When a short, lanky 22-year-old Malayali lad from Ernakulam got off the Madras Mail at Howrah Station, he could never have imagined that he would become famous as the “barefoot historian of Old Calcutta”. It would be beyond the wildest imagination of P Thankappan Nair — PT to most — that 69 years later, so many million informed citizens of Bengal would mourn his death.
