Shida Night Market and the Man for All Seasons

Class over, and the elevator free-falls one floor at a time down to the ground, and I step out into the September sun. Opposite the Mandarin Training Center lies the road to Shida Night Market, where I meet Tashi, the man for all seasons.

He runs an Indian kitchen, aptly named Namaste Taiwan, selling chickpea and chicken curry, naan, and special mutton or kidney bean curry on Fridays and some weekends. I have heard of Indian scholars who visited the Island or mainland to learn Chinese in the decades before the internet. They did not have Google, translation and maps, which somewhat bridge the vast gulf that separates my knowledge of Chinese and the world of brushstrokes.  

At his joint, a bunch of us assemble after the day’s lessons and chat without concern or purpose. Bluetooth speakers play songs from India, spices float in the air and curl up around us like invisible kittens that purr for communion. Half sheltered against the fine drizzle that roars a downpour and simmers like a mist, the march of winter stands guard to us wandering students, who are not so different from wandering mendicants and rowing persuaders about novel lands in pursuit of distant echoes where lightning strikes.

Begging bowl in hands

We seek the grain of rice,

a drop of soup

to soothe parched throats

and nourish tired bones

for the next day's walk.

On many afternoons, I find Tashi busy in preparations, and in the evenings, I find him fulfilling orders and feeding the crowd of dine-ins and takeaways, and occasionally smoking a cigarette on the opposite curb of the small alley that opens into the night market, always ready to melt some unspeakable worry with a kind smile.

When I long for flavors from home, I wind up at Tashi’s, relishing a morsel of curry and rice with a hot chutney. Somedays, I arrive before he has finished setting up and observe the motions of a meal in the making. Rice in the cooker steams up, the flames brew the concoction that is Indian milk tea, or Yindu Nai Cha (印度奶茶). Into the swirl of spices in frothing milk foam, Tashi adds a few rose petals. On sip and I feel the warmth soothe my throat.

For a few hours every evening, a line of locals, Chinese learners and international researchers make a pilgrimage to Tashi’s. He chats up the customers while baking the naan on an upside-down pot, smearing it with a wad of butter and chopping up the bread into eight quarters tightly wrapped in aluminum foil to go with a choice of curry.

In the corner against the second of two tables perched gently on the curb, where one chair leg is always ready to step out on the streets, whenever conversation turns to India, to the places we come from, someone stands up and points a province or a dot on a small map of India stuck to the wall. Pasted to the edge of the awning, a string of small Indian flags flutters.

Many years ago, Tashi met his love in Sikkim and pursued her to Taipei. I learn that he lived for a while near Xindian, learning bits and pieces of Chinese, and becoming a chef at a big hotel in the city. A few years into, he resigned to start his own business when the Pandemic hit. The local community came to his aid, placing orders online, and though difficult, the years of strict measures and social distancing were now a thing of the past.

When I arrive, he runs a bustling establishment, and I see him add a loft with indoor seating next door. Every Indian festival, Tashi’s is a spot for the motley that has grown to wind up at his place. It begins with a special menu, and when night falls, we offer some help to wrap up and close shop for the night, but he seldom allows us to do much, dealing with the dishes, the leftovers, before the night market flaneurs have thinned somewhat, the speakers have gone quiet, and sleep begins her nightly watch.

Over Asahis and Bensons, we take the party elsewhere, escorting it on our two legs to Three Little Birds, where some friends have made their nest. Late into the night and early hours, we mingle, circle indoors chatting away, stepping outside to stand in silence. On his off-roading bike, Tashi cycles away down the now quiet and asleep alley, reassuring our concerns and pleas on behalf of the late hour.

On Diwali, we meet his daughter born at the Silk Road of cultures, and I wonder about people who build bridges to foreign lands and plant oases along the journey for newcomers and travelers. Highways of the world are woven of threads of human relations that know no boundary or borders. Historians are prone to look for Marco Polos and Matteo Riccis in the distant past, but they are blind to Tashis in the here and now.

In the decades Tashi has been in Taipei, he has fed tens of thousands, many of whom had their first bite of Indian food made by his hands. In the sips of his tea, they have tasted what people across the Himalayas have done with the leaves of camellia sinensis, which become Oolong in one place and Pu’er in another.

Down the road from Tashi, deeper inside the Shida Night Market, I grow to love a breakfast place run by a group of old ladies. Empty stomach on early mornings, I order Shu Bing or Shao Bing Dan, from amidst a flaky selection of sesame pancakes wrapped in a paper foil like a roll, and walk back to MTC munching on a biteful and musing freely.

A few hundred meters that separate chickpea curry from the sesame cakes are full of windows into many worlds, a stationary story whose smooth off white pages of a notebook allure some poem, an electronics store selling memory cards and shaving trimmers, a bakery called Ijysheng (一之軒) selling Portuguese egg tarts and tiramisu, and a shop selling buns with all sorts of fillings.

One such world that had opened its door to visitors is closing up one morning. The owners invite me in for a sip of some local brew. They are offering their stock for discounted prices, sharing them freely before closing shop for good... for a while at least… until another idea seizes the imagination… and the heart wants to take the feet walking down some other road. Until then, the high noon calls for a siesta. Shi Da Night Market goes for a nap in the afternoons.