Mumbai Darshan. 1996 to 2022

Flora Fountain, 24 August 2022. I am told that
the fountain works too now.

I found myself in front of the Flora Fountain on Wednesday evening. I had finished a meeting at the Upper Crust magazine office and planned to hop over to meet Chef Niyati Rao at her new co-working space KMC Mumbai before going to Jasleen Marwah’s Kashmiri food pop up at the Intercontinental.

I was lost!!!! Yes, you heard it right. I followed Google maps and just couldn’t figure how to cross the main road as it was dug up and barricaded for the the metro constructions. A figurative moat where once stood a Fort!

I walked down the dark alleys created by the menacing metal barriers put on the pavements with barely any space for pedestrians. At times I was alone on stretches of the pavement which is usually inconceivable in busy Mumbai. The path suddenly opened up and I saw the light.

For a moment I thought I was in Paris again as I saw the renovated and brightly lit up Flora Fountain. Behind it stood the grand Zara store which looked so much like the one at Champa Gulley ( as I refer to Champs Elysees) from which I’d shopped so much during our holiday in August.

From Fashion Street to Zara. You have come a
long way Mumbai

I had passed by this area numerous times in the last 25 years and it had become a blind spot to me. This was different. It was as if I was in a spell. It was as I was suddenly transported to Paris July 2022. Or even Rome October 2016 and the Trevis Fountain which was under renovation then.

A young couple walked up to me. ‘Which is book street,’ asked the gentleman. ‘I think that’s it,’ I said pointing to the few second hand book stalls standing forlorn on the opposite side of the road.

‘Mumbai gate kahan hain,’ asked a Keralite gentleman (don’t ask me how I knew) who walked up to me next. I had just processed the fact that he meant ‘the Gateway of India’ when he added ‘aur Marine Drive?’

That’s when it struck me that these were folks from out of town, discovering Mumbai last evening, just as I had in 1996 when I came to Bombay for the first time to present my MBA summer project at the Balsara House and would hang at these very spots once done.

I fell in love with Marine Drive, the Gateway of India and Colaba. I did not care much for the book street as my B School was in Calcutta’s College Street with its vibrant ‘boi para.’ ‘Fashion Street’ was more my concern back then. Little did I know then that Mumbai would become my home in a year or so.

Bandra Gym 25 August 2022 at the birthday dinner for K
thrown by Erika and Gia

I switched from Bombay 1996 to Mumbai 2022 and hailed a cab (booked an Uber) and drove down Churchgate and Marine Drive. Then, as I passed by the Asiatic Store where K and I would go to buy Nutty Fingers from the RTI counter and to the soft toy counter to say hello to Big Sam till we brought him home, the Baskin Robins parlour where we would have Brownie a la mode (seems to have disappeared now) after dinner, and then the bus stops on Marine Drive where K and I often hung after work and chatted till one day, I ‘expressed my feelings’ to her while walking down Nariman Point, I was taken back to Mumbai 2000!

As K said, when I told her about ‘our bus stop’ and seeing a couple there that evening, ‘did you think back then that we would have these two powder puffs?’

26th August 2022. The powder puffs sleeping
by my feet in the morning.

Kalyan Karmakar

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