We drove to town last Saturday. ‘Town’ in Mumbai refers to south Mumbai. ‘Bombay’ is another term that is used. This distinction, introduced to me when I loved in in ’97, might be archaic in today’s Mumbai which has spread on all sides (barring the south which already reached the sea). The ‘western line’ perspective doesn’t hold anymore with the Chemburs, Wadalas, Ghatkopars and Navi Mumbais of the world standing up to be counted. Bandra, once the queen of suburbs and my home for 25 years, would be considered as the epicentre to many.
This story is not about how ‘geography is history’ (as a print ad from when we were kids said) in the case of Mumbai.
Our car passed by ‘Mahim Church’ (St Michael’s Church), once associated with the Wednesday Novena traffic jams. A source of hope and strength to those who are pushed against the wall and are living on faith. One might argue that a traffic jam is a small price to pay for this. Given the magnitude of traffic snarls across Mumbai today, the Mahim Wednesday traffic is probably just a blip now.
We passed by the City Light Market at Mahim. A pilgrimage spot for fellow Bengalis in Bombay. They head here to pay homage to Dulal and his freshwater fish shop and hope to go back blessed with katla, ilish, parshe pabda. I’d gone there years back. Realised that I was happy with what I got at Khar Market. Reduced the carbon footprint in the process.
This story is not about buying ‘Bangali machhi’ (freshwater fish) in Mumbai.
K had gone off to sleep after checking her work whatsapp groups on phone and taking action as needed. My phone lay balanced on my left thigh. I am on a self imposed ‘mobile detox.’ I have reduced the amount of time that I spend on my social channels. Logging in a couple of times or even just once in a day. I have slipped a bit from that of late but will get back with self policing.
This story is not about a digital detox. Or perhaps it is.
With a sleeping spouse beside me, and a sleeping phone, going to sleep myself was the obvious choice. I was not sleepy.
I looked out of the window as our car ambled on in the traffic. Something we hardly do these days. We are usually glued to our mobiles. Looking out only at times when we are running late (which is all the time in my case), to see how bad the traffic is. Or if passing by some instagrammable spot such as Marine Drive, Victoria Terminus or the Sea Link. You then turn towards the window. Click. Turn back and start posting frenetically. As if the world will stop if they don’t know you are feeling nostalgic and/ or romantic at that moment. All of this is assuming you are not driving. Don’t drive and post.
I had passed this stretch a million times before. Figuratively speaking. Maths was never my strength. I still don’t know who Pythagoras was and have no recollection of what the theorem, that gave him mega influencer status, was.
My gaze focused on a series of small shops that were at the ground floor of a relatively old, 3 or 4 story building. A building which was not a chawl and yet had balconies which stretched across each floor, linking the apartments, or ‘rooms’ as they are referred to, on the floor. Without my realising it, my brain went into Cinema Paradiso mode… to the wistful nostalgia of going back home that the movie of the same name so heart wrenchingly eulogised.
First in line was ‘House of Mats.’ In a moment of creative ingenuity, someone had written the name on a coir map and used it as a display board. I didn’t spot any mats inside when we stopped at a traffic light in front of it. The shop appeared to be quite deep and inside lay plastic buckets, mugs, brooms, mops etc.
As they lay in the shop at Khar Market which K and I went to after we took possession of our first (rented apartment) in 2001. We walked in to the flat and found it in a mess. The painters engaged by the landlord had promised to clean up before they left. They hadn’t. A pattern that played out each time we moved in to a new place subsequently. We were idealistic youth back then who believed that a promise was a promise. We furiously stormed off to the Khar Market and picked up buckets, brooms, mops, mugs, disenfectants from a shop that had the scent of new beginnings, and walked back. Taking an auto seemed indulgent given that we had taken a credit card loan to pay the deposit on the apartment. We rolled up our sleeves once home and cleaned up our apartment, as we would 20 years later during the Covid 19 pandemic lockdown. When done, the tiny one room kitchen converted apartment seemed like the Buckingham Palace to us. We even had a small verandah where K and I could stand and wave…to the rats and crows in the courtyard. We kept our washing machine there. The other verandah had been converted into the kitchen. Yeh hai Bombai nagariya, as the song goes. This is Mumbai.
Next came a largish shop with ‘Binnys etc’ (sic) written proudly on a signboard. ‘Etc’ was elaborated as Stanrose, Vimal, Mafatlal. Suiting and fabric material brands from the 80s which seem to have disappeared into the annals of time.
