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India and the Indian: Watch Fat Mama, Rafeeq Ellias' poignant film on Chinese-Indian émigrés
FirstpostThis is the story of Steven Wan, a Chinese-Indian. Back home in India, Kolkata’s shrinking Chinatown, ‘cheena para’ in Territe Bazar, is possibly Indian nationalism at its beguiling best. Stella, ‘Su Lan’, owner of a Chinese grocery store, who passed away recently, was as Indian as the elderly Bihari water carrier, the traditional ‘bhishti’, who brought water in a goatskin ‘mashk’ every morning to her home just behind ‘Sun Yat Sen Street’! Stella was of Chinese origin, a Hakka; but she was also an ‘aloo-luchi’ loving Bengali and a ‘dhishum-dhishum’ Shah Rukh Khan-loving Indian who religiously went to the cinema hall on Sundays after church. His eyes well up as he smiles and shares the irony of how in life his father could never get Indian nationality, but in death, he is firmly a part of India’s soil.
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