Tranquility Base Bombay: My Role in the First Moon Landing

Tranquility Base Bombay: 
My Role in the First Moon Landing


20th July 2019
When we were kids, ‘Apollo’ meant the Gateway of India. The harbor around the Gateway (we still board boats to Elephanta and Alibag from here) was known to all as Palwa Bunder, of which the word Apollo was an angrezi corruption.

Palwa, as any fule kno, is Hindustani for Mystus Vittatus, a fish found in the waters off Bombay. Ergo, Apollo Bunder. Not much later, I knew Apollo to be the Greek God of the Sun, son of Zeus, whose (pater et fils) shenanigans I read about and observed in my copy of Homer’s Iliad- the comic book version by Classics Illustrated.

All that changed after Apollo 11. Fifty years ago, on 20th July 1969 when I was five, NASA's Apollo Mission put man on the moon. If ever there has been a BC and AD moment in the history of the human race, this is it. Nothing before nor since has equaled this achievement, and I am happy to say I was part of it.

Some memories help you root yourself in the past. Some are unreliable, but compelling. For me the most compelling of all the memories I have of early, very early childhood, is one where I hear people (probably at home) insisting that man can/will never step on the moon. In the fog of this memory, July 1969 takes center stage.

Of course, at my age, at the time, I had never heard of either the American or the Soviet space program. Sometime after, and I was still as little at the time, I remember sitting in the garden outside my uncle Dawood’s farmhouse in Shirol, near Kasara, gazing up to a completely lightless sky, except for the incredibleness of the Milky Way, and watching a star mark its arrow-straight course overhead. A moving star! My uncle had a name for it: ‘Spootnik’. What was that? A satellite, he said. That didn’t make things any clearer, but still I loved the show.

Of course, after July, the news was all around. Men had landed on the moon. We even knew their names, vivid and evocative- Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin. Images of spacesuit shod, glass visor (reflecting the blackness of space) wearing astronauts were all around us. In newspapers- the Times of India, in the Sunday Standard, in the Poona Herald, in the Illustrated Weekly of India, on the walls of restaurants, on Volga ice cream wrappers and on the covers of firecracker boxes during Diwali. Apollo 11, Astronaut, Armstrong, Aldrin, America all became Indian words.

My role in the success of the moon landings came soon after, on the 24th of October, 1969. 

On that day, five years and ten months old, I found myself in Bombay, stationed at the turning outside the Crawford Market, under Lockwood Kipling’s marble murals, where the D N Road swings to Carnac Bunder. I was one among a huge crowd, lining both sides of the road. My uncle Musta-ali, whose finger I had held on to for the short walk from Bhandari Street next to Masjid Station (the Carnac Bridge end) to our current location, hoisted me up on the railing at the first roar from the mob.

Flanking motorcyclists in white uniforms formed the avant garde. The cavalcade arrived soon after, dark cars, as I remember, and in one of them three red faces in suits, their arms out, waving. Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin. As they swept past us, I looked at them, they looked at me, and I waved back and waved and waved.

The Cavalcade that took the Apollo 11 astronauts though Bombay on October 24, 1969

[Photo: Time Life Pictures/NASA/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images]

That night, my uncle and I went to the Azad Maidan. After their momentous encounter with me, all three astronauts had been ferried there for a much lesser event- the jaahir satkar by the Government of Maharashtra. 

https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/830169/view/apollo-11-worldwide-tour-bombay-october-1969

That night, Azad Maidan was festive. All of Bombay had turned up. Neither astronauts nor officials were in sight. A replica of the landing craft Eagle had been made, perhaps in plaster, perhaps by makers of Ganesh idols, I don’t know. From the Eagle, an Astronaut was forever descending on to the Azad Maidan’s turf- just one small step away.

On one side of the tableau, exactly like during the Ganapati season, a film was being screened on a stretched white cloth. It was a documentary on the Moon Landing. I watched amazed as the astronauts somersaulted in the weightlessness of their capsule, where down was up, where they attempted to suck blobs of water out of the air. I can’t vouch for these last memories, I may have seen these in the film of the event called ‘Footprints on the Moon’ that was shown in cinema theaters not long after. I do remember the documentary being shown, though.
 

Indian First Day Cover commemorating the visit of the Apollo 11 astronauts to Bombay
Photo Source: www.indianstampghar.com

The vividness of that day has stayed with me. It is one of my earliest, sharpest and most enduring memories that I cherish to this day. We in our fifties are getting on in years now. We predate television, we predate computers, we bloody predate man landing on the moon! 

Today, as I track the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary on the telly, on my phone, on my laptop, on Netflix, I am filled with nostalgia. I gaze at ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and  Michael Collins, alive and  still kicking, I shout at the screen: ‘I saw you, man, you waved to me.’  Then I google for the precise date when, in their whirlwind tour, the astronauts came to Bombay for their tryst with me.

I was five. I was there.

Mario Miranda's impression of the day, from SPAN, December 1969

A Cinema House in Poona

A Cinema House in Poona

1.

The motion pictures came to Poona with the coming of electricity in 1910. The first cinema house to be set up was the Napier Cinema in the Poona Cantonment. The Napier started showing silent movies to paying audiences in a shed-like structure, probably the first one in Poona.

With time and waxing popularity, the Napier was refurbished by 1919, or thereabouts, into a fairly well-boned neo-Classical building, with timber framing and a stone gable, punctuated with a Baroque-ish front. The Napier was very popular, and is mentioned in several accounts of Poona at the time. One peculiar feature was the screening of (what we today call) serials, short features of interminable stories that attracted the masses to the theatre weekly.

