By Malaika Mathew Chawla, 13 and Subhashri Acharya, 10
We play, run around a lot and our shoes keep getting scuffed, coming apart at the seams. Especially now during the rains. We don’t throw them away when they tear. No, we take them to the cobbler near our apartment block. Dinkar Krishna Kamble is a cobbler who repairs shoes and slippers every day in a narrow bylane in Bandra. He is 45 years old and has been doing this for 20 years. He travels to Bandra from Sion-Dharavi. He works from 7am to 7pm. He gets 10 to 20 customers in a day and earns about Rs250 every day stitching and mending shoes. There were many bottles of shoe polish, gum, thread, all kinds of needles arranged around him. He gets all his material from Kurla.
“My father and grandfather were cobblers – they would sit whole days stitching shoe, polishing them. They would make an old shoe look as good as new. I used to love looking at them work. My grandfather taught me the skill. So I came to do the same work.” He has a wife and two sons – “one of them go to college.”
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My Mohalla, Jalebi Ink’s Neighbourhood Project, tracks the history and culture of neighbourhoods through the people who inhabit the spaces, their individual histories and cultural influences. If you’d like to write about your neighbourhood, e-mail us at jalebi.ink@gmail.com
