Crossings
Imran Ahmed | Alba Arikha | sidharth Bhatia | Rupika Chawla | mustansir Dalvi | Gurcharan Das
Namita Devidayal | santosh Desai | Naresh Fernandes | Ramachandra Guha | Namrata Joshi
Ranbir Kaleka | melik Kaylan | Prashant miranda | Gautam Pemmaraju | Raghu Rai | sheela Raman
Navtej sarna | Gayatri Rangachari shah | Bulbul sharma | Harmala Gupta | michael snyder
Arundhathi subramaniam | shefalee Vasudev | Paromita Vohra | Daisy Waugh | Gillian Wright
volume 1 | issue 2 | January - March 2013
The inaugural issue of IQ was put out into the world with some trepidation. Despite discouraging warnings about the omnipresence of the electronic media and the shrinking readership of hard copy, we went ahead, convinced about the need for a magazine that offered food for reflection – and an Indian publication tuned into what was happening within India and beyond its borders. We needn’t have feared. Not only has the response been overwhelming, readers have appreciated our understated and clutter-free design.
We live in a world increasingly populated by those for whom home is no longer a single place. Many amongst the burgeoning number of global souls have been born in one country, grown up and studied in another and consider more than one country home.
‘Crossings’ is the overarching theme for the second issue of IQ. New York-based dancer Sheela Raman negotiates different cultures in ‘Italian Nocturne’. After three decades Gillian Wright moves from Nizamuddin East to West in Delhi. Melik Kaylan looks at his native city, Istanbul, through the eyes of an Indian friend. Imran Ahmed’s lens captures Indian and Pakistani workers wrestling, desistyle, in Dubai. Harmala Gupta retraces the travails of a Sikh ancestor putting down roots in Canada, while Sidharth Bhatia looks at Mumbai’s Chinese migrants.
Borders between the past and the present are porous. In her poignant memoir, writer Alba Arikha oscillates between the present and a painful adolescence. Raghu Rai’s rediscovered images of the Bangladesh war bring back the human cost of that tragedy. Namrata Joshi tracks the evolution of the Indian horror film and Sudha Koul examines the pedigree of Roghanjosh.
I hope you enjoy the eclectic menu of our second issue, which also has its lighter moments, such as Daisy Waugh’s attempts to get an upgrade on a flight. With its longer articles that don’t blindly stalk the headlines, IQ allows its readers to step off the speeding carousel of our lives today, to actually reflect upon and savour life. - Madhu Jain
A special thank you to Ranbir Kaleka for the cover painting to accompany his and Rupika Chawla’s ruminations on eroticism in art.
Publisher : Anuradha Mahindra
Editor: Madhu Jain
Associate Editor: Clea Chakraverty
Assistant Editors: Nandini Bhaskaran, Devyani Jayakar
Art Director: Rahul Das
Designer: Priyanka Patel
Production: Subhash Harinath Rajbhar
CEO: Falguni Kapadia
Business Manager: Vishnu Garg
Marketing: Priyanka Sippy, Rekha Kapoor, Bijal Mehta, Neha Kajaria and Freshia Mistry
PR and Corporate Communications: Arti Sarin
Accounts and Administration: Manohar Gaikwad, Sandhya Hegde and Marie Salve
Circulation: Nadim Shaikh, Prasad Herur, Satish Shinde and Santosh Gajinkar
Contributions from Shraddha Jahagirdar-Saxena and Shirin Mehta Many thanks to: Pradeep Gorivale, Mukesh Lohat and Rajendra Kanojia
I first encountered IQ in Washington, D.C. I marvelled at this unique and stunning tour de force of thoughtful journalism, photo-essays and history, fused with illustration, cinema, art and travel. IQ exudes a sophisticated global sensitivity, but is anchored in the reality of Mumbai and the Subcontinent.
I couldn’t help thinking of IQ as The Innovation Quarterly. Every section provided novel insights, perspectives and stories, even on seemingly familiar topics such as the India-China Border War and the future of manned space exploration. I stopped at the Dulles Airport “Wall for Peace” after reading about it in IQ.
In future issues, IQ could invite Indian and international perspectives on solutions to urgent and daunting challenges, both global and local: eradicating poverty and providing energy, water and food security for all. IQ has enormous appeal to a wide Indian and global audience, and not just to the affluent Indian diaspora.
David J. Jhirad, Ph.D.
Professor and Director, Energy Resources and Environment Program, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC
IQ reminded me of The Illustrated Weekly of India. I was intrigued that in the era of Mumbai Mirror and NDTV, someone wanted to publish long, contemplative articles. Am glad they weren’t text-bookish. Talking Points was nice. The articles on Marine Drive would be of interest to outsiders rather than thorough-bred Mumbaikars. The articles about writers, I’m going to preserve. The travel pieces were delightful, too. A bigger dose of humour would be welcome, and perhaps interviews of young dancers, sportspeople and playwrights.
Sheela Jaywant Goa
I was delighted to receive the inaugural edition of your new magazine. Thank you so much for your thoughtfulness in sharing it with me. Congratulations on this exciting new initiative and beautiful publication. I look forward to spending time with it.
Drew Gilpin Faust
President, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Your inaugural issue has six articles on Mumbai (including one on Bollywood). All of them are fascinating. The black-and-white photographs accompanying the piece on ‘The Making of Marine Drive’ are exquisite.
Yet, they left me with a sense of unease despite my love for the old Bombay. The nostalgia at the core of these articles conveniently distances them from the reality of present-day Mumbai with its miserable shanties, luxurious high-rise slums and the protofascist goons who regularly command its streets. Are there too many writers from Bombay-Mumbai who romanticise their mouldering city?
I look forward to reading forthcoming issues of IQ which, hopefully, will not pander to oldies and will be less Mumbai-centric.
Jawid Laiq
New Delhi
Imran Ahmed was born in Dhaka but considers the United Arab Emirates his adopted home since moving there as a teenager in the mid-1970s. He took to street photography in 2008 which resulted in a book, Dubai Creek. He works for a global investment bank based in Dubai.
Alba Arikha is the author of three books: Muse, Walking in Ice and a memoir, Major/Minor, published by Quartet Books. She has translated poetry and written for various art magazines. Alba is also a pianist and singer/songwriter. Her album, Dans Les Rues De Paris, was released last year.
Sidharth Bhatia is a Mumbai-based journalist and author of the book Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story, published earlier this year. He also writes on national politics for publications including DNA, The Hindu, The Deccan Chronicle and The Asian Age.
Rupika Chawla is a Delhi-based art conservator. She is the author of Surface and Depth, Indian Artists at Work, Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India and two books on the artist A. Ramachandran. She has also curated major exhibitions at the National Museum and the NGMA in Delhi.
Mustansir Dalvi teaches architecture in Mumbai and is an author, poet and translator. He writes two columns on urban issues in Time Out Mumbai and Firstpost.com, where he observes and critiques the unravelling urban fabric of Mumbai in its present post-planning avatar.
Gurcharan Das studied philosophy at Harvard University and was CEO of Procter & Gamble India before he took early retirement to become a writer. He has authored
several books, including, India Grows at Night: a liberal case for a strong state and a bestseller India Unbound, published in many languages.
Namita Devidayal is the author of the award-winning memoir Music Room and the bestselling novel Aftertaste. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Politics, though she wishes she had studied English Literature and Basket Weaving instead. Namita is a journalist with the Times of India and lives in Mumbai.
Santosh Desai is Managing Director & CEO of Future Brands Ltd, a branding services company. He has worked in advertising for 22 years and has been studying the evolving nature of the consumer culture in India. Author of bestseller Mother Pious Lady –Making sense of everyday India he is also a regular columnist with the Times of India
Naresh Fernandes is a freelance journalist who lives in Mumbai. He has previously worked in New York, Hong Kong and Brussels and has been the editor of Time Out Mumbai. He writes about urban development and city culture. He is the author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age. He is now working on a short biography of Mumbai.
Ramachandra Guha is an historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. His most famous books include Savaging the Civilized — Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India, India after Gandhi, and Patriots & Partisans (Penguin, 2012). Guha is currently writing a multi-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi.
Adam Jacot de Boinod was a researcher on the first series of QI, the BBC quiz programme hosted by Stephen Fry. He is the author
of The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World, from Penguin, and the iPhone App Tingo – the Interesting Word Game.
Namrata Joshi is an associate editor, Outlook and a cinema expert who has been on the jury of many international film festivals. She has written monographs on actresses Nutan and Mumtaz for a series Women in Indian Film, edited by Nasreen Munni Kabir for Zubaan Publishing, 2008.
Ranbir Kaleka was born in 1953 and raised in the city of Patiala. A contemporary painter, his works have travelled the world. Notably iCon: India Contemporary at the Venice Biennale (2005), Chalo! India at the Mori Museum in Tokyo (2008); India Moderna at the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain (2008). He is now showing at the Kochi Muziris Biennale and at the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts.
Melik Kaylan was born in Istanbul, educated in England, and has worked as a journalist in New York for 25 years. He writes about culture for the Wall Street Journal and international affairs for Newsweek. He has won awards for travel writing, television coverage of smuggling of antiquities and has been a reporter on conflict zones from Iraq to Georgia.
Sudha Koul is the author of Curries without Worries and The Tiger Ladies – A Memoir of Kashmir. Born and brought up in Kashmir, she is the first Kashmiri woman to be selected by the Indian Administrative Service. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Seminar and other publications. She has just completed her first novel, The Kashmir Chronicles
Prashant Miranda grew up in Bengaluru and studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad before moving to Toronto. He documents his travels with his watercolour journals, illustrates children’s books, paints murals and animates short films. He has just returned to India from a month-long artist residency in Assisi, Italy.
Sandhya Mulchandani has a post graduate degree in applied geology from the National institute of Oceanography and has worked in media for over 20 years. She translates from medieval Sanskrit and Tamil literature, focusing on eroticism and symbolism in Hindu literature and mythology.
Gautam Pemmaraju is a Mumbai based writer/filmmaker. He has several excursionary interests with a special focus on Hyderabad, its troubled political integration and cultural history. He is now working on a film on the Urdu comic-satire traditions of the Deccan as well as on Hindi film sound design in the analog era.
