Blackburn Lane. It's a sleepy, time-forgotten alley in Kolkata's Tiretta Bazaar. Ennui hangs heavy, like Elliot's yellow fog, curling into every sleepy crevice. Suddenly, a thundering roll of drumbeats shatters the timeless languor — a gaggle of boys and girls in costume spill out of a weather-worn brick house in a raucous dragon dance. The street erupts into joyous celebration, the greys eclipsed by a riot of red. It is Chinese New Year in Kolkata's Chinatown.

Not many people are even aware of a Chinatown in Kolkata, much less that it is one of the oldest and the only surviving one of its kind in South Asia. The Chinese began settling in Calcutta (now Kolkata) over two and a half centuries ago, and for as long as the elders in the community can remember, Chinese New Year has always been heralded by dancing dragons in Blackburn Lane. The procession then winds its way to the newer Chinatown, the once swampy badlands of Tangra, now a warren of bumpy roads dotted with outdated Chinese restaurants and questionable tanneries. It finally ends up in Achipur in the city's suburbs where the community pays homage to the graves of ancestors in the place where the Chinese first settled. Where celebrations go, this is a pretty modest revelry, but it signifies something much deeper. A celebration of diasporic survival. Of continuity. Of a city's unique multi-ethnic heritage.

Today it's hard to tell that Tiretta Bazaar was once a bustling, vibrant market in a once grand, cosmopolitan city that was the “jewel in the crown” of the British Raj. Here you could buy the world: from crystal chandeliers to marble statues, from hookahs to cigars; it was where the Portuguese picked up the choicest fruits and the Armenians shopped for exotic birds; where the Baghdadi Jews selected Italian tiles for their mansions and where the Dutch bought shoes and the Greeks their olives. The large, colonnaded, cacophonous market was built by the flamboyant Venetian architect Edward Tiretta — friend of the infamous Casanova no less — who became Superintendent of Streets and Bazaars in Calcutta. The Calcutta Gazette of 1788, described Tiretta Bazaar as occupying “nine bighas and eight cottahs of land, formed in two squares, with convenient shops, surrounded with a colonnade veranda, and the whole area of the square divided into commodious streets with pucka stalls”.