It took me back to a month before Durga Puja time in Kolkata in the 1980s. A time when clothes were bought once a year for kids. The number dependent on the financial situation of the family. Along with notun jama (new clothes), one would get the odd jamar kapor or pante’r kapor… fabric to stitch shirts or trousers from. Yes dear Gen Z, ‘tailored clothes’ which you think is the next big thing in fashion, was the norm in our time. The most coveted of fabrics would belong to the brands displayed in the shop at Mahim.
My mama, who filled in as a father figure/ male role mode for my brother and me after my dad passed away, would take me to Shibanalaya. A small tailoring shop on the pavement run by a thin gentleman, dressed in a white vest and terrycot trousers. Akin to a government bank clerk sans his shirt. A measuring tape draped across his chest. He would be furiously spinning the wheels of his sewing machine. The biggest suspense was about whether he could deliver the clothes before the pujos. Shoshthi at least. The first of the five days the pujas. Life was meaningless otherwise. The gentleman looked harrowed after having to negotiate dates with everyone who came to him at this time, after he sat idle all year through.
He’d measure me. Mark the fabric with coloured chalks. Scribble some numbers, which seemed like a code in spy vs spy in MAD. The only legible bits would be the cost and delivery date. He would staple a swatch from the fabric to the bill and give us a carbon copy. The whirling dervish of the sewing machine would resume…rrrrrrrrrrrrr…pause…rrrrrrrr..pause… till the next customer walked in. When there was a load shedding – ‘Jyoti gelo’ as we would say after the communist chief minister of the time – the earnest tailor worked in candle light. Drenched in sweat. Honest sweat.
When you came to collect your clothes, you got the scent of hope and subsequent disappointment. Of hoping to impress that years puja crush in the new outfit. Followed by the disappointment as one would be tongue tied when the came. Aaschhe bochhor hobe. Ma Durga would return next year. There would be a new crush. The result would be the same. Till came a year when the story progressed to the Maddox Square pujo, the meeting ground of dating couples during the pujas in the 80s and 90s. The Wonder Years.
When I was in the 9th standard (aged 15), the boys in my class discovered another tailoring shop called Bhogoboti Tailors. Run by two men who were younger than the Shibanalay kaku (uncle). Said to be more with it when it came to fashion. ‘With it,’ in Kolkata of the 80s was defined by whatever ‘Megastar Mithun’ wore in his latest movie (barring the time when he wore track pants through the movie Jeete Hain Shaan Se). Pleated trousers were the rage that year. I went to Bhogoboti Tailors. Accompanied by a slightly elder boy from our apartment complex and not my mama. I was trying to move out of the system.
‘Pleat hobe’, I asked after handing over the material to the young man at the counter with ‘back-brushed’ hair with no jhulpi (side-whisker). A hair style made fashionable by Mithunda. He had a prominent moustache. His chutzpah seemed promising.
Nishchoi. Kota?
Char te?
‘Er, I think you should stick to two and not four pleats,’ muttered Bapi da in English.
Achha duto. (Grr. Grown ups).
During the pujas I saw someone wear a trouser with not four, but five pleats! It looked like he was wearing a curtain! Made one feel rather small in ones double pleated trousers.
Next to the Binny’s shop at Mahim are a couple of small ‘readymade clothes’ shop with the promise of shorts and shirts for little boys and nighties for women in the display window.
I was in the car, Mumbai 2022. And at the same time in a small shop on the ground floor of the Bansdroni market near our house in Kolkata in the mid 90s. It sold nighties and saris for women, panjabis (kurtas and not those from Punjab) for men. I patronised it when in college. Not to buy nighties! To use their public telephone. The ones with an electronic display telling you the amount of time you had been on the phone. The rate was constant till 179 seconds. Three Rupees for local calls. Then went up every 60 seconds. Which meant that you would have to measure your words. Which is always a good practise in life. In this case in seconds.
There was a young gentleman with curly hair and a moustache who ran the place. He would hand over the receiver when asked, his mind somewhere else. On his stock portfolio as I now realise. He would sit with the day’s Economic Times and go through stock quotes from the previous day. The shop had the scent of grandmas and soft cotton nighties.