Raghu Rai was born in the Punjab in 1942. He has been at the fore front of photography in India for over 40 years and is a part of the Magnum Photos team. His work has appeared in leading publications. Rai has produced more than 30 books including The Indians–Portraits from my Album, Bombay / Mumbai, and Calcutta / Kolkata
Sheela Raman is a first-generation Indian-American and a jazz singer. After graduating from Brown University, she wrote about art and culture for The Boston Globe, Art in America, and Forbes. She is currently working on a series of short stories and recently began vocal training in Carnatic music.
Navtej Sarna is the author of the novels The Exile and We Weren’t Lovers Like That. His most recent work is Winter Evenings, a collection of short stories. He contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement, The Hindu and other journals. A member of the Indian Foreign Service since 1980, he was most recently India’s ambassador to Israel.
Gayatri Rangachari Shah is a Mumbai based journalist. She contributes to the New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Harper’s Bazaar, where she helps with editorial direction. Gayatri graduated from Columbia University’s school of journalism. She has lived all over the world, most memorably in Islamabad and Algiers.
Bulbul Sharma is a painter and writer. Amongst her most noted books are My Sainted Aunts, The Perfect Woman, Anger of Aubergines and Now that I am Fifty. She has also published books for children and conducts for special needs ‘Storypainting’ workshops for children with special needs.
Harmala Gupta has a Masters in International Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. In 1977 she went to McGill University, Montreal, to do a doctorate which she was unable to complete because of illness. Harmala founded CanSupport, a palliative home-care programme for people with cancer in Delhi in 1996.
Michael Snyder graduated from Columbia University in 2010 with a BA in English literature and comparative religion. After graduation he spent a year living in Santiago, Chile, before shifting to Mumbai. His work has appeared in several publications including GQ India, ELLE, Open and The Caravan
Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet, curator and journalist. She has been published in several newspapers including The Hindu, The Indian Express and Time Out Mumbai. She divides her time between Mumbai and a yoga centre in Coimbatore. Her most recent works include the book of poems, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems, and the biography of a contemporary mystic Sadhguru: More Than a Life
Shefalee Vasudev is the author of Powder Room: The Untold Story of Indian Fashion. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years, writing on popular culture, social trends and gender. She was the founding editor of Marie Claire India and currently writes for Mint Lounge
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer with an interest in urban life, desire and popular culture. She has written the Pakistani film Khamosh Pani and some of her films include Partners in Crime, Morality TV, the Loving Jehad, Q2P, Where’s Sandra and Unlimited Girls.
Daisy Waugh is a British novelist and journalist. She currently writes columns for the Sunday Times Magazine and Standpoint Her books include A Small Town in Africa, Bed of Roses and The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife
Gillian Wright is an author living in New Delhi. She studied both Hindi and Urdu at London University and has translated two modern classics of Hindi literature, Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari and Rahi Masoon Reza’s Adha Gaon. She has collaborated with Mark Tully on all of his books, including No Full Stops in India, Heart of India and India in Slow Motion
Letter from the Editor 04
Letters 05
Contributors 06
Talking Points 12
Power Pleat | Did he or didn’t he ? | Pop goes the Museum | A Hazy Shade of Winter | Goan Soirees
Urbanities
20 Last of the Seven Bungalows Gayatri Rangachari Shah discovers its secrets.
26 Chinese Comfort Sidharth Bhatia revisits a community through its oldest restaurant.
34 Azans from the West Gillian Wright writes about moving from Nizamuddin East to its more vibrant side.
41 Notes from the past Alba Arikha’s poignant memoir recounts her childhood and the su ering of her Jewish father.
54 Divine Love Sandhya Mulchandani looks at the erotic in Tamil and Telegu poetry.
60 Ganesha in the Midwest Stephen Alter visits novelist Louis Brom eld’s organic farm in Ohio.
64 Whose Roghanjosh is it Anyway? Sudha Koul traces the origin of this culinary wonder.
69 Movable Identities
70 Italian Nocturne Sheela Raman nds India in Italy.
76 The Lords of Sand Imran Ahmed captures wrestling, desi style, in Dubai.
86 A Garden for Aliens The challenge of growing lavender for Bulbul Sharma.
90 Turkish Delights Melik Kaylan rediscovers Istanbul through Indian eyes, nding similarities in both cultures.
Essay
96 When Rules Acquire Flesh Mustansir Dalvi on the disjunct between the law and its interpretation.
104 Lest we Forget Raghu Rai’s forgotten cache of images on the human tragedy of the Bangladesh Liberation war.
Cinema
116 What Lies Beneath Namrata Joshi explores the evolution of Indian horror movies.
126 An Awkward Subversion Santosh Desai examines an ubiquitous urban sartorial choice.
130 Strings Attached Naresh Fernandes writes about the in uence of a Hawaiian guitarist on Indian jazz.
134 The Emperor of Alberta Harmala Gupta retraces an ancestor’s passage to Canada.
140 The Skin Remembers The erotic in Ranbir Kaleka’s art and Rupika Chawla on the erotic moment in creativity. Poetry and Fiction
146 Raat Akeli Hai/No More Lonely Nights screenplay by Paromita Vohra
156 New Poems by Arundhathi Subramaniam
158 Jumping Class Daisy Vaugh tries her best to get an upgrade.
160 Browser’s Corner Gurcharan Das, Ramchandra Guha , Namita Devidayal and Jonathan Foreman on their favourite Indian bookstores.
On the cover: Contestations in a Fecund Landscape (Digital imagery and oil on canvas made for The Indian Quarterly 33 x 30 inches, 2012) by Ranbir Kaleka For subscriptions and queries call: +91 95949 99978 Or email: theindianquarterly@gmail.com
The Indian Quarterly welcomes letters to the editor. Write to: IQ C/o Indian & Eastern Engineer Co. Pvt. Ltd., Cecil Court, M.B. Marg, Apollo Bunder Mumbai 400001 India. www.indianquarterly.com +91 22 22897889
By Shefalee Vasudev
Incredible as the story of Draupadi’s unending sari in the Mahabharata sounds outside its mythological construct, today, the sari symbolises a curiously ‘unending’ narrative in contemporary India. If imagining our nation historically without the six-yard drape is inconceivable, re-imagining modern India without it would be equally warped. The sari is not merely a ‘revived’ garment that has withstood the onslaught of changing aspirations of a republic in transition. What’s fascinating is that despite dozens of experiments with its fall, fabric, styling and weave and intense competition by global brands, holding out numerous options of dress and drape, the purist garment retains its influence. The sari may have occasionally become a sarong on the ramp, been worn over a pair of jeans or as half a drape revealing a leather skirt beneath, yet its traditional, unstitched form remains endearingly appealing and resilient.
First, consider it as a story-telling device. You can tell the tale of India through the sari, not just as academic reflection but with strong visual imagery. From the coarse khadis of the Freedom Movement, to the handloom revival of the 1980s; from cinematic costume director Bhanu Athaiya’s Badan Pe Sitare-sequined saris for Mumtaz, Sadhana or Sharmila Tagore, among others, to the Yash Chopra school of chiffon saris in Hindi cinema; from Manish Malhotra’s clinging red-carpet versions to designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s heavily embellished pieces –the incredible six yards have hundreds of
stories to tell, both public and private. Modesty, morality, conspicuous consumption, bling, simplicity, distinction, recession –saris decode every nuance of our transition.
The script wasn’t so simplistic all through. In the last decade, the sari would annually pop up in feature sections of Indian publications. Some stories highlighted its adaptability, citing its New Age versions; others lamented its dwindling attraction for younger Indian women. Still others brought up weary arguments that the sari was still our best bet for wedding and festive wear and it was unlikely to fade out. Then international publications found statistics from India’s handloom and weaving industries to support their theses. Not only were fewer women wearing the sari, but designer creations spelt the doom of the handloom sector, they reported. Interestingly, the socalled struggle of the sari to reclaim lost territory resulted in some revealing accounts of dressing dilemmas that women, both in India and Bharat, had.
Now there are articles on the sari every few months – even as cover stories in the Sunday sections of Indian news publications. Lengthy interviews with sari warriors, working women who wear it every day, rain or shine, mothers who can manage it while changing diapers and of the sari as India’s ultimate sexy garment, bob up. The rest of the world can see the sari on our celebrities, striding global red carpets, and know too well that it has not been reduced to a ceremonial kimono. Save the sari, didn’t they say? We went and made it queen. So much so, that Parisian luxury brand Hermès followed us back home with its own saris, created especially for the Indian market.
It may be a truism that handloom saris are currently less sought after than
designer ones, but it is no coincidence that most designers in India consider a collection incomplete without saris. More significantly, many designers are now collaborating with weavers and craftspeople to create what we shrug off as designer saris. So if we must use the word, ‘revival’– a fragile term to interpret the power of the sari – then let’s count in the fashion industry too. If Tarun Tahiliani’s sculpted drapes still rule wish lists, there is also a huge surge of interest in hand-woven native saris, like the reinterpreted chanderis by Sanjay Garg of Raw Mango or the soft khadis of Neeru Kumar. Designers and textile conservationists, stylists and fashion directors, fashionistas and feminists find the sari a flexible statement and use it the way they want, to say what they will.
Seasoned designer Suneet Varma who often calls fashion the most visible form of sexuality, is as serious about experimenting with the sari to keep its mystery alive in his own way as is textile historian Rta Kapur Chishti whose 2010 book, Saris of India: Tradition and Beyond, tells us of their regional diversity and the more than 180 ways in which it is draped in regional India. If Sabyasachi swears by the sari as an assured tool to reconvert women to tradition as power amidst the sea of global brands, edgy designer Gaurav Gupta’s Grecian saris have found wearers in other countries. Anupamaa Dayal, who interprets the sari to make it relevant to the needs of the evolving Indian woman, styled it with shorts and sneakers, and even as resort wear in ‘Sarini’, one of her collections. One of our senior most designers, Wendell Rodricks, revived Goa’s Kunbi weave, no small feat as the sari was banned in Goa by Portuguese rulers for 200 years. Rodricks invited veteran textile expert Jasleen Dhamija
to unveil it in Delhi two years ago, memorably bridging fashion and conservation. Today, woven or chiffonesque, stitched or wound around, worn with leather boots or Kolhapuris, inherited as an heirloom piece or made to order, the sari has an assured place in all closets. It’s the way it is bridging contrary schools of design and persuasion that makes it such a unique sociological story.
by
By Navtej Sarna
Many of India’s diplomatic missions and residences abroad occupy beautiful and historic buildings: the Ambassador’s residence in Cairo has a jetty on the Nile; the one in Tunis slopes down to a private patch of the Mediterranean; and in Paris, the Ambassador virtually lives in the shadow of the Eiffel. Some of the buildings have legends lurking in the backyard. The residence in Bonn, before the capital moved to Berlin, housed a farmer’s annexe where a teenaged Beethoven is said to have composed the opening chords of his Fifth Symphony. And in Moscow, Indian envoys since K.P.S. Menon have looked down from their chandeliered reception rooms in the elegant residence on Ulitza Obukha, at a small cottage-like structure within the embassy’s compound, introduced to every awe-struck new arrival as Napoleon’s dacha – Russian for a country home or summer house.