     "Monica also took Mehera to the movies. Once when her ayah, her seven-year-old brother, and Mehera went together to the Napier Theatre (later renamed the West End Cinema), Monica wanted to buy chocolates at the concession stand and pushed some British soldiers out of the way.
     Mehera was flabbergasted. "I'm not going to push a soldier," she thought. "Monica can get away with it; she's a Westerner."
     Most of the movies screened in Poona were American. A serial titled The Broken Coin (1915), starring Grace Cunard and Francis Ford, was a favourite. Every week there was a new episode, but eventually they became tired of it as the story went on forever with no conclusion."
     - 'Mehera-Meher, Volume I: A Divine Romance' by David Fenster; Meher Nazar Publications

Located on a busy thoroughfare, but on an un-demarcated plot, the theatre had, in its immediate neighbourhood a lovely fountain and a bandstand, that was very popular, gathering audiences whenever 'The Napier Cinema Band', which consisted of British (or Indian) army-men stationed in the Cantonment, performed. 

Thank you, Amit Vachcharajani, for this image.

     

"In 1916, the first Poona (Anglo Indian) and the 2nd Poona (the first Indian company) gave a concert at Napier Cinema in aid of the War Fund, raising 100 Rupees. The Rosebuds (in nighties) sang 'Goodnight Mr. Moon' and were encored, before Miss Sawyer (Captain of the 2nd Poona) posed as Britannia in the concluding patriotic pageant.

     -'Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World', edited by Shirleen Robinson and Simon Sleight, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pg. 172

The Napier Cinema became Napier 'talkies' in 1931. Not long after that came the big theatres in Bombay, under the patronage of the great American Studios like the Universal, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros. Many old cinema houses were refurbished in this, the Indian Golden Age of Hollywood, and the Napier seems to have undergone a change too. Perhaps under the influence of the Western India Theatre Association and 20th Century Fox (I am speculating), the Napier was blessed with a two storey RCC front and a new name- the West End.

The new building was superimposed on the old gable. You can see the poor gable sticking out of the top of the new building in the photo below. The new West End highlighted its own name twice on the facade, once in large concrete letters inset as the second floor balcony balustrade and the other as a vertical mast along its axis of symmetry, sticking out upwards, and skywards from the building in an Art Deco manner. While not an Art Deco building as such, the new front, with a cantilevered porch, fake arches, and vertical ornament striping its sides fell well within the fashion of the time. The West End shows some proto-Deco flattened ornament, sloping chajjas and a Palladian symmetry. Notice the protruding porch supported on concrete brackets.

This West End was the cinema house of my childhood. Now that I look back, many elements of the old Napier still remained even then, especially the old timber staircase that I remember vividly, painted olive.

2.

The West End Cinema was within spitting distance of the Empire Cinema and the Marz-o-Rin Fast Food Place, famous for its eggy, mayonnaise chicken rolls and sandwiches and guava juice in milk bottles.

The West End marks one site of my misbegotten youth. This was my second school, where I saw all sorts of movies my parents did not approve of. Between the late sixties and the very early eighties, this is where I was indoctrinated in a variety of World Cinema, and force-fed such dire gems as Sssssssnake (Don't say it, hiss it!) (US), 3 Fantastic Supermen (Italy), Fantomas Stikes Back (France) and The Swiss Conspiracy ("My father always told me- son, never lose your head, or your arse goes with it")(Germany/US). I can safely bet that none of you have ever heard of any of these atrocities, much less seen them.

I specifically remember being taken to watch Lost in the Desert (South Africa) as a special school outing during my 2nd or 3rd standard. A horribly traumatic choice for us young-uns (and a reflection on our teachers) considering the terrible, terrible things that happen to the child in the film, including being spat in the eye by a venomous snake, after surviving a plane crash.

The theatre was bounded into a rather large compound, as you can see, that had a low brick boundary that bounders and lowlifes (such as myself) would sun themselves on. On one corner was a marquee that displayed two large posters- one for the feature and another for the matinee. You can see how much these posters would have impacted my innocent self.

And observe the building extending in the rear. That was the site of a genuine 'merican soda-fountain, that we would aim directly for, if we had any money leftover after buying the tickets. A proper Saturday Night Fever experience, a movie I saw here too. My combed back hair dates from this vintage. The West End made me much of who I am today, I am sorry to report.

Later, the fountain became a traffic roundabout and the bandstand vanished.
Later still, in the 1980s, the West End itself was demolished to exploit the real estate value of its compound.

All that remains today is the traffic roundabout.
So it goes.

Time Out Mumbai- Slow City

This piece was published in an edited version in the latest issue of Time Out Mumbai


Slow City

We must concoct a new name for the extreme sport of sitting in the path of whooshing traffic on Mohammed Ali Road with your back to it. Limb and possibly life is risked for a plate of saffron-hued firni outside Suleman Mithaiwala, but one spoonful is all that is needed to make the risk worthwhile. Above and beyond your head, long haul cars speed past nonchalantly on the snaking flyover with many names, the one that connects the Sir JJ School to the Sir JJ Hospital. At the Al-Madinah, plastic chairs and makeshift tables are always full at this time of year, occupied, quite comfortably by growling bellies in need of satiation.

Once upon a time, when Ramadhan was pronounced Ramzan, the all-denominational greeting ‘Khuda Haafiz’ had not yet been essentialized to ‘Allah Haafiz’, indeed when the concrete reptile flyover under whose grimy underbelly we now cheat death in order to gain the Kingdom of Culinary Heaven was not even imagined, eateries on the cross lane to Minara Masjid and beyond would lay their spread out nearly across the busy Mohammaed Ali Road,. For a month, at dawn and at dusk, vehicular lanes would be re-imagined as food plazas. Bombay’s hordes would descend on Saarvi, Shalimar and Noor Mohammadi, full of piety and perfume in time for Sehri and Iftaar. The moments before sunrise would pass swiftly, suffused with prayer and humility but the nights were long, filled with loud conversation and conviviality.

