The "Real" China Town- In Kolkata

One is hardly used to the Calcutta that one sees at the crack of dawn. For the newspaper-wallah who has to wake up early morning so that he ( here’s one profession where I haven’t seen a female working) can manage the entire logistics and ensure that the paper is made available at each home with the cup of hot morning tea, its no big deal. Neither is it a big deal for the lady who comes to work at our home from some far off village. She gets up at 3.30 in the morning and then takes the 1st train into the city for starting her work.

For such people, the dawn breaking in the city, holds no special surprises. However, 5 am is a little too early for people like us, who are blessed and do not have to worry about physical exertion for the sake of eking out a living. Therefore when someone suggested to me that I have to wake up and leave home latest by 5.30-5.45 am, my initial reaction was one of dismay! There’s no way, I would get up so early and that too on a Sunday morning! However, when my friend assured me that the end results would certainly be well-worth the trouble, I mellowed down and finally agreed. If one wants to savour authentic Chinese cuisine at very low prices then one has to reach the place early, I was told. I also learnt that the popularity of the place is apparently gauged by the fact that most of the food disappears as soon as the rising sun makes an entry.

When we left home at 5 am on a Sunday morning, it was still dark though the cuckoo had already begun to coo. A few morning walkers could be seen searching for some fresh air that is only available early morning in Kolkata. The night watchmen from the various residential complexes had come out in search of a cup of warm tea and had begun to crowd around the corner tea-shops. Though winter had already bid farewell there was a nip in the air that made me shiver a bit. Hailing a cab we quickly got inside and ordered the driver to drive us to Poddar court with full speed.

The popularity of the Chinese roadside breakfast became clear to us the moment we got down from the taxi at Poddar court. Although it was close to 6 am now, dawn had not yet broken and the streets of Calcutta were wrapped in a thin blanket of darkness. On one of the streets running perpendicular to Poddar court, we noticed white smoke emanating from a few places. Barring this, there was no sign of any bustling activity that we had read about in the papers and expected to see the moment we reached the place. The mist and the semi darkness made it difficult to find out the source of the smokes emanating and we joked amongst ourselves that the smoke is probably a result of the Chinese food stall owners who had just lit their coal fired stoves and would now get down to the business of cooking the breakfast! Afraid that we had reached a wrong place, we decided to check out from a few of the rickshaw and hand-cart pullers, who were up and about as their profession demanded them to wake up early and were waiting beside their respective vehicles. Surprise was in store when did not even let us finish our description of the place and immediately pointed to the perpendicular road from where we had earlier seen the smoke emanating.

By that time the blanket of darkness had begun to wear off and as we made our way down the road, the shops begun to take shape. It would be wrong to call them shops for there was no permanent structure of any kind. On one side of the road, a few people with Mongloid features had laid down benches and tables on which, large-sized white balls of dough stood on display. I looked up and tried to read the name of the street on one of the sign-boards outside a shop. It read- Sun Yat Sen Street. Bingo! We had reached our destination!

The Indianised version of Chinese name not-withstanding ( The surname Sun had been conveniently changed to the Indian surname-Sen), the place did have a Chinese aura to it. Authentic Chinese food like dim-sums and big sized steamed pao with a choice of beef, chicken or vegetables inside, were arranged in big bamboo containers and aluminium trays for people to savour. There was a lady sitting at the corner with a huge cauldron of fish ball soup getting heated by a simmering fire. She even had a round plastic table laid on the road, in front of where she sat selling her soup. On the table were neatly arranged stacks of soup spoons and chop-sticks and also a bottle each of 3-4 varieties of sauces for people to eat with. For people who had a sweet tooth and wanted to end their breakfast with sweets, there were shops selling a variety of traditional Chinese sweets. For customers who insisted on the Indianised Chinese version, there were fried dumplings too.

“If you want to taste authentic Chinese food, you must come here. This is the only place in Calcutta ( I noticed they still used this pronounciaton) where you can get original Chinese food,” remarked one of the Chinese shop-keepers.

“Tangra has become Indian and doesn’t serve Chinese food these days,” remarked another lady seeing me taking an active interest in the cuisine and making an attempt to taste everything that was on display. In between shovelling the fish balls into my mouth, I decided to enter into a conversation with a lady who had set up a small stool beside the lady selling fish ball soup. Many bottles of sauces and various items like mobile phone covers, stickers displaying Chinese characters, small ladies purse and torches that proclaimed the origin of those articles in China, etc were spread out on the stool and I realised that this place turned itself into a bazaar for a few Chinese who lived in that area.

“How long have you been living in this area?” I asked the lady who owned the stool shop.

“Oh, this place has been my home for many years”. The lady smiled and replied.

“This was the place where the original Chinese population who came to Calcutta, settled down. Tangra came much later. So in a way this is the first home for many a Chinese living in Calcutta!”

“And how many people stay here at present?”

“Well, not many actually. Many of the young generation have gone back to the Chinese mainland and Taiwan in search of greener pastures. Those who have stayed back, live in the buildings around here.”

I looked in the direction in which the lady pointed and noticed an almost crumbling building that resembled a “chawl” or a mess, as a “chawl” is popularly known in these parts. The extended front balcony was the connection for the inmates to the outside world and this space was used by the residents to hang clothes for drying. In front of one or two rooms i noticed smoke emanating from coal-fired stoves that the lower middle class population in India still use, for cooking purpose.

The soup was almost finished and I realised that a few shreds of green spring onion had got wedged between my teeth. Trying to extricate same, I paid up and got ready to leave.

As we made our way back, I suddenly realised why the break-fast stalls begin to wind up as early as 7-8 am. The road had become a busy thoroughfare now and was getting ready to play host to another market- a Sunday morning vegetable market. Already vegetable vendors had begun to spread their gunny sack-turned-mats on the ground and had begun to display their vegetables and fruits. I noticed a Chinese break-fast stall owner argue with a vegetable vendor and ask him to move his wares a little further probably in a bid to avoid his dimsums getting contaminated with dust raised by the Indian vegetables! Space crunch had forced this small community to adapt and seek a compromise so that their trade did not clash with the trade of the local Indian community.