Bombay: Nostalgia, Poetry and the City

Ballard Estate, Fort, Kala Ghoda, Colaba

Greetings! dear reader.

It has been long since Poetly has found space in your letterbox. Today I seam in, like a butterfly, that flutters by, trailing the sun. How a vision can sear through sound, no? Remember Kolatkar’s Pi-dog conjuring up the city “stone by numbered stone” - his “magnum opus:/ a triple sonata for a circumpiano/ based on three distinct themes -”

one suggested by a magpie robin,
another by the wail of an ambulance,
and the third by a rockdrill;

But I’m already digressing. Forgive me, dear friend. I have been caught up in different pursuits, and only today, after many days, did the moment make itself felt. It is not as if I have not been writing. Quite the contrary. The potli has been full, bulging with stories, and poetry. It’s just that, until now, the right moment to untie the red tasselled thread, with golden sequins, that binds it, just hadn’t announced itself.

I’m thinking to share with you today an odd list. I’m thinking… of nostalgia, of work, of memory, and food, of the imagined city; of night school, and printing presses, photocopy shops and back entrances, wings and alleyways. I’m thinking of names and places, and the spaces between the two. I’m thinking also, of what it means to find shared language.

“I must go back to a place that I loved
to tell you those you will efface I have loved”
- Agha Shahid Ali

… For days, I’d been meaning to return to Kala Ghoda (Bombay, of course); return this time as a researcher and walk through the bylanes of Fort. I was immersed then, in Kolatkar’s imagination. I am, today, too. But differently. This is a different kind of witnessing.

Yesterday morning it struck me quite suddenly that the person who had spent many years from the 70s to the early 2000s living and working there (like Kolatkar), was right in front of me. All this time. The perfect companion. My father.

So on a sunday afternoon we decided to go to fort and walk the old roads again, departing from memory, into imagination.

An exercise in nostalgia and urban placemaking

My father studied law in the 70s in Night School at Siddharth College. He worked in various places around the fort area including as a typist at Mantralay ( “it was Sachivalay then”).

For 20 years (1986-2006) he ran a Photocopy shop (Dheeraj Xerox), behind Tokyo Bank, near Horniman Circle. I used to go to his shop often, during my college days at Xavier's. We would sometimes go to Harish Lunch home where he'd have a beer, and we'd have surmai fry or chickken sukka, or kori roti.

We went there again yesterday - we had lepo fry, kori roti and beer. Little had changed.

Those days, whenever a book came to my father for photocopying that he thought I'd enjoy, he'd make an extra copy for me and bring it back home. This was my first library. A cyclostyled reading list. The selection was eclectic - from “Chicken Soup for the Soul” to Rahul Dravid’s Biography to Harry Potter.

This time we went back to where his old office was, behind Horniman circle. In its place stood another xerox shop - COPYRIGHT. How ironic.

My father’s Fort was the Fort of publishers, printing presses, banks, xerox shops, book binding shops, and cheap, Mangalorian eateries that served chakkli and schezwan sauce, along with salted sengdana (peanuts), with beer (free chakhna). These reasonable, home-styled joints would be the haunts of small business men, share market employees, printing press owners, bankers, and worker bees of all hue and colour. These were the people who populated the Fort network of Art Deco buildings and bylanes. They’d gather there for their lunch hour, and Saturday beer. 

Appa didn’t want to go first to the Main road connecting Victoria Terminus to Fountain or even Regal Cinema. His horizontal cross-sectional knife gaze cut through the sidestreets. His attention was taken by the thick hive of paths beside the main road, like tributaries, that reached out through the dynastic stone, and the makeshift stalls. He liked being in the wings, where each pathway opened a trapdoor into another world. This is why it did not bother us much that the main road was occupied clumsily by metro construction monstrocities.

As he excitedly reminded me of Apurva lunch home, he stopped suddenly in his tracks. He was standing dumbfounded at a road corner amidst all the “chambers” (Maker Chambers, Poddar Chambers) - the many stone buildings with gargoyles, and elephants, and philosophers or dilletantes. “It’s Gone!” he exlaimed. He gestured madly at the area cordoned off by metal corrugated sheets, above which you could discern some ongoing construction work. Apurva Lunch home was no more.