Legends spin around the dacha like the
russet brown leaves of autumn or the snow flurries of the ruthless Russian winter and some find their way inevitably into memoirs. B.S. Das, an IPS officer turned diplomat records his arrival in Moscow in 1961 (after a month long journey from Bombay through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki and Leningrad!): “I reported to our embassy located in Ulitsa Obukha, a historical place with a small hut called Napoleon dacha. Legend has it that the place got its name from the fact that the great man spent a night at this place in 1812.” Sheila Gujral, wife of former envoy (and Prime Minister) I.K. Gujral has a more colourful entry in her recollections and revelations about her days in the USSR: “A small dilapidated building at the back of the embassy estate was another interesting landmark of history. We were told that Napoleon spent two nights there with a Russian girl.”
A less romantic version is that it was from this hill of Vorontsovo Polye that Napoleon watched Moscow burning across the river. He had entered the city on September 14, 1812, a week after barely winning a bitter and bruising battle at Borodino against the experienced Russian commander-in-chief Field Marshall Kutuzov. The Russians had been retreating for three months before that, leaving scorched earth behind as they went. Once again Kutuzov ordered the Russian army to abandon the city and retreat, predicting that the French “shall eat horseflesh yet, like the Turks.”
Most of the citizens of Moscow simply abandoned their homes in the beautiful autumn when, in Lev Tolstoy’s words “the sun hangs low and gives more heat than in spring, when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear atmosphere that the eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and refreshed by inhaling the aromatic autumn air....”
Napoleon waited in vain for Moscow’s
noblemen to bring him the keys to the spiritual if not the political capital of the Russian nation. Deprived of the pomp of a ceremonial surrender he finally entered Moscow only to find it empty, “empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty” (Tolstoy). The French soldiers wandered around the rich abandoned houses wonderstruck, hearing only their own footsteps. Soon the looting began and then the fires started. Russians themselves, it is believed, began to torch their city and quickly an inferno was consuming the predominantly wooden city, its houses and churches, art and sculpture and of course the critical ammunition and food stores. An amazed Napoleon may well have watched it from the hill, exclaiming “What savages! To annoy me they burn their own history, the works of centuries!” What began that day would end only with an inglorious retreat of the French Grande Armee from Moscow five weeks later. A garden pavilion, or our dacha, was built to commemorate the spot where the Emperor may have stood at that fateful hour.
Whatever the truth may be, the Indian embassy carries the historical presence of the dacha lightly. A few yards away lies the squash court which was at one time the only one in Moscow, a huge asset in the business of making friends and influencing people. On the other side, volley ball courts appear in summer. The dacha itself has been used at various times as a video rental library, an officer’s club, a gym.... Twice a year its doors – like the rest of the embassy’s – are opened up for cultural tours. Generations of diplomats have heard the legend of the dacha, debated it among themselves and often dismissed it as apocryphal –but only amongst themselves. For the rest of the world, this is Napoleon’s dacha where he spent a night – or two – and let us not get overly troubled by facts.
By Michael Snyder
The defunct warehouse that hosted the Museum of Memory for a single Saturday in December sat in the shadow of a construction site in Mumbai’s Northern suburb of Vikhroli. Deep inside the Godrej Campus up a dusty stretch of the Eastern Express Highway, Mumbai’s first ‘Pop-up Museum’ filled a 60,000-squarefoot space with installations of street art, photography and painting, mixed-media displays, fashion, music, readings and an array of spontaneous contributions. The next day the warehouse was demolished.
Parmesh Shahani, founder of the arts think-tank Godrej Culture Lab, conceived of the Museum after visiting Cockatoo Island, a former prison and shipyard now used as a major venue for the Sydney Biennale. Over the course of just two weeks, Shahani organised and curated his event by tapping into artistic circles in India’s commercial capital, particularly the arts collective Visual Disobedience, which contributed seven of the 20plus curated artists participating.
It was virtually impossible to tell just how many people attended (the event was free), but Shahani estimates around 2,500 visitors came through in the course of the day, many of them adding their own works to the proceedings. “The idea of art is so narrowly defined,” says Namrata Bhawnani, one of the directors for Visual Disobedience, but projects like the Museum “make the art world much more interesting and accessible.”
While on the same weekend the Kochi Biennale brought a traditional format from the established art world to India, at the
Museum of Memory, Shahani says, “People were celebrating transience” and at the same time exploring the question: “Can a museum be about archiving the present?”
At the Museum’s opening, the street artist Tyler was stencilling ants across the floors and walls. In another gallery, Priyesh Trivedi painted an elaborate psychedelic image directly onto the warehouse wall. Speakers offered remarks on the nature of memory on a stage towards the back. In one of the crumbling rooms surrounding a light-filled courtyard, a video of street art around Bandra played on loop, while visitors painted the gallery walls with cans of spray-paint.
The works on display combined elements of both high- and low-brow with giddy abandon. They were the products of post-modern, post-pop-art artists who experience the world through the endlessly dynamic mixed media of a collaborative digital universe.
For Shahani, the event encapsulated “the whole spirit of sharing, collective memory, collaboration – the whole spirit of ‘pop-up’.”
A term he describes as “the child of the social media generation”. Retail destinations in the United States were the progenitors of the modern ‘pop-up’ phenomenon. Then about a year ago, luxury boutiques like South Mumbai’s Bungalow 8 brought the concept to India. Since then, pop-ups have become – perhaps ironically – a fixture on India’s fashion and art scenes.
According to Mathieu Gugumus Leguillon, Head of Fashion Design at Bungalow 8, “It’s a mixing of two identities, for me that’s the difference between a pop-up and a show. There is that dimension of experiment.” Rather than simply commandeering a foreign space, pop-ups allow two distinct identities to combine, creating something new and essentially ephemeral.
Collaboration and transience, then, have always been at the core of the pop-up, but so traditionally has transaction. With the Museum of Memory, Shahani “wanted to experiment with pop-ups that were about sharing, not necessarily about selling”. No money changed hands at any point during the day – neither tickets, nor food, nor artworks were there to be sold. Instead, the Museum of Memory was designed to be experiential, encouraging people from different creative spaces to develop linkages across mediums. Hosting the event in Vikhroli, a fairly distant suburb for most of the city’s art and media community, also demonstrated that you can take culture out of places like Bandra and South Mumbai. Dislocation is also central to the pop-up, the ability to “bring to a new audience things that are not necessarily accessible”, as Gugumus Leguillon explains it.
Nostalgia, as much as instant gratification, is one of the driving aesthetic forces of our age. Pop-ups offer something like instant nostalgia, something we can long for even as we experience it, that can exist only in the assurance of its own eventual demise. Unlike the towers and corporate headquarters emerging on a larger and larger scale across India, pop-ups – transient by nature – lay no claim to permanence or monumentality. Pop-up is the medium of flux.
“For a city of the size and scale and texture of Mumbai, there should be five of these each month,” Shahani says. It’s an ambitious and fascinating idea, to create a real-time archive of the city’s lived experience, a sort of Facebook account on the scale of the metropolis rather than the individual, an opportunity to compile our collective archive of digital memory and make it real, if only for a moment.
By Gautam Pemmaraju
The anonymous itinerant diarist of Sleepy Sketches (1877) writes of the ‘delightful climate’ of Bombay in its winter months, when “the nights are cool, the days not raging hot, and every afternoon a soft, temperate breeze comes flowing in from the sea”. One February early morning, he recalls, an ‘astounding’ 56F was registered, and duly reported by all the newspapers.
A pleasant two-week spell in late November and early December 2012, brought to the city a semblance of seasonal change. Officially, winter lasts from January till early March, and the first week of 2013 witnessed an uncharacteristically cold spell. Promptly, past instances such as January 2008, and the coldest day ever recorded in the city half a century ago, 7.4C on January 27 1962, are nostalgically invoked, as are memories of a Bombay where the mercury seasonally dipped enough to warrant sartorial attention. Woollen sales may be up this new year but fashionable shawls, jumpers, and jackets are usually deployed in this city to protect against overenthusiastic air-conditioning in high-end restaurants and movie theatres; the plebeian versions can be seen in video/film post-production studios (and B.P.Os ?). Cheap monkey caps, mufflers and jumpers, sold by Tibetan street vendors, are seen on those who work nights – security guards, rickshaw and taxi drivers, chai and cigarette-wallas who ply near train stations, taxi stands and seaside promenades. Residents are quick to point out though, that the city seems to have gotten progressively hotter.
“Bright and tempting breezes flow across the Island” and perhaps, as these words of the poet Nissim Ezekiel suggest further, they separate “the past from the future”. In 1805, Lt-Col Jasper Nichols, a former Commanderin-Chief of India, presented to The Literary Society of Bombay his Remarks Upon The Temperature Of The Island Of Bombay. In this purely factual report on average monthly differences and the greatest monthly extremes, technicalities like the placement of the thermometer are discussed at length – the western face of the Fort is deemed better due to the cool sea breezes, but by way of comparison, “similar observations made in the country, and some more unexposed part of the Fort, is necessary”.
Systematic meteorological measurement goes back a long way in the island city. The Colaba Observatory dates back to 1826. Due to the potential risk of the electromagnetic noise from trams affecting readings, an alternative observatory was set up in Alibaug in the early 20th century. A recent visit to the Indian Meteorological Department in Colaba on an unusually hot December day, underscores today’s tangled debates on urban climate change. A high of 35.2C and a relative humidity of 90 percent recorded by the tautness and slackening of strands of human hair held within the measuring hydrograph, were over 40 percent off normal. It was a bad hair day.