Life did take a downturn after the unimaginable events of the early nineties, but then life does find a way. Today, Allah be praised, even in its relatively constricted circumstances haleem, nalli nihaari, and a variety of char grilled kebabs occupy the mind as much as firni and maalpua, assorted barfis and the awe-inspiring aflatoon (the word by which the Arabs knew Plato). Elsewhere in the city, politicians hold Iftaar parties to stem the erosion of their flock, while the food corner between the Suleman and Zam Zam confectionaries requires no agenda to flourish.

Ramzan in Mumbai is a month of charity and fasting, but also thirty days of collegiality and general bonhomie. The fasting hours these days are quieter, given a summer that has stretched longer than usual, but evenings, despite the delayed monsoon go on and on, full of good cheer and loud humour. Does fasting make our city a warmer place? We should all try it then. Our city’s streets are used particularly well, transforming into spaces for eating, shopping and prayer. If the rains do not play spoilsport, each lane outside overflowing mosques accommodate the faithful. Azaad Maidaan on the day of Eid becomes a vast makeshift Idgaah.

Unlike other parts of the Muslim world that have taken the more rational path, using calendars to determine the times of fasting, India is still fixated on mandatory sightings of the sliver of moon for beginning the cycle of rozas and, especially for ending them. As children, this was a time for one-upmanship, running up to the terrace and trying to spot the Chaand. This year, the chaand was attested to by several reliable witnesses on Facebook, a public service act that was, in turn duly liked and shared. Whatever works.

In the days before television, Muslim neighbourhoods of Bombay would be woken by a volunteer walking from street to street like a town crier calling the faithful to rise for Fajr prayers. Today, times for commencement and breaking of fasts are easily regulated by downloadable Android and IoS Apps, loaded with alarms that indicate various times of prayer. But the crier’s sonorous voice, often using popular tunes of the day resonates in my memory decades after this tradition gave way to loudspeakers and recorded calls.

We live in a world of punctuated chaos, a term coined by Bill Gates. He alludes to our current times as one of constant upheaval marked by brief respites, unsettling to those who experiencing them. There was a time (that Gates calls punctuated equilibrium) when we believed the world would never change, at least not much, when the full enjoyment of a month that brought the city together was enjoyed at a slower, more deliberate pace.

For me, this pace is represented by tongawallahs and Victoria drivers, those urban transporters who played a crucial role in short-distance commuting in Bombay right until the late seventies. Plying a beat that extended from Colaba to Jacob Circle, these horse carriages could carry four or five persons along Bombay’s North-South roads. After stuffing myself silly at Minara Masjid, staring up at starlit skies unencumbered by flyovers, sky walks or luxury housing, I could slide into satisfied somnolence to the offbeat clipclopping of the horse’s hooves, nodding my head to a rhythm that would take me home. It this slow city that I miss the most.

Time Out Mumbai- Nanny State of Mind

This piece appeared in an edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai, February 2014

Nanny State of Mind

One of the first actions the new CEO of the Central Board of Film Certification has taken is to rollback all permissions granted to movies in the last few months on the grounds that the previous board was too permissive of objectionable content. One of them, ‘Sholay-3D’, was pinpointed for lacking seriousness in its content. The movie was screened in the presence of the CEO, his Board, his parents, his wife, her parents, his daughters, and their neighbors from the same floor. The following cuts and modifications to ‘Sholay-3D’ were demanded:

Vigilantism in all forms is disapproved, as when a currently serving policeman is commissioned by a retired Inspector to source delinquents to carry out encounters. The scene showing Thakur giving supari to Jai and Veeru should be removed.

All three coin tossing scenes to be excised as a British Raj coin is used in independent India. Also said coin was forged (heads on both sides).

The Inspector, shown sitting in the same space as two convicts in a goods train should be replaced with a havaldar. Also, when in uniform, the inspector should be addressed correctly as ‘Inspector Saab’ and not ‘Thakur’ (proper hierarchy must be followed).

Scenes showing Veeru running on tops of railway compartments should be deleted. This wrongly encourages rooftop travelling by children in suburban trains and violates several clauses of the Indian Railway Act.

The song ‘Yeh Dosti’ is to be entirely deleted for promoting cultural prurience. Far too much love and physical displays of affection are visible between two full-grown males. Not only do they hold hands but one actually mounts the other’s shoulders while riding a motorcycle. Sec 377 to be referred to, also traffic laws regarding reckless endangerment while riding a two wheeler. The board also found objectionable the lyrics that openly refer to same-sex love (‘aisa apna pyaar’, etc.)

Scenes of the main actors openly extorting beedis from Soorma Bhopali without a ‘Smoking Kills’ disclaimer is a lapse needing rectification. A later scene of Imam’s son moving to work in a tobacco factory is discouraged on religious grounds. Alcoholism, consuming unbranded country products by respected senior film stars encourages illegal haath bhattis and leads to liquor tragedies.

Scenes of a widow turning off lights in the verandah outside her bedroom while another man ogles her while playing a mouth-organ were found to be too suggestive. The implied invitation to promiscuity cannot be overlooked. The scene of Radha handing over keys of father-in-law’s safe to criminals shows the Indian widow in poor character.

Russian roulette in Gabbar Singh’s introductory scene is of foreign origin. It is suggested that this be replaced with the Indian game of chausar. Firing bullets in the air is a waste of ordnance, an action not desirable in a developing country such as ours. Also, harvesting mangoes using guns is discouraged as it divests the unskilled unemployed of a proper day’s wages under NREGA.

