Mohammad Diljaan repairs a gramophone in his shop. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

Ask him what his favourite song is, and he just puts on a record, a shy smile playing across his wrinkled face. He carefully places a 10-inch 78 RPM — one of several hundreds in his collection — on the player.

Placing the stylus on the disc, he proceeds to wind the spring with the old-school handle. One rotation and a half. It’s Bol radha bol from the Raj Kapoor hit Sangam. There’s also Pratima Bandopadhyay’s first Rabindrasangeet tune, collections of Pankaj Mullick classics, play-readings of a 1945 production of Taasher Desh, the odd foxtrot, even a version of Gershwin’s Summertime, sung as a duet by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

Mohammad Diljaan, the king of this quaint workshop, better known as Babua to his patrons and the entire stretch behind the Calcutta Police headquarters at Lalbazar, is a lone ranger in these digitised times. From here he mans his tiny streetside shop, repairing hand-wound gramophones and records.

Taking apart a gramophone is an elaborate process. There’s the base, a tangle of coiled springs and bent, chromed metal, the winder, and a connector to the beautiful funnel. Running this instrument requires knowledge of mechanical rotation, RPMs and frequency. Diljaan learnt it all early in life.

“Near our family home in Motihari, Bihar, a gentleman who would visit the city often would bring back curious gadgets. I was fascinated by the gramophone and the records he would bring back,” says the mild-mannered 60-year-old. The lure of the city was too much to resist, and at 12, Diljaan ran away from home and came to Calcutta.

Work was difficult to find. Diljaan ended up as a trainee at a gramophone shop off Radha Bazaar Lane. “There were at least six or seven huge shops selling gramophones and records on this stretch,” recounts Diljaan. The last shop closed two decades ago.

Diljaan set up his own shop first in Radha Bazaar Lane and then at his present address on Rabindra Sarani, where he has been for 36 years. Fellow shopkeepers call him the “doctor”.

“I visit Delhi and Lucknow, before the Puja. You would still chance upon rare records and gramophones at Daryagunj in Delhi,” he says.What about Calcutta? “People who own gramophones are possessive. Ask them to sell their gramophones, and they might ask you never to come back.”

With a repair charge of Rs 150, the maximum that Diljaan, father of two daughters and a teenage son, earns in a day is Rs 450. “It’s not just my rozi-roti, it’s my life,” he says.