V.K. Rajeev, Director, Regional Meteorological Department, attributes this unseasonably high temperature to relatively warm easterly winds and an absence of western disturbances – the ‘synoptic situation’ (the general state of the atmosphere) allowed for such deviation. B.N. Goswami of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology says that there is overwhelming evidence from the scientific models pointing to a general long-term rise in
temperature: the all India average rise in temperature over a century is 0.5 °C and future predictions by the institute indicate a further increase of about 3 – 5 °C. One cannot specifically separate city changes from such broad global increasing trends. Night temperatures within cities, in pockets, have increased due to rapid urbanisation, he further indicates, but since data is collected from clear lowrise areas, there is no empirical way to claim a consistent rise of the city’s temperature in isolation from larger climate changes.
Extensive use of heat-retaining materials like concrete and asphalt, contributes to the Urban Heat Island Effect causing cities to be hotter than the areas around them. The difference in temperature is further exacerbated by emissions, urban waste, reduced natural spaces, and the heat generated by electrical appliances or machines. While ‘Micro climatic changes’ vary from city to city, this is widely considered to be a very minor factor in overall global warming and climate change which in turn is considered to be a separate issue altogether.
Darryl D’Monte, Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India, alludes to an IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report on direct urban greenhouse gas emissions to argue that cities are in fact at the centre of climate change, thanks to the exponential rise in levels of energy consumption, emissions, and other ecologically parasitic practices. Another recent IPCC report cautions that Mumbai is becoming increasingly vulnerable to floods, storms and rising sea levels, pointing to man-made changes, population shifts and poverty.
Alongside more effective civic planning, ‘green buildings’ are also considered to be part of a broader mitigation. The LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental
Design) program that evaluates ecological impact, waste management, energy conservation, health and safety measures, reduction of emissions, and other mitigating solutions for commercial ventures around the globe, is meant to “address the entire life cycle of a building”.
Air quality is always a cause for concern, particularly in a city which seems to be perpetually under construction. Winter months bring increased respiratory infections but city dwellers cheerily invoke the season through festivities. Some recall walking back from Christmas Mass in Bandra (no longer at midnight due to a dubious civic regulation), while others speak of street vendors selling roasted shingora (water chestnuts), bargaining for seasonal vegetables for the Gujarati delicacy undhiyo, migratory bird-spotting, year-end parties, new year hangovers, seasonal tourists, festivals and concerts. Such evocations then draw attention away from the temperature. And characteristically for Bombay, as noted in the Bombay Developing Committee Report (1913) by its Secretary B.W. Kissan while quite drastically recommending the removal of Worli Village, “During the cold weather, the smell from dried or drying fish is a great nuisance”.
Whether one rebuffs such provocations or lustily inhales instead, there is little choice but to engage with the city at large. As Patrick Geddes writes in the preface to Cities In Evolution (1915), our ‘Eutopia’ lies around us: “For civic considerations have to illuminate and control geographic ones, as well as conversely. Idealism and matter of fact are thus not sundered….” Wise words, as the city contends with its winter discontent, and discussions inevitably turn to the hot months ahead. The fish will still stink, but one can hope for cool, summer sea breezes.
By Clea Chakraverty
Abeautiful, purple Portuguese villa nestles amongst the trees on the top of Altinho Hill in Panjim. Built about a hundred years ago it once belonged to an old Goan family, the Rodrigues. Bought by industrialist Dattaraj Salgaocar seven years ago, it now houses Sunaparanta, a vibrant cultural centre with the coveted Bodega café. The enticing aroma of orange cakes baking in a corner wafts through the air as visitors wander through the rooms exhibiting Goan artists.
“It has always been my dream to establish a centre to develop a platform for the visual arts for Goans,” explains, Salgaocar, “and what better place than this lovely old house to set up Sunaparanta.” Programmes round the year include documentary and art films, children’s activities, workshops and events. Among the more recent events is the Shanghvi Salons, conceived by writer and photographer Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. Based in Goa for part of the year, Shanghvi is curating informal encounters between the artists and writers he admires. “I wanted to share the intimacy of these conversations with others who might care to listen in. That’s what makes these salons different from a literary festival where two or three strangers are deliberating something wonderful and vague like post-colonial fiction. I wanted to employ my knowledge of these people and encourage them to share the sort of things that have astonished me in private,” he explains.
This January, scriptwriter and author Sooni Taraporevala discussed the “work behind the work”. She also shared her experience as a young scriptwriter and debutante photographer. “We believe that art is for the masses and
not just the elite,” explains Salgaokar. The Goan literary and art scene is, with its “huge talent pool that needs to be channelised”, blossoming, according to him.
It certainly looks like it. The literary scene is coming alive elsewhere. From the Broadway bookshop that has turned into a publishing house focusing on Goa to the recent Goa Litfest, literature has taken a front seat. In Calangute, the famous Literati bookshop has been hosting workshops and events since its inception in 2005, and is today thriving with international and Goan writers stopping by for discussions and occasional book launches. Not very far, the Centre for Alternative Photography, or CAP, set up three years ago, is offering a space for research in artistic photography including a residency programme for writers (including in Indian languages) and one for photographers. n
Dariya Mahal is an elegant holdout from a calmer, more gracious era hidden within the busy Mumbai suburb of Versova. Gayatri Rangachari Shah discovers its secrets.
Photographs by Ritam Banerjee
The Palace by the sea: Overlooking the Arabian sea, stoic and elegant, Dariya Mahal is Versova’s secret pride
worst affected by unchecked construction and a lack of urban planning are the city’s northern suburbs. The former township of Versova is a prime example. Once a gracious northern corner, home to quaintly named neighbourhoods like the famous Seven Bungalows, today Versova’s cacophony of sights and sounds gives it a quintessential Mumbai air. Slow moving traffic, incessant honking and shoddy construction mar the landscape. Single family beachfront dwellings have long given way to five or six-storey buildings, most sporting hanging laundry across the ubiquitous corroded metal grilles that line their windows. Mom-and-pop dry goods stores have been replaced by fancy
coffee bars, hair salons, and designer boutiques. Given its proximity to the suburban film studios, a number of movie stars and film executives now live and work in the area, effectively making it a Bollywood hub.
Yet from this unlovely chaos there emerges a thing of beauty, a structure so charming and unexpected that visitors who pass through its entrance can’t help but gasp. A metal gate and yellow boundary wall are the only indication of what hides behind: a stately bungalow recalling the city’s once glorious architectural past. Dariya Mahal, or Palace by the Sea, is set on an acre of prime beachfront and remains largely untouched since it was built in the early 1930s.
Dariya Mahal is the last of the original seven bungalows from which the neighbourhood got its name. The house was designed by one of British India’s foremost architects, Claude Batley, for a wealthy textile merchant, Maneklal Chunilal Chinai. Batley is responsible for some of Mumbai’s most famous landmarks including Bombay Central Station, the Bombay Gymkhana, Breach Candy Hospital, Lincoln House (originally for the Maharaja of Wankaner) and Jinnah House, the former home of the founder of Pakistan.
As Maneklal’s grandson, 51-year-old Harish Chinai, tells it, when his grandfather asked Batley to build him a house, the architect told him about a recently completed residence (what is now Lincoln House) in Breach Candy that would suit his needs. “But grandad refused, saying the property didn’t have a beach, just a lot of rocks!” (Lincoln House was recently vacated and press reports suggest that a number of big companies, including the Tatas are interested in the property, which has a reported price tag close to $190 million.
From an unlovely chaos there emerges a thing of beauty, a structure so charming and unexpected that visitors who pass through its entrance can’t help but gasp
Boasting 15 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms and 20ft-high ceilings, Dariya Mahal’s existence in Mumbai’s current real estate landscape boggles the mind. Yet such bungalows were common until the 1980s, most of them having been built in the first half of the last century.
Whereas today tycoons construct paeans to the gods of height and FSI (floor space index), it wasn’t always so. Like many selfmade merchants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Maneklal prospered in the thriving textile trade between India and China. (Indeed, the Chinai family maintained a home in Shanghai, complete with a Gujarati cook, until the 1960s.) Spurred by a legendary childhood incident where a constable threw him off a beach for being Indian, Maneklal vowed to build himself a home where he could enjoy his own private beachfront sunset, and that he did, blessing his descendants with one of the best views on offer across the city. Built at a cost of Rs 150,000, which included the price of the land, a very considerable sum in those days, Dariya Mahal helped define its neighbourhood. The other six homeowners in the original Seven Bungalows area read like a Who’s Who of famous Indians: royalty like the Maharaja of Gwalior and the Maharaja of Kutch, one of the original founders of the Indian National Congress, Dadabhai Naoroji, and affluent Parsis like Sir Rustom Masani, Sorabjee Talati and the Khambattas.
Nineteen-thirties Bombay, when Dariya Mahal was constructed, was the scene of frenetic building activity, the late writer and historian Sharada Dwivedi had explained to me. Versova was a remote corner of the city, with no proper roads and no street lights. There was no wall separating the property from the
beachfront and the tide would wash up into the gardens of the house.
Built in the Indo-Saracenic style that combines traditional Hindu and Muslim elements with British Gothic and Neoclassical ones, Dariya Mahal’s façade is painted a bright ochre yellow. The property has three garages, a 1,000-square-feet guest house and one of the most spectacular, sprawling lawns in Mumbai. In the years leading to Independence, Sardar Patel, one of independent India’s founding fathers, spent time here. In the 1990s, the Hindu seer Swami Chinmayananda was a regular visitor.
The house now is almost eerily quiet despite a staff of 20, including three gardeners, a full-time electrician, a cook, a cook’s helper and four maids. In the old days this large household bought its rice directly from Amritsar and kept all its grains and produce in storage rooms adjacent to the kitchen, separate
A royal oasis: Harish Chinai’s peaceful private livingroom is forbidden to the film crews that shoot in Dariya Mahal
Steel relic:
This century-old solid Godrej almirah is the Dariya Mahal heir’s favorite artefact. It requires six men and a whole tray system to move it.
Step inside Dariya Mahal and you go back in time. High ceilings dominate the main foyer, living and dining area. Original Burma teakwood is everywhere.
from the main house as was then the norm in Indian households.
