Raja Paan Shop: Representing the South

Where: Lake Market, off Rashbehari Avenue

Second home: Footloose South Indians found a safe haven in Komala Vilas ever since it opened doors in the 1930s. The greyish building with an open terrace is one of the first lodging houses to come up in the area. "People would initially put up for a few weeks but soon a few families stayed back to settle here. Later, many more started coming in," says Komala Vilas owner B. Sridhar.

"Little wonder then that a road in Lake Market has been rechristened Subramanya Bharathi Sarani, after the celebrated Tamil poet," says film-maker Ashoke Viswanathan, whose grandfather V. Narayan Swami made Calcutta his home in the 1930s.

The look and feel: It's a mini Madras out there - Udupi restaurants dish out idli-dosa, the aroma of filter coffee fills the air, women mill around the market with gajra in their hair and men chat in groups with traditional tika smeared on their foreheads. To drive home the point, posters of a Tamil film starring Kamal Hassan plaster walls.

Stores like Raja Paan Shop have everything to make the South Indians feel at home, from Andhra fish masala to banana chips, oils, agarbattis and appams.

The South India Club is a few minutes' walk at Hindustan Park and down Manoharpukur Road is the Sree Guruvayurappan temple where priests in traditional attire perform the evening puja. But with many moving on to the Gulf for better jobs, the Madrasi paan and Malayalam Manorama find fewer takers these days.

Overheard: "This is possibly one of the few areas in Calcutta where the Chennai edition of The Hindu is in great demand. Also, South Indian women's magazines like Vanitha and Grihalaxmi," says K. Rajan, who owns Raja Paan Shop.