All scenes of eve-teasing and physical proximity in song ‘Holi ke din’ should be removed. The producers are requested to see Barjatya’s wholesome films for positive influences.

The Board also frowns upon the excessive use of the Arabo-Turko-Persian vocabulary that permeates the entire movie, ignoring our homegrown Sanskritic heritage. To redress this, it is suggested that the following phrases be replaced-
‘yeh dosti’ by ‘yeh maitri’,
‘mehbooba’ by ‘premika’
and
‘kitne aadmi the?’ by ‘kitne purush the?’

Also, to avoid the issuance of an ‘A’ certificate, the following obscenities must mandatorily be replaced-
‘haramzaadae!’ by ‘dusht!’,
‘hijdon ki fauj’ by ‘ardha-nar sena’,
‘soovar ke bachchon’ by ‘murgi ke chooze’
and
‘chakki p*****g’ by ‘micturation’.

All lady members of the audience walked out during the ‘Mehbooba’ song, while covering the eyes of their young ones. Helen was not wearing skin-colored, full-body innerwear, as Sandhya and Vyjantimala have respectfully done in the past. Also physical thrustings of certain body parts in 3D to R D Burman’s rhythms were too much for older members of the board. On second thoughts, an ‘A’ certificate is unanimously advised.

Horses, poultry and insects were all harmed in this film. Such scenes should be replaced by CGI and a certificate to the effect should preface the main titles.

Depicting the surgical amputation of Thakur’s limbs is deemed unacceptable as the swords were not sterilized before the operation. Also Thakur was not put under general anesthesia by a qualified medical person. This encourages bad practices.

The use of spikes outside of a sport pitch can send wrong messages to school going children to wear them to classroom and home and should be replaced with sneakers (with the brand blurred). Also, stamping on someone’s palms with shoes on is against the Indian tradition of respect and humility. On the other hand, the Board commends the depiction of the ill-effects of dancing without shoes in public places.

The last scene of a man and a woman publicly embracing in a train compartment makes us hang our heads in shame. We condemn the previous Board for allowing such vulgarity to go though and recommend an enquiry (by appointing a retired judge) on their possibly mala-fide intentions of ruining the ethos of our great nation.

In Memory Yet Green, In Joy Still Felt: On turning fifty

In Memory Yet Green, In Joy Still Felt

When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life;
Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;
Only a few hints--a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,
I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)

-Walt Whitman


This was never supposed to happen.

Turning fifty was never part of the larger scheme of things. I am completely ambivalent about this sudden state of affairs- for one moment you are what you are, and the next, half a century old.

Bugger!

Imagine this, five years ago, on this day, I started this blog. This post is, for better or worse, the hundredth. Have the thousands and thousands of words amounted to anything, I wonder? Well I have been paid for many of them, I must acknowledge this, and I have been commissioned to write a good number of pieces because of previous blog posts, so there is a happy syntagm between blogging and continuing to blog.

When I started this, the intention was largely to preserve memories. I did state that as a rough and ready credo in my first post. And subsequently a good many became an archive of my own past. This blog is an ever yielding tell, and I am an archaeologist of my own memories. It is both self serving and indulgent, but as I have mentioned before, a defense against short term memory loss. However, in the course of posting, I have ended up writing on a very large variety of subjects, as can be seen just by looking at the list of labels, which I am sure have crossed a thousand. So what is it that I am doing?

No idea, really. I am large, I contain multitudes.

My most successful post in terms of footfalls has to be the piece on Mario Miranda. It has already crossed 13,000 views. In December 2009 itself, the number of viewers of this post crossed 7000, and this bumped up further on Mario's untimely passing.

The closest in terms of this success was a long time coming. It is only half way through last year that another post crossed a thousand views and that was my translation of MirzaGhalib’s famous ghazal. I have been a magpie, and have written about what ever shiny object that has attracted my eye. Translations have become a passion that has been fueled by this blog and the early appreciation it got. This has led to two offshoots that have been steadily growing- two separate blogs of my translations of the poems of Muhammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I have, looking back translated (in bits and pieces) the works of the entire Urdu pantheon- Ghalib, Iqbal, Manto, Sahir and Faiz, even Sharyar I have also translated a few poems from the Marathi- those of Arun Kolhatkar and Narayan Surve. All these were done for pleasure and this is a movable feast.

Bombay, or what’s left of it, has always provided fodder for thought, and I have chewed and ruminated on its urban affairs in a variety of ways. Pieces commissioned and written in Time OutMumbai, FirstPost.com, the Indian Quarterly, Times Crest and the EPW, among others have been archived here and are places I return to from time to time. The cultural history of the city as personal memory is always available as a common troth to dip into, and cinema, radio, television and reading form the signposts to growing up.

While the best part of being is the unending sense of awe, that quite counters any embedded cynicism, there is a joy that emanates from the company of friends, and friends as readers for whom I am forever grateful. You have ensured that these virtual pages are not mere contemplation of one’s belly button but a useful discourse that has fine tuned my own worldview.

This brings me to my current shop-worn state of five decades of having existed.
I would like to express my full-blown angst at this, and state that whatever I do henceforth I do under protest. I shall be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, and the scuff marks that my unwilling shoes shall leave in the dirt may well be the stuff of future posts.

So don't say that I did not warn you.

Time Out Mumbai- Radio Days

The interiors of Radio Hotel, photographed in October 2012 by Mustansir Dalvi (c)


This piece was published in Time Out Mumbai's Back of the Book (Vol 9, Issue 4; October 12-25 2012) in a slightly edited version.