During World War II, the government attempted to appropriate Dariya Mahal for army housing using the power of eminent domain. Maneklal was devastated, but his neighbour and friend Sir Rustom Masani, the first Indian municipal commissioner of Bombay, came to his aid. He persuaded the British authorities, with whom he had excellent relations, that Maneklal had built Dariya Mahal in Versova so that his seriously ill wife could avail herself of the sea air, and it would be cruel to deny him that right. The story worked, and the bungalow remained in Chinai hands.
Step inside Dariya Mahal and you go back in time. High ceilings dominate the main foyer, living and dining area. Original Burma teakwood is everywhere. It was salvaged by the owner himself. According to Harish, after Batley had finished building Dariya Mahal, he asked Maneklal for an additional Rs 50,000 to complete the interiors. Harish says his grandfather was appalled. “He told Batley, ‘I’ve given you my entire life savings, where do I get more money?’ He ordered Batley to stop work immediately and went out to inspect the property. That’s when he saw these three old wooden boats bobbing in the water. They were Portuguese boats that had been sitting in front of the koli fishing village for about 50 years, unclaimed. So he went to the koliwada and asked about the ownership. There was a Goan character, half drunk, who claimed to own the boats, and so my grandfather proposed buying them. The Goan quoted what seemed like an outrageous sum to his mind – Rs 1,000. My grandfather handed over the money and had carpenters swim out the next day to cut up the wood and bring it ashore. That’s what all our in-
terior woodwork is made from, those old boats.”
Original glass etchings and wall carvings abound. Over the years, the furniture has been reupholstered, resulting in a mishmash of styles. Some balconies have been enclosed and the kitchen has been moved indoors, next to the dining rooms. Yet Art Deco lights and wall mouldings remain intact.
The bungalow has been divided among Maneklal’s surviving sons into three wings. Upkeep of Dariya Mahal is expensive and the owners sometimes rent it out for photo and film shoots. Perhaps the most famous film shot there is the 2006 hit Lage Raho Munna Bhai, starring Sanjay Dutt. Harish sums up the family sentiment when asked if there are any pressures to sell and cash out: “Money doesn’t bring happiness. When you walk into this house it’s like you’re at the end of the world. You can leave all your tension and stress behind.” n
The end of the world: No radical changes have been made to this hall or to any of the 15 rooms of the mansion since their construction
In the 1970s the Chinese were a major presence in India, Mumbai’s Kamling restaurant being a symbol of their staying power
Text by Sidharth Bhatia Photographs by Suleiman Merchant
Kamling:
Mr. Chen’s iconic restaurant was built in 1938-1939. It has had its loyal patrons for generations.
TO WALK INTO KAMLING, THE Chinese restaurant near Churchgate station in South Mumbai, is to enter a time capsule. Outside, a large sign has the name in Mandarin, something that has become increasingly rare in recent years. The décor – brush paintings, red walls and tasselled Chinese lanterns, traditional music piped through the speakers – is redolent of an earlier time, circa 1970s. It would delight an art director searching for a location for a period film. As for the food, new dishes have been added over the years, but the staples remain, because to banish them would
upset customers. In a city where the newer Chinese – and other – restaurants promise a cool, minimalist, ethnicity-free look and where pricier has come to mean better, Kamling stands firm in its stolidity, harking back to a simpler time. Mumbai’s swish set is more at home in watering holes carved out of once humming factories or set in crumbling old bungalows. Kamling could seem a relic of an older, pre-Reforms India, when options – and awareness – of ‘foreign’ cuisine could only be limited. Sweet corn chicken soup, spring rolls, chicken sweet and sour, Hakka noodles and mixed fried rice, were the high-carb staples.
The choice then was between fancy restaurants in five star hotels, where the middle classes feared to tread or restaurants serving mainly north Indian food, which meant meat swimming in oil. For a family that wished to be adventurous and go beyond the familiar, standalone Chinese restaurants were a good compromise – exotic enough, but yet somehow familiar and comforting. Kamling and many others fulfilled that need in Bombay for decades.
But today’s Mumbai offers a wide range of trendy restaurants where one can have Sushi, Pasta, Chorizo sausages or Crepes. The welltravelled, global-minded consumer, who is a regular watcher of food shows on television, is loath to go where the masses go. If at all he craves Chinese, there is no dearth of fine dining restaurants which will rustle up even a Peking Duck at short notice. Besides, those are the restaurants where the stars and celebrities hang out. Why then go to Kamling? Because it still dishes out excellent chow and delivers value for money. It is one of the last few Chinese restaurants owned by the fast dwindling Chinese community of Bombay. Tulun ‘Terence’ Chen, who runs the restaurant, is now a community elder and has held on to the place even while other joints – Nanking, Mandarin, Ssi Hai – have shut down and only Ling’s Pavilion, Flora and China Garden survive. But Kamling has history on its side. Chen insists the food served at Kamling is authentic. Authenticity is a tricky concept at most times, and world-weary sophisticates are notoriously sniffy about anything that may have been diluted to pander to local tastes. And it is true that Indo-Chinese cuisine, the bastard child created to satisfy the spice cravings of Indian taste buds, is a travesty, even if it is wildly suc-
cessful. But Kamling has resisted going down that route. As Chen says, “I could easily throw in some masala and make the dishes palatable to Indian tastes. But I have refused to do it.”
His restaurant offers a combination of Hakka, Hunan, Cantonese and Sichuan food, a wide representation from China. Chen, now in his 60s, has been running Kamling since 1968, when he acquired it in the strangest of circumstances. As he tells it, Kamling was set up in 1938-39 by a group of Chinese who had been working in Bombay. Bombay had a small, but thriving, Chinese community.
Large numbers of Chinese workers had been moving to India from the early 1800s – mainly to Bombay and Calcutta – to take up odd jobs in the docks, working as sailors, carpenters and mechanics with the East India Company. The Imperial connection with Hong Kong and trade between India and China meant that ships moved between the two countries and it was not unknown for sailors to get off at Indian ports to try their luck here. Though exact numbers are difficult to come by, there were thousands of Chinese in Bombay by the early 1900s, most living in and around the dock areas. They missed home food and a few restaurants had come up to service them. The oldest recorded one in Bombay was Lok Jun (apparently set up in 1895) on what is now called Shuklaji Street in Kamathipura, which had gained notoriety as the city’s red light district with its infamous “cages” from where prostitutes operated. The street got the name “Cheena gully” because of its Chinese residents and small businesses. Kamling’s founders were obviously a bit better off because they chose as the location for their restaurant the newly constructed Nagin Mahal on Churchgate Street near Marine Drive.
For a family that wished to be adventurous and go beyond the familiar, standalone Chinese restaurants were a good compromise
Large numbers of Chinese were shipped off to internment camps... in Rajasthan where they languished even after the war of 1962
The entire stretch was built on reclaimed land in the 1930s in the latest Art Deco style and Churchgate Street was where fancy restaurants, such as Gourdon’s and Bombelli’s, serving European food to British residents also came up. It is here that the city’s fledgling jazz culture took root in the 1940s and right next to Kamling stands the Ambassador hotel, the favourite nightspot of the city’s well-heeled of the time, known for its nightly entertainment. The sole Chinese establishment on the street caught on fast. But the British administration was wary of the Chinese. A weekly confidential circular of the Special Branch of the CID also detailed the shady activities of Chinese nationals in the city, listing those from China who had entered the country but had not got themselves registered. The police kept a close eye on their activities, such as the formation of clubs and associations. The Chinese Seaman’s Association, founded in 1944, for example, interested the police greatly, which reported it to the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi. The interests of the community were closely monitored by the consulate of the Republic of China which, in a letter to the Bombay government assured that the Association was formed to look after the interests of sailors and coordinate with shipping companies. The consulate’s letter pointed out that there was as yet “no association formed which can claim to look after the interests of the Chinese population in general”.
After the British left, the police did not give up its scrutiny of the community. But it was not until the early 1960s, when relations between India and China deteriorated that the Chinese community settled in Indian cities came under suspicion. Large numbers of Chinese were shipped off to internment
camps, most of them to Deoli in dry and hot Rajasthan where they languished even after the war of 1962. Many were repatriated to China and some chose to migrate to Canada. Kamling shut down and went into receivership with the original owners fighting amongst themselves. In 1967, Chen, then a teenager, was walking near Victoria Terminus station when he came upon a commotion. An old Chinese gent had fallen on the road and a crowd had gathered. Chen rushed him to a hospital where he looked after him for a few days. The man turned out to be Tham Monyin, the sole owner of Kamling, and he lived alone in a small room with no one to care for him. All he wanted, he said, was 3200 rupees, enough money to fly to Hong Kong – he had decided to leave India. Chen and his friends collected 4500 rupees between them and bought him a ticket. A year or so later Chen got a letter from a lawyer’s office in Hong Kong – Tham, it said, had died and willed him a restaurant in Churchgate. Chen’s father was a well-regarded dentist in Bombay and there was no one in the family who had any experience in running restaurants. Chen senior suggested he take the help of the Thams, a prominent IndianChinese family who owned the Mandarin restaurant in Colaba. Chen took the plunge and soon Kamling was refurbished and re-opened. Bombay at that time was humming with Chinese food restaurants. Most of them were in Colaba, the premier shopping strip in south Bombay and nearly all were owned and managed by members of the local Chinese Indian community. After jobs in the docks dried up in the wake of the war, the Chinese, many of them Hakka and from Canton, Hupeh and Shandong, opened restaurants and the women set up beauty salons. Chinese beauticians
Mazagaon’s temple:
In the upper wing of the temple, the visitor enters a rich sanctuary, similar to those in Hong-Kong
were in great demand in the city. Tham’s in Colaba was an institution, where the crème de la crème came to get their hair done. For Hindi film actresses, a Chinese hair-dresser was a must-have accessory. Leather goods was another popular business. South Bombay was dotted with Chinese shoemakers who got their raw material from the tanneries of Tangra, Calcutta’s own Chinatown. Some, like Chen’s father, became dentists – there are still a few of them dotted around Grant Road. Less visible to the general public but known to the well-informed were the dark, dank opium dens, presided over by Chinamen, where you went to get your shot of the drug. Though significant numbers of Chinese migrated abroad, for others, Bombay – or Calcutta, Kolhapur and other cities they lived in – was home. They spoke the local language and though they tried to keep their customs and language alive, assimilation was difficult to avoid. Inter-community marriage was not always possible; in the Raj days, a husband or wife could be imported from Hong Kong, but it became difficult later.
