A January night in the late 1990s. Jogia, 30, was tapping away at leather soles with iron spikes at his roadside shoe shop in Rajpur.
Those days Rajpur in south Calcutta was not quite the busy settlement it is now. That night the radio was on. Jogia, who goes by one name, was listening to commentary for the derby match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. At times, he paused in his work and listened closely.
He was not alone; a huddle of young football fans sat inside his shop. And whenever the commentator announced a goal for Mohun Bagan, most of the boys would throw up their hands in the air and cheer loudly. That season, the name on every tongue was Swapan Paul, the stopper for Mohun Bagan.
By 10pm, Jogia was getting ready to wrap up when a car stopped in front of his shop. The man who stepped out had an air of urgency about him. He wanted to purchase a pair of ready-made boots. That done, he asked Jogia, “I am told many footballers play in your boots? Who are your customers?”
Jogia recalls rattling off the names with pride, “Prashant Chakraborty, Mehtab Hossain, Ranjit Karmakar…” The man smiled and said, “Now you can add Swapan Paul to that list”.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as Jogia will tell you, there was hardly any football club in Calcutta that did not fight over Paul. Today, 30 years later, Swapan Paul’s legacy is missing from Google searches and digital archives. There is no such thing as Jogia’s shoes either. But his shop still stands at Rajpur, a shack with boots strung at odd corners.
There is no crowd, no frenzy, no pressing demand for shoes anymore. Old photographs from the heydays are on the walls; they are mostly of Jogia posing with club members at Maidan. When the shoemaker is not in his shop, he is to be found in his workshop, which is just behind it.
As a young boy, Jogia had wanted to try his luck at football. But for one reason or the other that never happened. His father was a shoemaker. Jogia had watched his father craft a variety of fancy shoes — Newcuts, Alberts, Oxfords. In time, he too joined his father.
Says Jogia, “At the time, many were making boots but they would hardly last the wear and tear of one whole football season.”
Jogia started off with the south Calcutta football clubs. He says, “Back then clubs did not have money; the boys would wait months for some club or the other to distribute shoes, and then they would have to make it last.”
“Malay Bhaumik, who was a City Club member, took me to Maidan,” says Jogia. He introduced him to club officials and that is how Jogia started to deliver bulk consignments of boots, and this went on for 16 to 17 years.
On days when he went out to deliver the boots, he would hang around the club house and watch the boys play. At halftime, he too would fuss around the players, fetch them first aid if they were injured, then grab tea and shingara after the match — making a joyous outing of a task.
“At Maidan, watching the boys play in my shoes, the tag Jogia glistening on their feet — those were the best moments of my life,” says the shoemaker.
Other big shots such as Mohun Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting clubs were clients of his archnemesis, the one and only Nagraj. (Curiously enough, he too goes by one name.) Jogia, however, will tell you with relish that individual players from those clubs too would come all the way to Rajpur to buy his shoes.
He has a story about Mehtab Hossain, a former professional footballer who represented India several times. “Back then, we called him Bicky,” he says. “He would sit in my shop and watch me make his boots. Even now, when his car passes by my shop, he stops and asks after me,” he adds.
Neither fame nor money had fuelled Jogia’s craft. His boots were priced somewhere between ₹180 and ₹240. Instead, he always had a soft spot for those boys who dreamed of making it big on the Maidan.
Boys from distant villages of Champahati, Kakdweep, Sandeshkhali, Gosaba and Canning would flock to his shop with only one request: “Jogiada, give me a pair of boots.”
Many would take years to pay him back, while some would dip into personal savings. “Poor boys, football crazy like me — I couldn’t turn them away.” The heavier boots came with bigger iron spikes, ensuring smooth play on the waterlogged fields during the monsoon. For dry seasons, lighter shoes with smaller spikes were enough. Jogia recalls, “One day, a boy called Keshto came to me and asked, ‘Jogiada, why do you give lighter shoes to the big stars and give us such heavy boots?’”
Keshto was a “decent goalkeeper”, never made it to the big league. Jogia sat him down and explained, “The bigger stars can afford a new pair every season. But you are a goalkeeper, you have to play on the waterlogged fields. If I give you light boots with smaller iron spikes, can you make them last?”
Since the onslaught of global brands in India, most shoemakers have gone out of business, including Nagraj. Jogia has shifted to making trekking boots. He crafts them out of car tyres to give them “maximum grip”.