Radio Days

Manish Market, near Crawford Market, caught fire earlier this year. This re-ignited some smouldering embers at the back of my mind. And then the market caught fire once again, and unlocked the memory of a lurid poster of ‘Bhoot Bangala’. Several skeletons, with glowing eye-sockets danced the twist, while an image of Tanuja screaming was painted over the titles in chiselled, impressionistic strokes. The poster quite affected the five year-old that I was when I first saw it. My uncle, whose finger I tightly held on to, had to drag me away from this phantasmagoric tableau. I would conjure ghosts in every corner for a while after that. We were walking outside the Radio Talkies on Palton Road. This was the late sixties.

In 1974, to my chagrin, Radio Talkies was pulled down, and Manish Market (Bombay’s bastion of ‘smuggling’ goods, especially of Sony and National Panasonic, made-in-Japan, televisions), would be erected in its place. This was a loss, not only because this cinema was within this child’s permissible walking distance, but also for being a purveyor of re-run Hindi picchers that changed daily. Growing up in the seventies, cinema houses were the horn of plenty from which we partook, not by watching films necessarily, but by devouring their posters. We would stand, open-mouthed like guppies in front of each new one, shovelling derring-do action, grand-guignol melodrama, and ‘Color by Technicolor’, Ravi Verma channelized heroinis into our subconscious wholesale. And here was a new one every day!

I did not give Radio Talkies much custom, but on such occasions I would run to a suitable bench (no seats, no numbers) in the dark hall with its plaster of paris ceiling and industrial fans. If you raised
your hand you could poke the projector’s beam and make funny shadows on the screen. The audience, largely local residents and market workers would rarely amount to a ‘Housefull’ board, but fillums were shown, complete with accoutrements like a Gujarati thali: advertisements, Indian News Review, Films Development Board Documentary (Hum Do, Hamaare Do; Nasbandi kijiye) and coming attractions. One intermission. Pee/smoking breaks optional, during songs.

Radio Cinema offered another urban pleasure, rare even for those times. It was a modest, one storey building, set back into large compound, bounded by low walls and a gate, always open (the other grounds I recall, with warmth-tinged sadness, is the former West End, on Poona’s Main Street). You could walk right up to the booking office with impunity and gaze at placards of the ‘Next Change’ persuasion. The grounds of the Radio always exuded an odour of cigarette smoke (everybody smoked) and fish. The Crawford Market sold meat but you had to cross the road to the shed alongside the cinema, abutting the Palton Road Police Chowkie (estab.1918), to buy everything from fresh paplet to dry kolbi soda.

When Radio Talkies was consigned to my memory so were its grounds. The old fish market soon followed. Manish Market would be built right on the road, denying even a reasonable footpath outside it. The Bombay of my childhood used to be an accommodating sponge; Mumbai today is its fossilized after-avatar, solidified, rocky and unyielding.

Radio Cinema lives on in name, in its cousin around the corner- the Radio Hotel. A true city survivor- a hotel in a standalone, erstwhile warehouse that has its former owner’s name (Akbarally Mulla Rasoolji Dharangadrawala) engraved in Gujarati above an entrance you could drive a truck through. Its whitewashed stucco façade is in the baroque style, with a centrally ornamented widow typical of mid- 19th century Bohra architecture. The Radio Hotel’s interior volume is certainly the largest in the city with a vast open floor and a ceiling that rises to more than twenty feet. The hotel has seen better days, but still offers an Irani menu, one of the last surviving places you can order gurda (goat’s kidneys) for breakfast.

Consider this: the Radio Hotel, the Musafirkhana, the police station, the Pedrushah Dargah and the Crawford Market all survived the ‘Fort Stikine’ blast at the Bombay Docks in 1944 that devastated many of the buildings adjacent to them. These places and artefacts that will go; no doubt, but let us at least pay them the respect of memory, give them a last hurrah.

A Bookshop dies: a paean to Manney’s

A Bookshop dies: a paean to Manney’s

I growed up, like Topsy, in libraries and bookshops.

Besides the British Council Library (Motto: ‘Truth Always Triumphs’) where my father was the librarian, it is the bookshops of Poona that were the long suffering witnesses to the sputters and spurts of my pubescence. One of the most visited was Manney’s Booksellers next to Westend Cinema (English movies, soda fountain) at Camp. And now, it is shutting down.

Bookshops, like Irani Cafes, seem to have a way of doing this, blindsiding your comfortable memories and leaving them frayed and crotchety. Manney’s (the anglicised ‘Mani’s’, after its owners) is (for a short while now) a cavernous bookstore of current bestsellers and oddities and rarities that one can safely get lost in for an afternoon. In its bowels, I graduated from the vast collection of comics (GoldKey and Indrajal) and children’s books (especially the Three Investigators Mystery Series, ghost authored, but hosted by Alfred Hitchcock) to Alistair MacLean's oeuvre of war novels and contemporary thrillers (where I read my first swear words, and was thrilled to learn their spellings) to a completely eclectic set of reading habits, foraging rather than finding new stuff to read.

Manney’s was the first port of call, though not the only one. Around the corner from Manney’s were the Modern Book Stall and the Express Book Stall, both on East Street; while the Utkarsha and Popular were both at the Deccan. Each was different from the other, so visiting them all one after the other, browsing, not necessarily buying, was as ritualistic as temple darshan. Manney’s offered the largest collection, its employees tolerated, yet frowned upon my frequently darkening its doorstep (Free Reading Not Allowed). Manney’s has bookshelves upon bookshelves- travel, the English language, the Classics, novels, books on spirituality, philosophy, cinema, music and uniquely, a section on the military. Presumably it caters to the extended presence of Armed Forces folk in that part of Poona, the Southern Command being nearby, but also the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla and the Armed Forces Medical College. Then the shelves peter out, un-categorized yet fun to delve into. I have always found that the best bookshops are the ones without direction. But then maybe Manney’s had imprinted on me in my impressionable years.