Like the other Chinese restaurants, Kamling became hugely popular. Whatever their views about China as the aggressor, Indians loved Chinese food. It had three vital attributes that made it appealing to their palate –it had gravy, starch, and most of all, it could easily be made spicy, either with red chilli powder or the addition of the condiments and sauces provided at each table. Some dishes like the infamous Chicken Manchurian – marinated chicken balls deep fried after dipping them in ginger-garlic flavoured cornflour and garnished with spring onions and – and its vegetarian version with cauliflower were practically invented in India to appeal
to the Indian customer.
By the 1980s several Bombay restaurants had shut down, often due to internal family issues and sometimes because the next generation had other plans. Migration reduced the community’s numbers to barely a few thousand – Chen, who is also the long-serving president of the Maharashtra Chinese Association puts the current figure at around 3,000 in the state. Calcutta, which has a bonafide “China Town” in Tangra, where old tanneries have shut down to make way for restaurants, has about 10,000 Chinese. With the declining numbers, many of the old community institutions in Bombay too died: the language school in Agripada, the Hakka club off Grant Road station, the old hookah parlours of Shuklaji Street where opium was smoked, have all gone. There are still a few dentists around and some hairdressers too, but the shoemakers are almost all gone. Young Chinese Indians, though perhaps the most comfortable in India, have their sights on Toronto and Sydney or want to take up other jobs in India – Bangalore is the hot new destination.
In Nawab Tank Road, in the heart of Mazagaon in central Bombay, where many Chinese had settled because of its proximity to the docks, is a small temple dedicated to Guan Gong, the god of courage and justice. The familiar Chinese motifs are all there – fortune scrolls, incense sticks and the dragons – but it is usually quite empty. Though most Chinese are now Christians, they assemble here in large numbers on Chinese New Year day to pray and feast. Every year the congregation looks slimmer. Every community has its own special needs. In his capacity as the chairman of the Chinese Association, Chen approached the Bombay collectorate for more space for
Many of the old community institutions died: the language school in Agripada, the Hakka club off Grant Road station, the old hookah parlours of Shuklaji Street where opium was smoked
A meal at new fancy restaurants can set one back by a mini-fortune. Kamling falls somewhere in between these upscale restaurants and the low-priced ones with greasy spoons dotted all over Mumbai.
the tiny Chinese cemetery in Wadala, which was falling short; the authorities responded by giving an additional 10,000 square feet, almost doubling the current plot. He is also trying to get funding for the language school to ensure that youngsters don’t lose their link with their culture. But his bravest fight has been to keep Kamling going. It could have easily gone under; with trends and fashions changing and with some heavy-duty competition from five star hotels and international chains, it is a miracle that Kamling still survives and thrives. Churchgate has lost some of its cachet as the city’s nightspot. Now the action – and the money – is in the northern suburbs. In Bandra, restaurants like Hakkasan, with its pricey menu and its nouvelle Chinese cuisine, with items like Duck with Ossetra caviar are the go-to places for the rich. Vijayan Gangadharan, the F & B Director at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Santactruz, which runs the popular China House restaurant, explains how a discerning new audience is constantly searching out newer experiences and is much more aware than the previous generation was about Chinese food and what it should taste like. “Our customers have travelled all over the world. They know what they want, and they can detect it if we try and needlessly Indianise the food,” he says. The hotel decided to go in for Sichuan cuisine, knowing that its spicy notes would be a hit with the Indian consumer. In keeping with that theme, China House does not have too many traditional Indian favourites, though it could not avoid a dim sum section, which is Cantonese. Yet, China House customers are ready to try out abalone and ginseng-based dishes, which are new to Mumbai.
A meal at these fancy restaurants can set
one back by a mini-fortune, at least when compared to Kamling, where prices have been kept at moderate levels. Kamling falls somewhere between these upscale restaurants and the low-priced ones with greasy spoons dotted all over Mumbai where short order cooks can rustle up a carb-heavy, spicy noodles dish as easily as they can make chicken, Mughlai style. Scores, even hundreds, of such multi cuisine hole-in-the-wall joints have cropped up all over the country, testifying to the fact that Indians now consider “Chinese” food their own. Restaurants serving Chinese food in different parts of India – most of them run by non-Chinese people – will gladly cater to the taste buds of their Punjabi or Gujarati customers, since they are amongst those who eat out a lot. Kamling has resisted all such market pressures, says Chen. He still imports ingredients from Hong Kong and Singapore and his famous dishes – Chimney soup, for example, which has remained on the menu for decades – is as authentic as it can get. “Chinese and Korean expats come here regularly, because they know they can get real Chinese food,” he says proudly. The secret of his success is also linked to his understanding of his customers and occasionally bending his own rules for their convenience. Kamling has had its loyal patrons for generations, some who came there with their own parents and now come with their children, and Chen has worked out many of their preferences. He knows the Parsi penchant for sweet and sour – garlic prawns are among their favourites – and a discreetly scribbled P on the order slip lets the kitchen know how to slightly modify the dish for the customer. But it is his Chinese heritage that has really
worked to his advantage. Chen, the unlikely restaurateur, is passionate about food and Kamling and is a regular sight at the docks early in the morning, looking for the freshest fish from the catch that has just been brought in. His visits have now reduced, after an accident left him somewhat weak, but he still eats in the restaurant and goes around suggesting new dishes to diners. The profile of the Kamling customer has somewhat changed –in the afternoons it is the young executives from neighbouring offices who come for the All You Can Eat buffet; at night, families still come but the typical customer has become older. Chen knows that Indians play it safe, so will occasionally send them a complimentary dish to help them move beyond their comfort zone. He knows he has to move with the times. Keeping that in mind, Chen is also thinking
of changing the décor of the restaurant. He isn’t revealing what he has in mind – perhaps something minimalist, in keeping with current styles, or maybe a trendier, hipper place to bring in younger crowds. Will the renovation mean goodbye to all that Chinoiserie, the Ming vases, the Chinese lanterns? Will the menu change too?
As the restaurant approaches its 75th year, a refurbishment to take it forward could certainly be an option. On the other hand, its loyal customers would not want a large-scale makeover; Kamling not only has its place in Mumbai’s culinary landscape but is also a part of the city’s cosmopolitan history. It deserves to go on and on, unchanging and unmindful of passing fads, to remind us that some things in a fast moving world will always remain the same. n
Smile please: After jobs in the docks dried up, many Chinese immigrants took up other businesses like Chen’s father who became a dentist
Nizamuddin
By Gillian Wright Nizamuddin East
The area of NizamuddiN iN
South delhi stands on a triangle of land between the old course of the river Yamuna and one of its smaller tributaries. People have lived here for over 700 years. Today the area is known for its railway station and for two post-1947 housing colonies divided by the roaring traffic of mathura road. on one side stands the majestic tomb of the mughal emperor humayun and the upmarket colony of Nizamuddin east. on the other is the dargah, or shrine, of the Sufi saint after whom the area is named, and the less upmarket colony of Nizamuddin West whose fate is irrevocably entwined with the basti, the narrow-alleyed, densely populated settlement surrounding the dargah.
for 30 years i lived in Nizamuddin east, venturing to the West only occasionally. i did appreciate that Nizamuddin as a whole was special. Because of the dargah we had some of the best neighbours imaginable – although admittedly they were long dead. There was the Sufi’s disciple, the poet, musician and courtier amir Khusro, the soldier-poet rahim Khan-e-Khanan, the mughal princess Jahanara and delhi’s beloved 19th century poet, mirza Ghalib to name but a few. and, largely because of the legacy of Nizamuddin, the area had an extraordinary density of Sultanate and mughal buildings, and living traditions that stretched back across the centuries.
But i lived an east-centric life and it was the east i observed as it transformed over the decades. in the late 1970s the tributary of the Yamuna that runs along the southern side of the colony was a not unpleasant open drain, with a leafy footpath leading
past a government nursery. Gradually, this nala became covered with slums where all kinds of drugs were readily available, code named as different types of sweets. over the same period another slum, of a more middle class nature, grew on the eastern side of the colony beside the main railway line to agra in the old bed of the Yamuna. This slum surrounded the Nila Gumbad, a brightlytiled mughal domed tomb, which originally stood at the end of a man-made causeway projecting into the river. We used to walk our dog along the railway line beyond the Nila Gumbad to enjoy the sight of the great steam locomotives that were ending their days as shunting engines. at sunset their fireboxes were emptied on to the tracks and slum dwellers would glean unburned coal from the piles of embers.
The southern walls of humayun’s tomb complex marked the northern boundary of the colony. in those days most of the gardens within, where we residents took our constitutionals, belonged more to wildlife than to human beings. inside snakes and peacocks flourished. Clouds of butterflies fed on the flowering bushes overgrowing graves. red munia, silverbills and dozens of other bird species lived undisturbed. Whitebacked vultures, now close to extinction throughout india, sat on every dome and nested in great silk cotton trees. Grey partridge whirred up underfoot, and once in a while you could find a monitor lizard. The archaeological Survey’s gardeners made occasional attempts to control matters, but they were generally overpowered by nature’s abundance.
Then things changed. The age of steam finally ended. The slums were cleared,
Red munia and dozens of other bird species lived undisturbed. White-backed vultures, now close to extinction throughout India, sat on every dome.
their inhabitants granted plots of land in the city suburbs. Security became an issue that citizens were encouraged to deal with themselves. Green metal gates sprang up over the colony’s public roads, reminding me of the katras of Old Delhi that could be closed off at night. And eventually an elevated road was built over the nala, leaving the drain below in ghastly disarray.
Humayun’s Tomb, meanwhile, gained deserved recognition as a World Heritage Monument and began to be restored. The wilderness that supported the wildlife was pushed back. Inside the colony property prices began to spiral, and simple single storey houses were demolished and replaced by blocks of flats. The colony became smarter, cleaner, the parks impeccably manicured.
Residents changed too. The artist Jatin Das, with his vintage Morris Minor, moved out, and the great B.C. Sanyal passed away after celebrating his 102nd birthday. But other artists – notably Anjolie Ela Menon and Arpita Singh – moved in. A whole host of journalists, architects, academics and many others made Nizamuddin East a very pleasant place to stay. But it was perhaps becoming a shade too quiet and too well organised.
