Lahurabir Market

Lahurabir is one of Varanasi's great everyday marketplaces — not a monument or a heritage lane for tourists, but the working, bargaining, tea-drinking heart of the city's middle-class shopping life.

• Radiating out from the busy Lahurabir Chauraha (crossing) in the Chetganj–Maldahiya belt, roughly two kilometres from Varanasi Junction, the market is a dense, unglamorous grid of shopfronts that locals trust for one thing above all: value.
• Where the ghat-side lanes sell silk and souvenirs at tourist prices, Lahurabir is where Banarasi families come to kit out a home or a wedding trousseau without paying a premium.
• It is loud, practical and cheerfully utilitarian, and that ordinariness is exactly its charm.
• The merchandise mix is broad and deliberately affordable.
• Rows of shops stock ready-made clothing and everyday sarees, costume and 'junk' jewellery, bangles and imitation ornaments, along with household goods, kitchenware, home appliances, hardware, curtains and decor materials.
• Bargaining is expected and rewarded, prices are keen, and the crowds — though thick on weekends and during the festive months — are more manageable than the crush of Godowlia or Vishwanath Gali.
• A few weaving outlets still let curious visitors watch silk being worked before they buy, a quiet reminder that this is Banaras, city of the loom.
• Come for the theatre of the transaction as much as the goods themselves.
• What pulls food-loving visitors here, though, is the street food.
• Lahurabir Road is one of the city's celebrated addresses for tamatar chaat — the uniquely Banarasi cold-then-warm chaat of tomatoes slow-mashed with ginger, spices and crushed namak-para, finished with a spoon of ghee and served in a leaf bowl.
• As the afternoon cools, the stalls fire up and the crossing fills with the smell of frying and the clatter of ladles against kadhai; this is a place to graze, standing, between shops.
• For vegetarian travellers, Lahurabir is effortlessly comfortable: like almost all of old Varanasi, its food scene is overwhelmingly satvik and pure-vegetarian, and much of it is cooked without onion or garlic.
• Tamatar chaat, tikki, kachori-sabzi, palak-chaat, golgappa and jalebi are the staples of the crossing, all meat-free and egg-free by tradition.
• Nearby institutions such as the pure-veg Deena Chaat Bhandar at Luxa, and the vegetarian thali houses off Dashashwamedh Road, mean you are never more than a short auto ride from a wholesome, alcohol-free plate.
• Eat where the queue of locals is longest and you cannot go wrong.