Around that time an uncle of ours living in Bombay working in the Port Trust wrote to my father to send his children to him during the vacations. That is how our trip was shaped up. Thankfully two daughters of a neighbour too were due to go to Bombay to their Brigadier uncle. Plans were drawn up and soon we, the foursome, boarded the crowded Punjab Mail for Bombay. A 24-hour journey took us through mostly barren summer landscape of dry fields and rivers with depleted water beyond the Vindhya and Satpura ranges until the climb commenced over the Western Ghats after Igatpuri. I remember having seen some tremendous scenic beauty of green hills with lush green forests, plunging cliffs and deeply cut river valleys. I am sure that green cover is long gone, some of it had already disappeared about 20 years later when I used to travel from Nagpur to Bombay on official business.
As soon as we alighted at the Dadar
Railway Station a petite and good-looking lady approached my sister and rather
uncannily called her by name. She turned out to be our aunt whom we had never
met. She was in her early 30s and was quite adept in dealing with the Bombay
taxi-walas. Within moments we arrived at their Hindu Colony apartment on what
was then known as Vincent Road, a broad avenue, with three-lane carriageways and
trams plying up and down on the central verge. Vincent Road had Hindu Colony on
one side and the Parsi Colony on the other. The apartment was on the first
floor - of three bed rooms and a big hall and a dining area. Each room had
floors done up in bright colourful tiles. Obviously, the era of massive use of
Makrana marble was still far away. The flat was airy and our aunt had organised
some tropical potted plants on the balconies. Uncle had his around 80-year old
father living with him. He was a law graduate of early 1890s and had a raging
curiosity about everything. He had known my father since the latter was a
student in Scottish Church College in Calcutta in the second decade of the last
century.
Bombay, now Mumbai, was a thriving
commercial and industrial city and yet it was considered only the second city
of the country. Calcutta, now Kolkata, continued to be known as the first city
even nearly a decade after independence. Kolkata, earlier the capital of
British India, was where the action was and the Communists were still far away
in the future and were yet to drive away private enterprise from Bengal. No
wonder, it continued to be the hub of trade, commerce and industry. Delhi was
nowhere near either Kolkata or Mumbai though it had been the capital of the
country since 1931. Perhaps, it had little opportunity to progress after
independence as it was subjected to the oppressive pressure of refugees soon
after the partition of the country.
Mumbai in those days was of special
charm for me. One of my close friends was doing his B Tech at one of the
institutes there. He was highly enamoured of the place, especially of its Fort
area and the city's local train services. Another close friend had just
returned from there and had given me glowing descriptions of its local trains,
buses, trams, its sea and beaches as well as its massive British era buildings.
It was quite a build- up and with the opportunity coming my way I was eager to
lap it all up. Having never been to a big city my excitement was naturally
palpable.
As I settled down and started feeling
comfortable in the new environment I would venture out of the house all by
myself. Initially I would be cautioned to be careful while crossing roads which
I had to do as I frequently would go over to the Parsi Colony
on the other side
of the Vincent Road. It was a quiet place with well maintained parks where one
could hang around in the shade of a tree. Or else I would go cross the Dadar
Railway over-bridge and walk all the way to the Shivaji Park beach and get the
refreshing breeze that would cool me in the warm and humid weather.
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| Eros Cinema - an example of Art-Deco architecture |
I would also take rides with my uncle in the morning as he drove down to his Port Trust office in the Fort area. He would mostly take the central north-to-south artery via Parel, Byculla, etc and then take the Mohammed Ali Road - now virtually inaccessible to cars - right up to the Fort. Or for a change he would take the outer route of Cadell Road on the Western fringe and would pass through Hornby Vellard, Breach Candy, Chowpatty and on to the Fort via that wonderful "Queen's Necklace" - the Marine Drive. Both the routes were interesting and I would look forward to these drives.
I would be dropped somewhere near the Hornby Road and I would wander around down its arcades looking at those British era buildings and indulge in window shopping. Sometimes I would veer right into the thick of the business district where offices of big and reputed commercial and industrial houses were located in huge Victorian buildings in what is now known as the “Fort Heritage Precinct”. I was charmed by the Horniman Circle which had a massive park in the middle surrounded by solid looking buildings of uniform elevation. Occasionally I would turn west from Flora Fountain and go and sit on parapets of the Marine Drive and take in the view of (now as I know them) the Art-Deco architecture on Marine Drive and, of course, the Arabian Sea that was not quite
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| An example of Neo-Gothic architecture - Mumbai High Court |
The Fort area appeared to me more like the
London that we had seen in photographs in various magazines with its old and
heritage buildings, wood and glass red telephone booths planted in the
middle
of broad pavements, its red and yellow double-decker buses and trams, the fire
hydrants, road signage and the zebra crossings. There were no malls then but
big departmental stores one of which was Akbaraly's off the Hornby Road. One
could get virtually every conceivable item in it. After loitering around for a
couple of hours I would catch a tram near Colaba Causeway and return to Dadar
Tram Terminus sitting on the upper deck taking in the aerial view of the busy
but largely uncluttered streets paying just, incredible as it may sound now, an
Anna (one sixteenth part of a rupee) as fare. Now, one can neither see the
trams nor the wood-and-glass telephone booths, overtaken by technology as both
have since been.
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| Mumbai Art-Deco architecture - a residential block on Marine Drive |
We also had outings
to Vihar Lake or to Juhu Beach or to the Aray Milk Colony. My uncle was fond of
visiting the Santa Cruz Airport. He loved to see the big international flights
arriving and disgorging passengers. In those days one could go right up to the
glass front of the Arrival Lounge with no questions asked - a seemingly
impossible activity today because of the terrorists' threat. I keep wondering
how in around fifty years the country has changed and simple pleasures of life
for ordinary people have been snatched away.
My sister and I not
only saw “The Country Girl” (with Grace, Kelly, William Holden and Bing Crosby)
at the New Empire theatre we also happened to go to an evening of Bengali music
at the prestigious Shammukhanand Hall where Late Hemanta Kumar, the famous
exponent of Rabindra Sangit (Tagore Songs), led the programme of Barsha Mangal
– a thread of songs invoking rain
written by Rabindranath Tagore. A great
occasion for me, as I, luckily, had the chance to hear live the favourite
singer of my adolescent years.
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| Renowned singer, Late Hemant Kumar |
We didn’t realize how
swiftly time raced away and soon it was time to undertake that rigorous 24-hour
journey to get back to Gwalior. We, my sister and I, spent a very enjoyable
summer in the company of uncle and aunt. They were extremely good couple and
were very nice to us. Clearly, we were enriched by the trip - the exposure to a
metropolitan town enabled us to acquire invaluable experience and knowledge. We
got back to Gwalior richer in every way.
Thirty years later, as luck would have it, I
was posted at Bombay and served a full tenure of four years. By then Uncle had
retired and was not doing very well. The
Great City, too, had deteriorated and degraded a lot, overtaken by hundreds of
slums, inspiring many books on it, both, complimentary and non-complimentary.
Politicians sold numerous dreams of the city’s development and upgrade but it
kept sinking to greater and greater depths. For common men it is excruciatingly
painful to survive in it whereas for the rich it is a great playground where
billions are made and, perhaps, lost everyday. Be that as it may, I look back
on my Bombay of fifty-odd years ago with nostalgia and wistfulness.
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All photos taken from Internet except one below of Victoria Terminus shot by me 1987 during the Station's Centenary celebrations
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