“It’s ok”, he said and swung on his axis in the opposite direction. He regained his stride almost instaneously. “Petit library… let’s go to Petit Library. Where anybody could go and read. No wait high court! Oh wait we’ll go via University.”

This happened again, and again. He wanted to go to Gopalashram - another eatery he used to frequent in his younger days. I wonder - will it be there, still? “Cheapest, tastiest Rice plate. Used to be so crowded. Mad rush. Even on weekdays. All officegoers”. When we reached the bylane where Cafe Deluxe and Taste of Kerala stood now, we found that it had also made way for some swanky looking commercial office. He turned again and pointed at the corner. “This! This was where you’d get amazing cheap breakfast, chana and all -that West Coast”. Even that image remained in his memory.

I realise as we walked that we were measuring the distance between his office days, and his college days, and mine; between when Bombay was being formed as an idea, as a material organism in continuous motion, bearing all the history, and the weight of the imaginations of its thronging crowds. We were going back there, transposing our memories like a membrane on the stone, concrete and glass.

Is this not how the city was made, covered by a thin layer of imagination, pieced together in the inhabitants’ aspirations, like the popular blue tarpauline, that sheltered asbestos, concrete and shanty alike? The miraculous thing about Bombay is that it can stretch endlessly, a bit like flex. And, as stubborn.

The poetic image, is that magical configuration, that leaps from the past into the future. This is an idea from Bachelard that I keep returning to. He also says that every inhabitated place has the memory of home. Yesterday I understood this - what it means when I felt instinctinctively that my research is a way for me to return home.

There is so much to tell, but this post is already far too long. So here’s a smattering of fragments, a heap of broken images, a map made of shingles, slices of personal history, experience sluiced with the gush of nostalgia, and the present, an imagined city hurtling into the future:

who knew I’d find Van Gogh’s Arles Bleu in Bombay, that too, beside red brick!

“har koi chahata hain ek mutti aasmaan”

Bhindi Bazaar Premier League. Appa’s listening to India-Australia ODI on one earphone btw.

Arcade next to Elphinstone Building, beside Horniman Circle. I always loved those Geriatric Stoics. If Benjamin could walk here…. sigh.

“Arre Laxmi Building! That way!”

Telephone building.

Dada Bhai Naoroji

“It used to be so liberal then. I used to sit on the university lawns and read under the lamps at night. Nowadays….”

"The university,
you’ll be glad to know,
can never get lost

because, although forgetful
it always carries
its address in its pocket"

(Pi Dog, KGP, Arun Kolatkar)

A “Samyukt Maharashtra Smarak”

“Samaaj Shastragnya” G.S. Ghurye

The newest avatar of the Spirit of Kala Ghoda

“St Andrew’s church tipoes back into its place
shoes in hand
like a husband after late night revels”

(Pi Dog, KGP, Arun Kolatkar)

the “trisland”, present day, at twilight.

A mouse, reading.

“This used to be Modern Lunch Home!”

We used to call this Central Library, then.

Back to the Chembur of Secrets.

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Yesterday was very special. I remembered again what it is to see the city through another’s eyes. I found a shared language with my father. It is uncanny that it is rooted in the past, and our shared, simultaneous, parallel experiences. In fact the temporalities meshed into each other much like Kolatkar’s (Annapurna’s) torrents of idlis in Kala Ghoda Poems. It formed a language of its own whose syntax was the plotlines, and the routines.

Memory marks a place. The map stays intact. It might shift a little bit here or there. It might move a few metres to the side. But the scale remains the same. The map is never the territory. It is imagination. It is real.

We have only scratched the surface - a surface that many have scratched before us. (I mean, I haven’t even mentioned Wayside Inn that is common to the vates - B.S. Mardhekar, B.R. Ambedkar, and Arun Kolatkar)

There is so much more to tell. so many stories.
But for now, I’ll leave you with my favourite poem from Kala Ghoda Poems. The Potato Peelers.

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It feels so good to write these words again :)

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