Pile it high

Indians love a good pile. Wherever you go, whatever they're selling, it will invariably be heaped in profusion and confusion all around them. They have taken piling to a new level - to an art form.

In markets, plum tomatoes are precisely laid out in neat concentric circles, one on top of the other to form great towers of produce so tempting you are loathe the buy anything, as this would spoil the symmetry. The humble carrot takes on a whole new beauty when placed tapered ends together to form a vibrant orange wheel in a wicker basket. Balancing veg on veg becomes an obsession, as a perfectly conical heap of green beans is topped off by the final pod, added precariously to the summit.

Clothes sellers do it too. By the side of the road one day, I noticed a little clutch of people gathered round something on the ground. I wandered over to see what it was. There, in the dust and discarded banana skins and plastic bags was an old man selling trainers, just trainers. All jumbled together, his prospective customers had to hunt through the pile to find a matching pair. He and they didn't seem to mind. Perhaps it added to the thrilled and fostered the belief that you may be getting a bargain.

Spice merchants line their stores with open sacks of glowing gold turmeric, ochre chilli powder and dull back peppercorns, all in perfectly heaped cones. When a customer buys, the merchant uses his little scoop to mine deep into the fragrant mound and once they've gone, he hastily rebuilds his tower, lest others think any less of him for having a dent in his dome.

Even the good old tourist shops are prone to the pile. In Amritsar, I went into a textile shop looking for a specific thing: a piece of fabric - any fabric - in that luminous saffron shade of the Sikh turbans and headscarves I'd seen. The owner had every textile, colour and pattern known to man, all in individual plastic wrappers, neatly stacked one on top of the other. The shop was lined on all sides with them, floor to ceiling.

I couldn't see what I was after immediately, so I asked him if he had it. And this is the amazing bit: despite his immense stock, he went straight to specific stacks and, lifting any on top all together, with a deft tug he extracted the packet he was after. He knew exactly where everything was.

Darting all over the shop, he produced pack after pack that barely fitted my description - neon orange, terracotta, red/yellow tie dye, and eventually saffron - all without toppling a single stack.

It seems to be a selling point to buy it in and pile it high. It's all about choice. If you go into a shop, seeing that there are only 20 different styles of shoes on sale, they think you will think their stock is limited. Whereas if you cram every available surface with all you own, the customer cannot but think that you MUST have what he is looking for, if only you can locate it. For the Indian salesman the pile is pride, the mound is money, the heap is happiness.