I go to the shop on trips back. Not to use the phone. I wonder if it still exists in the digital era. I buy cotton nighties for my mother in law, her sister and for K. They love the cotton nighties of Calcutta. A shorter and older gentleman runs it now. It is the sort of shop where you bargain and feel happy after knocking off ten Rupees from the total amount. I would rather not bargain but that would spoil things for those left behind, says my mom in a reproachful tone, seeping in pathos, which Bengali mothers have made their own.
There is a sweet shop further down the Mahim stretch. No, not the air-conditioned Sweet Bengal shop which came further down and where we would stop to buy mishti doi for my mother in law. A doodhalay or dairy, said the sign in Marathi. Which sold sweets. Its fans stood in front of the shop, waiting for their turn to be served.
As I would at the Gauranga Mishtanna Bhandar near our house in Kolkata in the 80s and early 90s. A shop which was enveloped by the lactose scent of chhana (cottage cheese) that is typical of the mishtir dokans of Kolkata. I would be sent to buy rasgullas if a guest had dropped in. Two for the guest and one each for my brother and me. If it was the afternoon, the chubby attendant with a grim face would lift the thick blue bed-sheet covering the display case to show what was on offer. The cover was to keep the heat from the afternoon sun, and flies, away. He wished it could keep customer away too during siesta time.
On Sunday mornings mum would send me to buy jilipis (jalebis) for us to have sandwiched in thin slices of commercial white bread for breakfast. In the evening to buy shingaras (samosas) for jolkhabar (snack), with their promise of bombastic bites of fried peanuts which lay snuggled in the sweet and spicy, un-skinned, cubed and fried, potato filling. The filling tightly hugged by the sort of crunchy maida crust coating I would dream of as I headed back home. Impatiently clutching a newspaper thonga (bag) full of shingaras. I still dream of shingaras three decades later.. Shingara is love. A forbidden one in ones late 40s. To be hidden from one’s dietician. When I was in high school, my mother would send me after dinner to buy freshly made, piping hot, lyangchas. My love for post dinner snacking and dessert come from strong genes.
The last shop that caught my attention on the Mahim stretch was a ‘photography studio’. Of the the sort I would go to at Surjonogar back home in the late 80s and early to mid 90s. A soft spoken middle aged gentleman of medium build owned the shop. The scent of genius, science and progress marked the experience for this seemingly innocuous man would become a superhero once you handed your camera to him. He would snap open the back compartment of the camera. Take a film out of a box (Agfa, Fuji, Konika, Kodak) and gently stretch it to a specific measure. Put it into the camera and roll the shutter till he heard a click. He would shut the camera looking satisfied. I would gasp in wonder. Surely this deserved a Nobel
He donned another role when I returned with the roll after taking photos. That of an expert diffusing a bomb in a Die Hard movie. The roll would get exposed to light and your memories would be lost for ever if anyone but him opened the camera to take out the roll. He knew how to turn the shutter, wait for the right click, open the camera and take out the roll which was unsullied. Just another day in the office for him.
I would return on the date specified by him. Fervently hoping that all the shots I took were in focus and that one had set the aperture and the shutter speed correctly. I used my dad’s Pentax which he loved with all his heart. I doubt if I have inherited his talent for photography. I am more an auto mode person. I would say a silent prayer when the shopkeeper handed over the envelope. Hoping that the shots I took after the camera counter showed 36, and yet turned, had come out properly. That I had stretched each coveted Rupee in a still pre-liberalisation India to the max.
I wonder if either millenials or Gen Z folks would relate to what I just wrote about manual SLR photography and film rolls. The studio at Mahim seemed to confim my hunch. It looked bare. With a man sitting alone on a chair in the middle. Waiting for the news of redevelopment perhaps. As would be the younger generation of the families who lived in the floors above. Hoping that someday they would inhabit something akin to the modern complex that stood at the end of the stretch. Incongruous in comparison to its neighbours. The one consisting of Darth Vader’s Death Star-like gleaming glass skyscrapers. One which housed a multi-storied modern departmental store and a gastro-pub ‘etc’. The new face of Dadar.
I understand their sentiment. The desire for progress and advancement is universal. Heritage looks nicer to a bystander than to those inhabiting a crumbling edifice, as I realised from my time working in the historic Laxmi Building at Fort, which looks awe inspiring from outside but is rather ragged inside.
I feel sad that my niece, who is 6 and belongs to the post Gen Z generation, will not get to experience the scent of the old curiosity shops that marked the childhood of her father and her jethu (me).
I guess she will have her own stories to tell.
