This red brick godown or warehouse or hangar housed about a couple of dozen cloth shops. A matrix of about six rows and four columns or the other way round, East-West. Mostly Bengali-owned and Bengali wear...saris, dhotis, punjabis etc.
My UP friend pointed out a curious anomaly in nomenclature of jibbas: In Punjab they are called Bengali kurtas while in Bengal the same are called Punjabis...I guess everyone wishes to be exotic. There was one particular variety which was neither pure cotton nor pure silk. It had a shine but soft. They gave this a curious name: Cheese Cotton or Swiss Cotton. The default color is Cream. I must have bought a couple of dozen over my 4 decades, for, my Father, F-i-L, and B-i-Ls all loved them. No such thing was available down South. And they were pretty inexpensive.
We used to be frequent visitors to this mini-mall operated on the CAS basis:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/11/cas-oas.html
Now that I have blogged about a couple of lakh words, I realize that my little life was always rounded with words. Playing with words hour by hour, I feel at times I know when and where I met some words first. The word Mall entered my consciousness at the tender age of 8 when I could just about lisp words of this alien tongue without knowing their meanings.
We kids used to collect and treasure empties of rare brands of cigarettes and give them consensually agreed upon Rupee values. The highest went to Pall Mall. 1950s was the heyday of exotic brands, like Marlboro, Passing Show, Capstan, Chesterfield, Kool, Player's, Marcopolo...Smokers of these exotic brands were few and rich and so the companies spent a lot of money in making the covers stylish. Most had pictures on them. Capstan had the pic of a real capstan with its drum and cable wound round it. I had to ask my Father what it was. Passing Show had the picture of a monocled gent perhaps watching a passing show. Gold Flake Honeydew was honey in color...I couldn't make out what a capstan had to do with a cigarette; or for that matter passing show. Perhaps the sounds and nuances of these words were attractive. In a couple of decades, most of these frills were extinct and cigarette covers started looking drab, except Charminar, which kept its picture of the Hyderabadi monument. Maybe by then many Indian youngsters got hooked to fags and so the interest was more in the contained than the container.
Anyway, I came to know that Pall Mall is a fashionable street in London...oh, how the heart pined to have a walk down Pall Mall...childhood is weird indeed.
I came to see proper modern malls only after coming to Hyderabad. Maybe a dozen of both the OAS and CAS variety. The other day however, my son drove me to the Inorbit Mall in the heart of the Hi Tec city, saying that it would be quite an experience. Indeed it was. The main plaza is so vast that if I had to describe its vastness, I would puff and bloat and burst like that Aesop's 'Father Frog':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wr_bQKelyI
But, in retrospect, the best Mall I have ever seen goes back to the glorious 1960s and in Calcutta. It wasn't called a Mall then; it was just called New Market. Nestling in the heart of Esplanade, it was a soul-stretching experience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Market,_Calcutta
Whenever I used to take visitors to Calcutta, like my sisters, parents, and friends, I used to take them to the New Market, with the proviso that they hand me their handbags and wallets.
I read that it got burned down some years later...everything 'heritage' here meets a similar or worse fate. The historical lakes of Hyderabad are daily shrinking due to sharks of a different kind...much more voracious:
| avid, covetous, devouring, dog-hungry, edacious, empty, gluttonous, gorging, grasping, gross, insatiable, omnivorous, piggy, prodigious, rapacious, ravening, ravenous, sating, starved, starved to death, starving, uncontrolled, unquenchable |
http://thesaurus.com/browse/voracious
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