Gole Bazaar 1960s - Chinese Chakkar

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Coeval and coterminous with the evanescent Hotel Apsara and Drop Inn was this Chinese Shoe Shop. Wiki tells me that Chinatown in Calcutta is the only Chinatown in India. It housed 20,000 ethnic Chinese at one time but only 2,000 now. Tanneries and Eateries were the main occupation of Chinese in India.

I guess Chinese shoes may have become unpopular but Chinese food is all-pervasive nowadays. Even hand carts in Gudur have weird inscriptions like 'Chinese Nooduls' handwritten in Telugu with the picture of a dragon breathing fire literally on their side-windows. There was indeed a Chinese Restaurant in the Jhapatapur area of KGP patronized by IITians. Say "food" and all KGPians would run there on their pushbikes in twos and threes. That is a rather eloquent testimonial to their Hall Messes...ask me! There was a Waldorf too nearby. This Waldorf always recalled the one in NYC:

http://www.waldorfnewyork.com/

Rather!

And there was this B K Mohanty, a couple of years senior to me in the Phy Dept at KGP...the one who was recruited because of his intimate knowledge of Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge. He was the only proper dandy I met with at KGP in all those decades.

One day he visited my room in a novel footwear all black and shiny and I asked him where he got that pointed shoe when the ones at Bata worn by those who wore any shoe at all were as broad as elephants'. He replied that the new Chinese shop in Gole Bazaar made it specially for him. And that he got them free because Mr Wong, the proprietor, glanced at him while he was strolling along the High Street of Gole Bazaar and invited him in. And pleaded and prayed to permit him to take measurements of his feet (no two feet are identical mirror images...only shoemakers know it). And return after a week to take them home on condition that he wear them at IIT as long as they lasted...BKM was the one and only Male Model at IIT.

And the goat that I was in my twenties, I ran to Gole Bazaar that evening and bought a pair that Mr Wong fobbed off on me. And I was wearing them like that famous Albatross around the neck of our Ancient Mariner. They pinched me at all possible hidden bones on my feet that I was unaware of till then. And when I walked, they made such a soul-shattering clatter that I was like the proverbial cow with her chimes around her neck. Or a buggy-horse trotting on a wooden pavement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5IF9HAGeRQ

Students who were shouting between classes used to fall silent when I turned the bend of the Phy corridor. And BKM looked at me appreciatively and said that he would gift me a neck-tie to make me look like David Niven:

http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.freemooviesonline.com/images/stories/cinema/actors/david-niven/david-niven.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.freemooviesonline.com/cinema/actors-and-actresses/david-niven-a-fine-gentleman.html&h=200&w=150&sz=9&tbnid=h8P_XuJir180oM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=68&prev=/search%3Fq%3Ddavid%2Bniven%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=david+niven&docid=lzP0ERCBC6h5CM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SWi6TtncM4TsrAeo7qjTBg&sqi=2&ved=0CE8Q9QEwBw&dur=4072

provided I got a 'tight pant' and full shirt stitched by the United Tailors at Gole Bazaar (I guess that they too employed him as a Working-Model).

I did (I didn't have the money for the leather belt though).

And he taught me how to wear the tie, single knot and double knot and Windsor knot. And I had my fifteen minutes of fame when I manned the Registration Counter of the 1970 Science Congress held at IIT KGP in that outfit:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/12/gatekeepers-gatecrashers.html

There was a photo of mine in that dress with a Wills Flake (with filter!) dangling from my lips...I don't find it now but it will be a pleasant exercise for Aniket & Co to stretch their wild imagination to its Yield Point to figure out how swell I looked then.

I reached my Yield Point within an year, since the Chinese shoe happened to be harder than my feet and refused to crack or die a natural death...I gave them away to Chinta, the new Bearer in our Faculty Hostel. And where the shoe went, there followed the tight pant, tie and full shirt...it was all a hideous combo...

And Chinta, as pleased as a squirrel with his nut, exchanged it for a jug of blushful Hippocrene of Keats...


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