These are the institutions that landmark your life, that you take for granted will always be there. And yet, after nearly forty years of browsing, I did feel that bookshops like these remained behind the times as the world moved on. It is not that monster bookshops (a huge Landmark store is just across the road) now dominate the book buying scene, nor that online reading and online buying are killing them. It is simply that these single proprietor bookshops never developed a warm relationship with their customers, never created the ambience for an extended stay and never made offers that bibliophiles could never refuse. This standoffish, take-it-or-leave-it attitude lingered on even after the challenges to their former monopolies loomed large.

I have my own Manney’s story: I have mentioned browsing and not buying; one could not afford most books in the shop. Once, in the late eighties, while still in college, voraciously skimming books on rock ‘n roll, I found a freshly minted paperback of ‘20 Years of Rolling Stone: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been’ edited by Jann S. Wenner. Its pristine cover and chewed-off corner delighted and enticed, and equally quickly disappointed as it was way too dear for my collegeboy allowance. I left, feeling all the worse because I had riffled through its pages and it offered everything a rock-philiac would have liked to get jiggy with.

Twenty years later, the book was still there, on the same set of shelves, now yellowed, considerably worse for the wear, thumbed by strangers, never owned. Between the two decades, each time I visited Manney’s, I gave the book a darshan and a wistful caress. God knows, the book is probably still there. I wondered each time: just what kind of turn-over policy did the proprietors have for their old stock?

I do not vouch for this, but I never heard of Manney’s ever having a sale. Now, as the shop-owners have announced, when Manney’s will finally shut shop by the end of March, they will organise a ‘Grand Sale’ with discounts of twenty percent. Twenty percent. Bookshops like the Strand in Bombay offer a discount of twenty percent on All new books, and considerably more on older ones. Life goes on in these bookshops; books keep changing, the shelves are constantly refreshed. The sale events of bookshops like Strand are looked forward to with anticipation; when you can buy books in buckets. Little wonder then a shop like Manney’s, much loved, can also leave you in a state of perplexity.

Its old world charm and old school obduracy notwithstanding, I am sorry to see Manney’s go. The vast space it occupies and the advantage of its location in Poona Camp makes it real-estate to be sought after. I wonder what will replace it though. Cafe Coffee Day? Barista? KFC?

Another bookshop? Naah, unlikely.

Mario de Miranda (1926-2011)

Mario Miranda passed away today.

We never met. We did not need to.

Mario de Miranda was the subliminal presence in our growing up years. He provided the visual counterpoint to our learning, our schooling, our appreciation of English, of literature, of illustration, of art, of Bombay, of India and beyond. His illustrations in our schoolbooks, his cartoons in our newspapers, his murals on the walls of our restaurants and his art in our galleries remain forever in the back of mind and can be recalled in an augenblick.

When I started writing this blog, one of the first pieces I wrote was on Mario. It remains to this day the single most visited page on my blog, outstripping very other blogpost by several hundred visits. Here is a poem I wrote, inspired by one of his illustrations, way back in the 80s, when I was in college, based on his 'Bar Lady in Germany' . This was the first of many wonderful travel illustrations that he produced, displaying finesse and rigor in his cross-hatching but sublime in his observation of life.

India should remember Mario as our own Norman Rockwell.

We are fortunate that architect Gerard da Cunha has designed a gallery in Goa specifically for Mario's work and has published a comprehensive book of his oeuvre. It is now a time of remembrance and appreciation.

Tchau, Mario!

Last Day in a Lived-in House

My First Serial Killer

I saw Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970), I'm not sure, but probably around 1974. I was nine.

I watched this film in blurry black and white on Bombay Doordarshan. This was a time of fledgling programming by Bombay's only television channel, leading to its golden age in the mid-seventies. Foreign films were a weekly staple, as I remember, under the program head of 'Montage'. For me though, looking back now, Chabrol's film was one of many firsts: it was my first introduction to world cinema, it was my first sub-titled film (something I unquestioningly accepted as normal) and it was my first serial killer movie.

Of course, what stood out for me was the last bit. As kids we were all brought up on a bloody diet of killing, murder, bloodshed, what have you... you know the wholesomeness of growing up, none of the namby-pamby stuff.

One scene in the movie stood out, clearly imprinting in my memory. I have recalled it many times since, I must have been pleasantly traumatized by it. A schoolteacher takes a bunch of children out on a picnic to a cave site in the hills. They sit by a stone ledge and open their sandwiches. One little girl open her buttered sandwich and exclaims 'Its raining!' The teacher says 'It's not raining.' The girl cries out 'But its red!' and looks up. A bloody female hand with freshly dripping blood pokes over the ledge. Everyone screams. Oh, how we loved watching this then, a bunch of kids in our neighbor's home (the only television set in the area at that time) and replayed it over and over in our heads and in our games. Drops of blood being an index for murder is a corny cliche today, but for us kids it was an affirmation of our own imaginations and fears.

By this time of course I had had my fill of horror stories and horror movies (only through books and magazines, trawling the depths of Poona's British Council Library, where I practically grew up). A particular favorite was the Encyclopedia of Horror Film and Cinefantastique (full of pictures, both scary and naughty-that's where I discovered King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, The House of Wax, the Thing, the Blob, and everything undead), and of course the monthly Films and Filming magazine that I could never get enough of. Watching these actual movies would come much, much later. No, I consumed texts, still images and above all movie posters, lurid marquees in books and magazines and outside on all the cinema theaters I passed everyday in our school-bus on our way to school, fueling fantasies and populating the visual libraries in my head.