Rents were also soaring and the time had come for us to move. We scoured Delhi, NOIDA and Gurgaon for a place we would like to live in. After eight months of effort our friend Salman Haider was proved right. He had predicted, ‘You will never be able to leave Nizamuddin,’ and in fact all we did, with some trepidation, was to cross the road into the West.
We discovered that as Nizamuddin East had ascended the ladder of elite colonies,
the West was in gentle decay. Old houses had been sold but not rebuilt and were gradually falling apart. Two opposite us had been bought as investments by businessmen – one from Karol Bagh, and another from Chandni Chowk. There was a stamp of Old Delhi on this New Delhi colony despite the fact that the residents included a mix of professionals and academics, as well as the descendants of Punjabi refugees. The fact was that the area had become an aspirational address for Muslims who found Old Delhi too crowded. A large part of this attraction was a basti which was not only famous for the dargah but for the world headquarters of the conservative Tablighi Jamaat that taught Muslims how to be better Muslims and disapproved of visiting the tombs of saints –including that of Hazrat Nizamuddin.
The colony now had as many Muslim as Hindu residents. Women wore burqas to take their brisk walk around the park, and spoke to each other in Urdu rather than Punjabi.
The most splendid occasion in the Residents’ Association was an Iftaar party. Surprisingly, I found that members of both communities had reservations about the burgeoning basti, and feared that it was taking over the colony – in fact the basti’s cars and two wheelers already occupied large areas of roadside and chunks of municipal park.
For me, the immediate difference between East and West was the sudden sense of belonging to a proper old-fashioned community. A lane to the basti ran past our new home and our back door opened on to it. After the human silence surrounding our bungalow in the East, I found the constant sound of children’s and adults’ voices companionable. In the mornings I heard not
Cooking for numbers: Workers get the langar ready
was activity day and night. It was a place you could never be lonely in, and I began to pass the time of day even with the spiky-haired basti youths whose main love in life was their motorbikes.
I was awed by the medieval glory of the outer walls of the great Sultanate mosque that stood a few yards from our back door. I learned that the tower inside had once been the last in a line of look-out posts keeping watch over the banks of the Yamuna. In the well-swept alley behind the mosque, twice a week, cooks prepared massive amounts of food that were then carried off to the dargah and distributed in a free langar (meal served in mass charity).
Food in general was an omnipresent life. The Jamaat and the dargah attracted streams of visitors that were engines of the local economy. Countless eateries sold kebabs, nihari and biryani. Shalgam gosht (mutton with turnips) and qeema pakoras (mince fritters) as well as heart-shaped potato tikkis were on sale at wayside stalls. There were bakers making rusks and naan bhais producing piles of fresh roti from tandoors.
Generosity and sharing were part of this traditional food culture. On the ninth day of Moharram, the evening of the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson Imam Husain, I met a smart young man who, with his mother, was busy overseeing the cooking of two huge cauldrons of halim in the
lane outside his house. He told me that every year on this night, his family cooked halim and distributed it to the public. “Every family distributes food today, according to their means,” he went on, “I don’t think you would find anything like this in Europe.” “Do you know Europe?” I asked. “Actually I’m a chef in Barcelona,” he replied. I stared at him in astonishment. “It’s a long story,” he laughed, “but I’ve been there for ten years. Now I’m thinking that I’ll come back in January and open a Spanish and Italian restaurant here in the basti. Do you think it would do well?”
I told him it was a great idea, looking forward to a daily diet of tiramisu, and promised to come back and share the halim when it was ready.
Those ten days of Moharram showed me glimpses of yet another side of the basti Moharram is a time when the tragedies that beset the Prophet’s family are remembered and mourned. One night, I followed the green standards of a procession from the dargah’s imambara, literally the house of the Imam, through the narrow lanes. Doorways I had never noticed were opened to reveal the graves of generations of descendants of the saint’s spiritual family. The procession went from grave to grave to the throbbing beats of the tasha and dhol, loud enough to waken the dead, and when the drums stopped, the qawwals raised their voices in soulful soz and salaams. The candle-lit graves seemed to light the spiritual silsila, the chain of inheritance, from the present through past generations back to Hazrat Nizamuddin himself.
Only men took part in that procession, but Moharram was an occasion for all the family. On the ninth night I walked to the imambara where the largest tazia, or replica
of the tomb of Imam Husain, sits in state. It was crowded with women, children and men paying their respects and, despite this being a solemn occasion, many of them seemed very happy to be there, and were distributing sweets and biryani that had first been offered at the tazia. This was by now smothered with masses of deep pink roses and creamy white chrysanthemum flowers. Incense rose in clouds. Near midnight a man carrying a huge semi-circular pankha, or fan, on his shoulders entered and spun round and round to the beat of the drums. The women and children turned to watch. At midnight the standards and tazia were carried out in another procession and I walked home with the women, feeling somehow blessed.
A few days later I found myself back in the basti, this time in a new grassy park that had just been created in place of a general dumping ground. I was in a throng of basti residents of all ages who were thoroughly enjoying their first mela in their own park. The mela was organised by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture which besides conserving the Humayun’s tomb area, is working with government agencies in a sustained urban renewal project aimed at improving the quality of life and opportunities for everyone in the basti. This was the kind of help the basti really needed as, like other urban villages, it had developed with no regulation and suffered from all the ills faced by underprivileged areas of the city.
The enthusiasm and hope around me was another reason to be proud of my new area. I would have a chance to witness and in some small way be a part of a new stage in the history of Nizamuddin, and especially the basti. Yes, I was very glad I’d moved West. n
(Mixed media, including wood, paint on leather, 200 cm, 2012)
Saad Qureshi works on the distortion of reality through the disciplines of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing and questions the relationship between the perceiver and the observer. His series of works has been shown at Gazelli Art House, London.
Alba Arikha reminisces about her own troubled adolescence and her father’s struggles as a Jewish artist in war-time Europe
PePi lives outside Jerusalem. the road leading up to her house smells of lavender and pine, mingled with manure from the nearby hills. she is waiting for us on her doorstep, a small figure in a polka-dot dress. Her white, curly hair is soft like cotton, her caramel skin has the warmth of honey and sunshine. she hugs my father in German, kisses my mother in Hebrew, clasps my sister and me against her chest. When she releases her grasp, her soft brown eyes look at us attentively. You are beautiful girls, she tells us. Pepi speaks to us in French, which she learnt at school when she was a young girl. she rolls her r’s with a gentle click of the tongue, and many of her sentences are grammatically incorrect. But we don’t mind. Liebe Kinder. Beautiful girls, she repeats wistfully. Beautiful? No. Neither of us is beautiful. my sister hides beneath a mass of unruly curly hair and thick glasses. i walk straight and stiff, like a puppet on a string. a metal bar runs down my spine, a cotton scarf shielding the outside world from the ungainly pink contraption which begins underneath my chin and settles above my hips. once we remove this back brace, you will look like a ballerina, the doctor had said. like a ballerina. anything but a ballerina.
Pepi’s eyes fill with tears, as they do each time she sees us. irrepressible tears which irritate me. Why does she always cry ? i ask my father. Because she sees our existence as a miracle. Why?
i already told you. during the war, we were destined to die, not to live. this is a concept i cannot relate to. life has barely begun, too soon for death even to
enter the picture. My sister is nine years old, I am twelve. Soon, I will enter womanhood. I have nascent acne bumps to prove it. I will become beautiful and popular, and life will be good to me.
Life wasn’t always good to my father, or to his mother, but now it is. One must move on, my father says. No need to dwell on the past. Only his nocturnal screams are a reminder of what it was like: Raus Jude! Achtung! We can often hear him shout in his sleep. Nazi flashbacks, as my mother explains.
The power of my father’s unconscious is startling. As if he mustn’t be allowed to forget. I know about Nazis, about flashbacks. I know how embarrassed my father would be if he knew that we heard him.
I dread my own unconscious. I cannot think of anything worse than having my secrets exposed.
When I see my grandmother cry, I cringe. Same for my parents. A poem, a piece of music, a quote is enough to unleash in them a torrent of emotions which I find repellent. How could anyone let their emotions tumble out of their system like wet laundry? Where do their boundaries lie? I know about boundaries. I read about them in various books. Russian legends with swashbuckling soldiers and blushing maidens. French classics where bashfulness wins over brazenness. When naughty children overstep their boundaries they get punished over and over again. I get reprimanded, but never punished. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I am as hard as steel, like the metal bar which holds my spine in place.
My sister, Noga, has skin like yogurt. Thick, white, creamy yogurt. Like me, she
wears glasses with prescription lenses that dilate our eyes like bubbles, a device more suited for the elderly than the young girls that we are. But our vision needs to be corrected. This is not about how we look, says my father, but how we see. How the world sees us, however, is irrelevant. One shouldn’t care about what people think, we are told, over and over again. Don’t you ever listen to anybody except yourself.
I listen to myself, but I also listen to my father. And so does my grandmother. I see her face light up every time she looks at him and listens to his words. Vigo, she sighs. Lieber Vigo, she repeats, occasionally passing her hand through his curly hair. Her manicured nails are polished a deep red.
Why does she always say that? asks Noga. Why does she always repeat your name? What do you expect after thirteen years of separation? answers my father. Thirteen years of separation.
My mother asks us to follow Pepi inside the house. Her husband, Jean, gazes wearily at us. Thick lines cover his face like twigs, and his hands tremble incessantly. He points his shaky finger towards a plate of biscuits. You like?
My sister shrugs her shoulders. Pepi walks over and admonishes Jean in German. He shakes his head slowly, like a tired dog. Pepi disappears into the kitchen while my mother talks to Jean. Her voice sounds like a purr, and he listens with a large smile on his face. My father starts to pace around the room, nervously. Pepi emerges from the kitchen, holding a cake triumphantly. We sit around a table in her small garden, while she cuts the slices tenderly, as if she were caressing our cheeks.
Eat, meine kindern, eat.
The harsh Israeli sun, which shows no respite during the day, is starting to set. Soon it will be pitch dark. Sunsets don’t linger here. Nighttime happens quickly. A door slamming into darkness, black as coal.
