V.I.P. Tailors

In Kalimpong even nice stores are holes in the wall. The upper and lower cart roads leading into town are dotted with tiny general shops and stands that people lucky enough to have a house directly on the main path have set up in lieu of a front room. Most of these sport bright signs advertising ISD, PCO, STD, Aircel and other kinds of local and international pay phones. Like the street vendors I'm so used to seeing in New York, these places all seem to sell the same things: soda and potato chips, cookies and biscuits, some local unpackaged products that aren't safe for westerners, and individually wrapped mints, soaps, and medicines that hang from the low ceiling in long dangling strands of colored plastic.

Once you get off Dikshit Road and into Kalimpong proper, however, things diversify a bit. The general shops have been replaced with pharmacies that vary in size and sketchiness (the Tibetan store is supposed to be the best) and are spaced out between restaurants, dirty looking hotels, barber shops, and dark, occult looking places filled with grimacing masks and twisted, grinning Kali figurines. But the tiniest places of all, crammed into every remaining meter of storefront space, are the tailors.

The prospect of getting cheaply tailored clothing excited me since deciding to go to India. Check the tags on any given dress shirt, and there is a fair chance it was made in India. In the States, getting a shit tailored could run you at least a hundred bucks, but here in All India, where man hours are the most abundant resource, they'll do it for two. Since the program had told us to pack light, shopping for clothes and other essentials was high on our lists of priorities. Last week we finally went, with Tanya and Bishu taking the girls off to pick out punjabis and Lalit and B.B. leading Josh, Ansel, and myself through the crowded, haphazard sidewalks to buy cloth. The store was one of the larger establishments on the main road and, like fabric stores anywhere, was filled with color. After much browsing and subsequent haggling, we got our cloth and went across the street, walking quickly to avoid the mobs of rowdy teenagers chanting their football victory at the Mela Grounds.

V.I.P. Tailors is the smallest of the tiny tailors. Every available square foot is dedicated to hanging finished clothes or tiny push-peddle sewing machines. Outside rusty square table is used by a bookie to take bets on sports unknown, the nearby wall pinned with sheets of lottery tickets and paper prayers from the last holiday. Now and then the inconspicuous bookie will reach through a hole in the store's Plexiglas window and pull a mysterious and unreadable strip of paper from a small ticker machine. Inside its dark and hot. The irregular beats of the half dozen sewing machines are punctuated by the constant thumping of a small, vicious ceiling fan hanging just a few inches above my head.

The attendant tailor measures us and asks vague questions about pockets and pleats, all the while scribbling in some arcane combination of sewing script and devanagari. His notes form strange half circles around quick, crude sketches that somehow indicate style and preferences. He cut two tiny squares out of each of our fabrics, stapling one half into his heavy, leather-bound spellbook, and other to our indecipherable yellow recite. Assuring us that our clothes would be done by the 19th, he waved us out without a smile.

I went back on the 19th. A different man glanced at my recite and shook his head. The 21st, he said. They'd be ready on the 21st.

They were ready on the 21st. I went in and a third young man took my yellow slip in a sloth-like daze. He pawed aimlessly through the racks of hanging clothes until, finally, I pointed at a thinly lined white shirt I had ordered and said, "Tyo." I this-ed and that-ed four more items which the man pulled down, along with a few others I was sure weren't mine, to compare to the little squares of material snipped off the week before. Thanking and paying, I took my stuff and left. Tailoring for three shirts and two pairs of slacks had come to a total of US$10.50.