Little India in Singapore

I shudder to think what round-the-clock shopping at Singapore's Mustafa and a new metro right up to its doorstep will do to India's diplomacy.

For our ministers and civil servants, who crowd Singapore either for bilateral meetings of the utmost importance or because it just happens to be an unavoidable stop on the cheapest and shortest route between Rio de Janeiro (or Accra or Vancouver) and Delhi, will now spend even more time and money in this place of pilgrimage for high and low.

Wherever Indians gather, the conversation turns sooner or later to shopping. And in the Far East, more often than not it centres on that magic name, the universally understood shorthand for two back-to-back emporia in the dingy part of Singapore called Little India.

One is the old Mohamad Mustafa & Samsuddin Co in Serangoon Road. The other Mustafa Centre opened in 1995 in nearby Syed Alwi Road. They are now open 24 hours -- an innovation even for innovative Singapore -- and are served by the North-east Line, which started on June 20.

Farrer Park, the new station diagonally opposite the old Mustafa, commemorates the site where on February 17, 1942, 45,000 Indian troops joined the Indian National Army, then led by Mohan Singh.

Mustaq Ahmad, Mustafa's youthful 50-something managing director whose family is from Uttar Pradesh, probably wouldn't thank me for saying that his store is an Indian shrine. His website claims customers from Japan, America and Europe. Perhaps there are.

In recent years, I have seen some obviously Slav types, just as the occasional Chinese face is now visible among the Malayali or Tamil Muslim shop assistants. But the overwhelming majority is still South Asian.

The Chinese Singaporean MP who remarked in caustic racism that it gets dark very early in Little India -- referring to the masses of Indian and Bangladeshi workers that congregate there on Sunday evenings when the police are out in numbers to regulate traffic -- might have included Mustafa.

Another joke at South Asia's expense is that the word has spread in Bangladesh that money pours out if you touch the wall of Tekka Mall.

Only a stone's throw away from Mustafa, Tekka Mall is Little India's old heart, a grubby rabbit warren of shops and stalls where you can buy goat's meat, subcontinental fish and spices and gaudy nylon sarees. The wall-touching refers to the ATM machine outside.

Such pejorative references may explain why Mustafa shies away from proclaiming that its main clientele is South Asian. Mustaq Ahmad likes to recall that a man who bought five television sets paid for them from the US and had the goods shipped to Russia. Such tales create a sophisticated international image.

Yet, statistics show that Indians are among Singapore's best buyers, ranking just after South Africans. The smart set might sneer that what they buy is trash -- trinkets, inexpensive household gadgets and fancy goods, and that, in any case, it is for resale. Often, apparently, one man acts as courier for several persons in India.

But the colour of money doesn't change with what it's spent on, and it is this almost wholesale mopping up of cheap goods that keeps Singapore's economy ticking over in these hard times.

It also explains why when so many fashionable stores and boutiques are on the rocks, Mustafa continues to increase its profit year after year. Starting as a convenience store, it now has 3,000 items on site and assets worth more than $100 million.

Mustaq Ahmad is nothing if not adventurous. He has tried out mail order catalogues. Online sales rake in more than $17,000 a month. His 200 lines in watches range from $11 to more than $8,500.

There are money changers, a travel agency, a boarding house and a cafeteria on the premises so that all the needs of a modest shopper from the subcontinent are taken care of.

Lately, I see that goods have spilled out on to Syed Alwi Road with separate cash registers on the pavement, which is also decked out with tables and chairs for eating. It's really a third al fresco Mustafa.

Still, Mustafa isn't my choice. The jostling crowds, narrow aisles, brusque assistants and crammed shelves with no attempt at display put me off. But not others.

Once, when an Indian VIP did not turn up for a dinner in his honour where he had to make a presentation to august Singaporean dignitaries, the deputy high commissioner clambered into his car, drove off to Little India and made a beeline for Mustafa.

There, as he had guessed, the VIP was happily buying up the store, oblivious of any obligation to India-Singapore relations.

Tailpiece: Way back in the early 19th century when Stamford Raffles founded Singapore, Little India was where Indian settlers grew betel nut, fruit and vegetables, ran a brick kiln and kept cattle, goats and sheep.

Buffalo Road and Kerbau (buffalo in Malay) Road bear testimony to those times. So does Desker Lane where a Eurasian pioneer had his livestock and abattoir.

It is now a street of ill repute -- you can see clutches of painted girls hanging about the balconies -- but that doesn't faze the pioneer's great-grandson, Barry Desker, a seasoned diplomat who was Singapore's ambassador to Indonesia and is now director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.

"I always say that Desker Lane has been in the flesh trade all along!" he laughs.

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