut and various coconut porridge puddings; sago and little worms of rice noodle - like spätzle or Italian strozzapreti - are topped with grated coconut, drenched with unfermented palm juice and made sweet and molasses-rich with jaggery. I buy a half-dozen bamboo-leaf-wrapped sticky rice parcels from a woman who wears the look of her labour of love. Her eyes and hand movements say her’s to be just-the-job: wrapped, bound and steamed, as neat as the tight bun of hair that sits trussed by a comb on the back of her head.