Chabrol, of course, I saw for the first and only time time that evening in the mid 70s. I found the scene again today, after nearly 40 years, and in glorious color here. And yes, the scene played put pretty much as I remembered it. Amazing, how I must have internalised the whole thing. A few years later, still a kid, I wrote a murrrderrr ishtory of my own called 'Whatever happened to Aunt Alice?' full of killing and assorted bunkum, where the first clue to a possible doing-in were three drops of blood on a bedsheet. Yes, yes, I did Google the title today to find that it was a film made in 1969, and I must have seen the title somewhere, what did I know? Plagiarism does not exist when you are ten. I must have seen the poster on the right, it has a gory familiarity, the blood is just about right. Also, this just occurred to me: the image of the bloody hand on the DVD box mirrors the hand in Le Boucher. Some amazing triangulation happening here, both inside my head and outside of it.

But of this I am sure of:
when those drops fell on the little girl's open buttered sandwich, I saw them fall in red.

A Diachronous Delving into Dhan Te Nan

What delighted me even more than hearing Vishal Bhardwaj’s ‘Dhan Te Nan’ for the first time is the realization that the music director has to be of the same vintage as I am. Why? Because I instantly recognized the sound-meme from my youth that he so cleverly channeled into his song for the forthcoming ‘Kaminey’.

‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’

If you are my age and grew up soaked in Hindi films, you know this sound. The first cousin to the more ubiquitous- ‘Dhishum!’ , which, as any fule kno, is the only technically correct foley for a punch, a box, a kick, a swipe, or (as we say in pure Gujarati) a fight. On the other hand, 'Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!', as any fule kno, is the loud background music exclamation! when the hero dramatically breaks into the villain’s den to save the heretobefore kidnapped heroini from a fate worse than… chiz chiz chiz.

‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’

In big, bold letters. In flashing lights, in neon. The audio equivalent to Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’ (1963). As kids we must have made this sound in a variety of settings, telling the picchur ka shtory the morning after, or even catching a friend during chor-poliss- ‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’ Gotcha!


Was it Bhardwaj, or Gulzar that did not get the sound just right? Dan Te Nan is a bit pale when written down, although its quite fine when sung, just like the sound we kids used to make. This dilution is not surprising- we’ve heard it done before. Rajesh Khanna used this as a dramatic counterpoint in Bawarchi (1972), but in an almost lisped ‘Dhat-ta-raa!’ which even we, as frigging seven year olds, for God’s sake, knew wasn’t the right way to say it.
Wimp!

This is a sound that needed to emerge full blown from within, deep within, rising up from the rectum, through the digestive tract, up the esophagus until its escaped with a roar: ‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’ (dha-na-dha-nan)

Well, what to do? We are the people our parents warned us about.
.

Remember the time

Michael Jackson’s explosion on our consciousness paralleled my years in college. ‘Thriller’ coincides with my second year in Architecture. Television was still the venerable and much lamented Bombay Doordarshan, and one evening they did a segment on the Grammy hopefuls. These were a long string of music videos- a relatively new phenomenon to us at the time. ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ were accompanied by David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’, Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’, Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’, even Sheena Easton’s ‘Telephone’. How do I remember all this? Because I had taped the show on an old fashioned mono cassette recorder using an external mike propped up next to the single speaker on the neighbor’s television set. I must have had this tape and heard and reheard it all through college, that’s why this stays with me. Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Live Aid all came in later years, but that year (1983) was seminal. Incidentally they never showed the Grammys, to the best of my recollection, and the memories of watching Jackson cradling his eight Gramophone replicas were from newspapers, I guess.

You knew Michael Jackson was someone else. Apart from being blown away by his dancing, it was his voice and the musical arrangements of Quincy Jones that would remain, and do even today. Just a couple of months ago ‘Thriller’ was reissued as a 25th Anniversary edition, bringing into sharp focus how we had grown, more than anything else. But the music is still fresh and continues to be part of my collection of MP3’s on my computer. Of course, after that that everyone was trying out the shaky-breaky dance movements with variable success. Mithun Chakrarvorty and Salma Agha rehashing the zombies of ‘Thriller’ in some long forgotten film still give me the heebie-jeebies just to think about it.

No one, however, could emulate the voice. In the midst of our continuing education into the Ages of Rock (Django Reinhardt onwards, by way of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Floyd, Dire Straits and beyond) Michael Jackson was our concession to POP, and he did Rock our Joint.

I remember going to the American Center Library to watch a special screening of ‘Thriller’ and ‘The Making of Thriller’ by John Landis. Why American Center? God alone knows, but even they probably acknowledged that the cultural scene was no longer the same without Jackson. The ‘Making of’ was the first for a music video, and the first behind the scenes look at filmmaking that I can remember. This was fun to watch. Jackson played his overgrown child persona and Landis indulged him (Middle to Close up shot, Landis to camera: “This is Michael Jackson. This is Michael Jackson’s toe.’ Followed by lots of tickling and giggling). Landis, of course, had just made ‘An American Werewolf in London’. ‘Thriller’ was just a reprise of that, but the prosthetic special effects were quite novel for the time (Long strand of hair growing out of face, canines sliding out of jaws like stilettos,et al). Life Magazine (defunct and lamented too) had done a many page photo feature on the great efforts it took to apply all this on the actor, and the film showed similar atrocities being heaped upon Jackson, before he could give his shots.

