When my parents first decided to buy a house for my grandmother to live in, they were led to look at Housing Board flats in Akhra Santoshpur by someone called Sunil Thakur if I remember correctly. When we went to have a look in 1977, we entered the house that would be the place where she lived for the next 24 years while raj mistris or workmen were still at work. I still recall climbing the unplastered staircase to go upstairs and the sight of the local women walking past the house with their water pots. They looked unusual to my city eyes. Much later, I noticed the absence of bindis and the red powder in the hair parting that marks married women in Bengal. I came to know that this was because they were largely Muslim. In fact for a very long time, the people in Nungi, Chotabanshtolla, Raipur, Bnarujje Haat, Akhra, Santoshpur, Battolla, Panchur, Kankhuli, Killkhana, Mollapara, Haldarpara, Bangali Bazaar, Mudiyali - a few of the names I can remember - areas lying within the Calcutta postcodes 700018 and 700024 have been almost 70% Muslim. 90% of the people are involved in the garment industry. Many came to settle in the region when Wajid Ali Shah came with his courtiers from Oudh after the British forced him out. Some came from old Rangoon in search of business. Even today, whether you buy a cotton shirt from the pavement in Howrah or a fine suit in one of the showrooms off Park Street, chances are most of it was made in those areas named above. Each house has tailors working on the ground floor. Some on ancient Wilson machines while others work on the faster modern Singers and Ushas. There are men who will only cut the fabric, others who will only stitch button holes while younger apprentices help where they can, scurrying about to sweep up fabric from the floor or running to get matching thread when the tailors run out. The best tailors are all men, working on fine couture garments for high end retailers at home and abroad. The owner is often a tailor who has done well for himself. He is called the Ostagar. He keeps an eagle eye on things, seeing to it that there are no useable pieces being thrown away and that all the collars look like the photo he has been sent from Hong Kong or Crawford Market or Reid and Taylor. His wives wear gold under their hijabs. His children feel ashamed of the machines and rolls of cloth their father seems to love more than them. I once heard an old tailor at Jaleels in Ballygunje say, after he had furiously driven out a young fellow who wanted to have a pair of drainpipe trousers made, tailors were ruined the day fabrics went from being natural to petrochemical by-products. It took people ten years to learn the cutting and stitching of a good English suit, he said. But then came the Beatles and the Hawaii shirt or the bush shirt and every Rajab Ali is now handling a tailoring business. He blinked craftily and reminisced about the days when he took measurements of the memsahibs in their knickses. They would show him picture of Hollywood actresses or French starlets and take their clothes off blithely. He said he never saw bottoms like those on the mems. These days women were emaciated in comparison. The English women were generous with money too, often asking him to make his daughter something if there was excess material; not like the women of today who frowned at him when he said it was impossible to cover a size 40 chest with the scrap of material he had been given. Then he was always overcome by a long drawn bout of rich phlegmy coughing at the end of which he extracted a measuring tape, blew his nose noisily on his sleeve and said, A goat next to an elephant! Do you understand? A bleeping goat next to an elephant! I still dont know whether he meant the bottoms or their budgets.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 07:36:42 +0000
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