by Ross Munro

Created on: May 14, 2009   Last Updated: May 24, 2009

Three Fingers

The wailing in the alley belonged to the early morning breakfast seller labouring under a bent pole with delicacies in baskets. She walked her route from early morning to mid afternoon and cried her presence like a lamentation. Over the weeks that followed there was a continuous stream of unlikely business enterprises that crossed my path. I couldn't imagine any of them making money but assumed that they did, otherwise why would anyone keep doing it. The old lady in the alley was the first. Others included:

The plastic laminating man in Saigon who towed a generator on his bicycle which powered a small laminating machine, just in case you needed to cover something in plastic.

The weight and height man on the beach patrolling the pavement with an electronic machine on wheels looking for people who just might want to know how high and heavy they were.

The popgun man who had a game on the back of his bike where you shoot at little targets and win some lollies if you hit them, for people who needed something sweet but couldn't quite bring themselves to pay for it directly.

The street vendor selling second hand doorknobs and keys except none of the keys fit any of the doorknobs. There were only eleven of one and seven of the other, for people who needed keys for other doorknobs and doorknobs for other keys.

Then there are the pavement puppy vendors, the itinerant chewing gum sellers, postcard pedlars, raffle retailers, flat tyre fixers, and the misery merchants who cut out the need for product altogether apart from their own abysmal poverty.

Further up the food chain are fruit and vegetable sellers and fish merchants and cigarette kiosks that don't need to keep their product on the ground but can display their wares from a little stand that would get in the way of pedestrians if there were any pedestrians to get in the way of. And there are colonisers of tiny spaces, in alleys off alleys that begin where you enter, for example, with a pool room made out of one pool table and no room, followed by a furniture factory occupying 6 square metres of thoroughfare, followed by a caf, followed by a fish-farm restaurant which, presumably, was the reason for the little lane in the first place.

Then there are the mobile sellers on bicycles that look like a mountain of popcorn on wheels. And the delivery bikes that consist of a guy on the back holding onto whatever it is that is being delivered sheets of steel or glass or huge mirrors or planks or steel

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