But the ‘Making of’ was remarkable for another memorable performance. It showed in its entirety Jackson performing ‘Billie Jean’ live at the Motown celebrations- sequined glove, white socked, with a fedora, Jackson unveiled the Moonwalk and forever embedded himself in the cultural space of popular music. I must check if the ‘Making of’ is on You Tube, it must be. The silken backward shuffle, defying gravity still gives a thrill, watching it after all these years. Plus, there is this quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that despite one’s forty five years and weighing twice that, one can still do a perfectly passable Moonwalk.

PS.
Hope you’re OK now, Annie.

Mario Miranda 's Bar Lady

Mario’s Bar Lady
The moon presents itself above Bergstrasse,
disentangling from its wobbly twin on the Rhine.
White glory showers. Work worn customers
trudge in like obligatory raindrops beneath
a dim archway. A spark flies every time-
clicketyclack! Heels connect with shiny stone.
A bearing swift, but in all her speed, never
a drop spilt.

Six gullets quenched by six massifs, delivered
vice like. She moves, mugs close to breast,
mugs that can hardly compete with her enormity.
White apron flashes, paling the moon.
She makes her rounds: ‘Was willst du denn?’
A return order: everfoaming kegs with an aperitif-
a smile.

The brash customer mellows. Dependent on
deepening dimples, empties jealousies and terrors
with beer. Her nods advise, a heaving chest berates
whatever scratches her sensibilities. Empty flagons
raise groaning feet, propel them homewards, yet
in passing, a Mark is pressed with a wan grin:
Danke schon, Maria. ‘Bitte, libeling.’ She returns
to beckoning bar, ready to gush forth every time:
‘Bier, bitte?’

This poem was inspired by Mario Miranda's very lovely drawing posted here. This dates from March 1984, when some of his drawings from (I think) Germany in Wintertime were featured in Midday. I had cut this one out and ensconced it safely until today when I scanned it and put it up here for all to see. This is really from way back when- Indira Gandhi was still Prime Minister, and the back of this clipping retains part of an advertisement for a cola, now defunct called 'Do it'.

Rediscovering Mario Miranda

On a recent visit to Goa, I had the opportunity of visiting a work in progress- a museum to house the works of the cartoonist Mario Miranda by the architect Gerard da Cunha. Apart from the delight of seeing a building at the bare bones stage (a delight for any architect, as any fule kno), it was the rekindling of association with the lines and forms, the crosshatching and the subtle colour infills of a cartoonist and illustrator whom people of my vintage 'grew up with'.

We knew Mario before we knew R.K. Laxman. Mario's illustrations filled our English textbooks- the venerable Bal Bharati. Right from 'This is Tim. This is Mini.' from Standard I to the later and deeper poems of Walter Scott (Kenilworth), we negotiated the byways of language mainly because of the illustrations that went with them. Mario could be funny, caricaturish but also dark and noirish as needed, and we absorbed this all. Mario's illustrations are now part of the visual vocabulary inside me and there is always a frisson, a kickback of nostalgia when I encounter (now rarely) his work.

His cartoons and illustrations were all around us too in the seventies and the eighties- mainly in the now defunct (and missed) Illustrated Weekly of India and several newspapers including the Times and Midday. These were of course contemporary and political, although Mario could, on occasion delight with full page spreads teeming with more characters that Michelangelo's Last Judgement but identifiable as people around us. Mario is from Goa, but for us Mario was quintessential Bombay- with buses, beggars, big bodied and bare bodied Bombayites teeming in Boribunder and Bhendi Bazaar. The word 'buxom' may have been coined specially for Mario's women- from the society ladies of Bombay to the fisherwomen of Goa- all bulging impossibly fore and aft.

Although Gerard da Cunha's museum is yet to see a single drawing installed, the architect must be commended for the monumental archive of Mario's work he has put together for a single book- 'Mario de Miranda', published by Architecture Autonomous and Art India. It has over 2000 images of Mario's work (sadly no Bal Bharati reprints though) from all the decades of his active life and it is a delight to possess. I have been immersed in it for the past few days and have no immediate need to emerge from it sometime soon. I can heartily recommend this book to anyone who knows his work (or doesn't).

Mario's work is also an architect's delight. In his later illustrations are single drawings of Goa, New York, Paris and Portugal, detailed and evocative of both time and place. Mario's work put together is a sociological document of many decades of work. You only need to see the New York suite to know that this is the city from the early Scorsese/Taxi Driver days and not the post Giuliani/post9/11 present.

                         

Gerard da Cunha has also put an extensive exhibition of Mario's ouvre in the Cymroza, which I have yet to

see. Fortunately it is still up for a few more days.

...and in the end the memories of the Bal Bharati days still most vivid are Mario's renderings of hands- open and clasped, fingers extended and expressive, that speak to me across the years. Yes, they are all there in the book and are as evocative as I remember them.

The illustration by Mario displayed here is of the coming of the Konkan railway- 

a wish fulfilling event about a decade ago for most of its denizens.

Memory is fickle

Memory is fickle, as any fule kno.

The internet, particularly broadbanded, has been a great resource for retrival - for the remembrance of things past. Music, images, snatches of culture, bits of film, the books, comics the quirks of childhood and middlehood all bob about together like so much flotsam, allowing one to wallow about to heart's content. It is a life kept alive and enriched.

After four and a half decades, this trackback is oddly reassuring. One can go arm first into the mulch of the world wide web, feel about for an hour or two and come up trumps. This assurance is satifying. Saving to favorites and occasionally downloading allows the retention of these snippets of one's past in much the same unorganised manner as the protagonist tattoos information about himself on different part of his body in Christopher Nolan's Memento.

This blog is another way to tattoo for the short term memory challenged. Keeping the mundane day to day alive for no other reason than to wallow in later. I have never had much truck with keeping a diary. But going headfirst into the blogworld is another kettle of fish, as any fule kno.