Nizam Sheikh

Nizam Sheikh learned to cut cloth the way some boys learn to read — early, thoroughly, and under a teacher who did not tolerate a second attempt where the first should have been correct. He was apprenticed at twelve to a tailoring shop two lanes from where he now runs his own, sweeping floors and threading needles for two years before he was permitted to touch the scissors, and a further three before the ustad allowed him near a customer's actual cloth.

By the time he was thirty he was, by common agreement among the tailors of that market, the best cutter working in the lane — grooms came specifically for him, mourners came for the correct black sherwani cut in time for a funeral the next morning, and two municipal councillors had their achkans made by his hand and nobody else's — and every one of those garments left the shop under a signboard that read Haji Tailors, a name that was not his own and never would be.

He worked under that signboard for nineteen years, drawing a fixed wage that rose slowly and unevenly while the shop's reputation, built almost entirely on his scissors, rose considerably faster. The owner, an elderly and not unkind man, occasionally acknowledged as much over tea, but acknowledgement of that kind, Nizam came to understand, does not appear on a payslip.

In 2009, with savings he had kept apart for eleven years and, though it has never been mentioned in front of guests, his wife's two gold bangles quietly sold to a jeweller on the far side of the market, he opened Nizam Gents' Tailors — eight feet by ten, one large table, a single Usha machine, and a signboard, this time, with his own name painted on it by a sign-writer who gave him a discount for cash.

The shop is small enough that customers wait outside on a bench borrowed from the paan stall next door, and Nizam has never expanded it, preferring instead to fill the eight feet by ten as fully and as correctly as possible — bolts of cloth stacked to the ceiling, paper patterns for regular customers hung on nails along one wall like the documents of some very small and very precise government.

He knows the true measurements of every man of standing in that market — not the measurements a man gives when he is feeling optimistic about his waist, but the ones Nizam has actually recorded with his own tape — and he has never once repeated a figure to anyone, though he will, without being asked, quietly add half an inch of ease to a pattern when a customer's vanity clearly requires it, a small dishonesty he regards as simply part of good service.

There have been offers of larger jobs over the years, bulk orders for uniforms and cheap wedding-season contracts that would have paid considerably more than his usual custom, and Nizam has turned down nearly all of them on the grounds that the finishing required would fall below what he considers acceptable, a refusal that has cost him money in years he could have used it and earned him, in the same years, a queue of customers willing to wait three weeks for a coat that fits.

His two sons have shown no great interest in the trade, one working now in a mobile-phone shop and the other still at college, and Nizam has never pushed either of them toward the needle, saying only that a man should be good at whatever he chooses to be good at, though he says this while automatically running a length of cloth through his fingers to check its weight, a habit thirty years old that will very likely outlast the shop itself.

On any weekday evening he can be found exactly where he has been for fifteen years, chalk behind one ear, tape measure looped around his neck like a modest decoration, cutting a pattern by the light of a single tube light while the market outside closes its shutters one by one, entirely satisfied, in the one place that matters to him, that the seam will carry his name even where the signboard once did not.