Two photographs stand on the corner of my father’s overflowing bookshelf. One shows him as a child, with his father and sister, walking down the Herrengasse in Czernowitz in 1932. It is winter and all three of them are wearing fur coats and hats.
The other photograph is a family portrait taken in 1939. My grandfather, Karl, has an angular face and stern eyes. He stands behind his wife in a white shirt, dark suit and tie. Pepi sits demurely, her hands neatly crossed on her lap. A brooch is pinned on to her dark dress and her hair is neatly combed back. Elena stands on her left, in a neat white frock, her long hair parted on the side. She is fifteen years old and smiles widely at the camera.
Life wasn’t always good to my father, or to his mother, but now it is. One must move on, my father says. No need to dwell on the past. Only his nocturnal screams are a reminder of what it was like: Raus Jude! Achtung! We can often hear him shout in his sleep. Nazi flashbacks.
My father, who is ten but appears much younger, stands between his parents, dressed in flannel Bermuda shorts, a white shirt and tie, and a single-breasted lapel jacket with three gold buttons. He wears round glasses and seems pensive.
There is an atmosphere of quiet formality in the photograph. It is visible in their overall demeanour, but also in the family backdrop a framed photograph
hanging on a wall – their wall? the plush, ottoman-style armchair my grandmother is sitting in. What did the photographer see as he snapped their picture? I wonder. Did he notice the stiff body language between Pepi and her husband? The carefree attitude in Elena’s gestures? Or did he discern a gifted child behind my father’s thick frames? Perhaps he only focused on their gaze. On their spotless attire. Their attire, that day. I can almost smell the soap they would have used before changing into their finest clothes. The French perfume my grandmother would have dabbed on her wrists. The hair gel Elena would have passed through her wavy hair. The polish Karl would have used on his shoes.
The photographer couldn’t possibly know that within two years, those same people he had photographed would be covered in filth and infested with lice. That they would contract typhus in a Romanian concentration camp. That they would fight for their lives in sub-zero temperatures, and that their feet would turn to ice. That they, along with many others, would be stripped of their humanity but would keep their indignity to themselves. Because once indignity is unleashed, there is no turning back.
You must be strong and resilient. You cannot fall.
Our class is going on a trip. We travel to Lozère, by train. I share a dormitory with other girls. Annabelle, Barbara, Brigitte,
Isabelle. Whereas in Paris they barely acknowledge my presence, here, on unknown territory, they do. My brace, a cause of derision at school, is seen here as an impediment worthy of some sort of pity. Annabelle decides to become my friend. So does Barbara, a Greek girl. Barbara is beautiful and popular with boys. One day, as we are eating lunch in the large cafeteria, she asks me which church I attend in Paris. I’m Jewish, I tell her. I don’t go to Church.
The Jews killed Jesus Christ. I cannot be your friend, she announces.
We milk cows in Lozère and visit the Cantal factory, where they make cheese. We taste the cheese with our fingers and learn about the pasteurization process. We walk for miles on country roads and learn how to light bonfires.
I don’t take a shower for two weeks, and when I finally return to Paris, ecstatic about the trip, my parents tell me that I smell. So do all the other children and nothing could make me happier. We all smell because we chose to rebel against the common showers. I was part of the rebellion. I became one of them. United in stink.
The photographer couldn’t possibly know that within two years, those same people he had photographed would be covered in filth and infested with lice. That they would fight for their lives in subzero temperatures, and that their feet would turn to ice.
ever. So much for his godfatherly duties. Then again, he is no ordinary godfather and he never shirked on presents before. On the contrary. His generosity towards me has always been laudable. Do you realize what this means? My father often reminds me. Do you understand the significance of Sam’s gifts? Yes, I do. No, you don’t. I’m holding on to them until you’re able to understand their value. You don’t need to. I understand their value. No, you don’t. You’re a child. I’m not a child. I’m a young woman. I understand the significance of his gifts: a first edition of one his novels. The silver spoon he had as a baby. A coral necklace which I’ve never worn. But I don’t understand the overbearing habit of highlighting a uniqueness I have recognized on my own.
Sam follows my father into the living room. He pulls out a sheet of paper and hands it over to me. Happy birthday, he says. So he did remember, after all. I shouldn’t have doubted him. I hold the typescript in my hand. Il fut trouvé par terre. It was found on the ground. I look at Sam and smile. Thank you, I say.
He smiles back. It’s just one page. A special page.
Samuel Beckett is coming to dinner. He is tall and gaunt, with sharp cheekbones and blue eyes like the sea.
As I have turned thirteen a few days before, he wishes me a happy birthday and kisses me on both cheeks. No present, how-
A bottle of Jameson whiskey is opened. My father and Sam talk about his latest play, while my mother prepares dinner in the kitchen. Noga follows us into the living room. My father puts on a Schubert sonata and tells me to be quiet. Noga sits still while I fidget in my chair. I can hear pots and pans
being rattled around in the kitchen.
Don’t talk while the music is on, I am warned. He then proceeds to close his eyes while Sam remains motionless. I squirm in my seat until my father orders me to leave the room. I ask Noga if she’ll follow me. I want to stay here, she says. Fine. I rush off to the bathroom and apply grey eye shadow to my eyelids, then wipe it off. No make-up allowed at home. Not at thirteen years old. Too young, still. How come Noga is so different from me? I wonder. When she has conversations with my father, her questions are neatly formulated, her answers pondered upon at great length. They discuss western thoughts and deeds performed centuries ago. They have few dealings with the present, but much to uncover about the mysteries of the past. My father listens to Noga and she to him. They sit and talk quietly. She neither fights nor judges him. He’ll never change, she once said to me, so what’s the point? Somehow, I know she’s right. But in order to affirm my identity, I still need to fight him back. We rarely sit and talk quietly. Most of the time, we stand up and argue. Why don’t you ever listen to me? He shouts. I’m telling you about David, one of the greatest painters alive! I’m listening! I shout back.
But I’m not. I’m more interested in how people lived, as opposed to what they accomplished. I’m interested in what they couldn’t say and those feelings they didn’t share. It must have been harder then, to share feelings.
Sam follows me into my bedroom and sits at the piano with me. I play him a Mozart sonata. I know that piece, he says. His voice is low and raspy. He tries playing too,
although his right hand is hampered by a muscular disease.
We sit down for dinner. Your eyes look puffy, my mother remarks. Fish is served and Sam swallows the fish bones. Calcium, he says. He recounts a trip to Dublin. A few people he saw, places he revisited. My father asks him about the new production of his play, Happy Days. Their friend in London, Jocelyn, designed the set. My mother wheels in a plate of cheeses. Sam recites a Shakespeare sonnet, then Keats. Ode to a Nightingale. My mother joins in, while my father grins throughout. I must go and finish my homework, I announce, after dessert is served. We discuss homework, and school. Sam asks a few questions, I answer evasively. I cannot wait for dinner to end.
Do you know what it means to have such a man in your life? My father asks me later on. Is it about meaning? I feel like asking him. But I don’t.
I am sitting in a café with my father, on the Boulevard de Port Royal. It is a beautiful spring day and the terrace is filled with students and regulars, couples and older people who huddle in corners against the yellowing café walls. My father is fidgety; he hates cafés.
Look at all those stupid smokers, he says, pointing around us. They don’t realize what they’re doing to themselves. They’re killing themselves these idiots. Killing themselves. Yes, abba, I mutter.
A man reading the newspaper looks up at me and smiles. A pack of cigarettes lies in front of him. He sips his coffee from a white espresso cup. Someone puts some coins in the jukebox. Cocaine starts playing, filling
the café with the sound of Eric Clapton’s voice.
This is horrible, my father says, leaving his salad untouched. Cigarettes and now this barbaric music? Let’s go. I still have half an hour before my French class. I tell him, attacking my steak- frites. And we were supposed to talk.
Yes, I know...it’s for my history project....Yes, yes I know. You want to know about the war. But why here? Why in such a place? Why not at home? I don’t know...I guess I wanted to do it somewhere different, where we wouldn’t be interrupted. My father snickers. Wouldn’t be interrupted. And this place is calmer, hmmm? He looks at me from behind his glasses and peers at me closely. There’s something blue and shiny on your eyelids. What is that?
I sigh, exasperatedly. It’s eye shadow. I’m fifteen years old, abba. Yes, I’m wearing a tiny bit of eye-makeup. He looks floored. And he doesn’t know half the truth. About the bright red lipstick I apply on the street. The fishnet stockings underneath my trousers. The mini skirt shoved inside my school bag. The cigarettes zipped inside my pocket. The chewing gum to hide the smell. The boyfriend I kiss in the school hallway and fondle in his house when his father is away. The green hair I had to chop off the other night because the dye wouldn’t come off. The music I stash underneath my bed. The Clash, The Pretenders, The Cure, Pink Floyd. And others, too. Joni Mitchell, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young. I listen to them at night, when everyone is sleeping. Forbidden music, this is. So I make up the rules. So, what do you want to know? Czernowitz. Start with Czernowitz. He pours himself
a glass of water. We arrived in Czernowitz in 1940, from Radautz. Where? Bukovina. The Austro-Hungarian empire. We had to flee when it was annexed by the Germans. My father was a communist Jew. A Zionist. Not a good combination for the Germans although the Soviets didn’t mind. They provided us with the house in Czernowitz. Do you remember it? Czernowitz, I mean? Of course. It was an intellectual town. A sophisticated place. We lived in a villa. A nice house. So, your parents were rich? My father smiles. My mother was a bourgeoise. She came from a prominent family. Before meeting my father, she had fallen for an umbrella manufacturer, a rich man from Bucharest. Her parents were delighted. Then she met my father, a penniless intellectual who spoke ten languages. She chose to marry him instead. My grandparents strongly disapproved. They said that Karl was too intellectual. That he was teaching me the wrong values. That knowledge wasn’t essential, but earning a living was.
And what about your father’s family? My father pauses. He had two brothers. One of them had the biggest pharmacy in Czernowitz. He was a respected man. One day he was deported. The Russians said it was because he was a koulak. That meant he was exploiting others. My father went to the NKVD to try to save him I’ve been a communist since 1912, Karl said. Please let my brother go. But the men at the NKVD told him that if he insisted they would send him away, just like his brother. What was the NKVD? The secret service. It later became the KGB. We later found out that my uncle killed himself together with his wife, in the gulag. They left behind a little girl of four, who was adopted