Magical mystery tour
Updated on: 02 February,2025 08:09 AM IST | Mumbai
Meher Marfatia
Earlier personal associations with iconic city monuments strike sad to glad notes
The Sir JJ School of Art
In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, the crab and the dab, the plaice and the dace, the skate and his mate, the mackerel and the pickerel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel.”
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How I too giggled, I remember, reading aloud to my four-year-old daughter that quirkily rhyming opening of How the Whale Got its Throat, the introductory tale of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. We were having fun under the shade of a fragrant mango tree on the campus of the Sir JJ School of Art. Shopping at Crawford Market, we happened to find ourselves across it. She was carrying this favourite book by Kipling, whose childhood bungalow stands on the grounds of the school where his sculptor father John Lockwood Kipling taught and was the Dean. Surrendering to serendipity, we had chosen an apt corner to hear the delightfully nonsense-nuanced passage in a match of monument to mood. Those beautiful buildings will always bear for me the memory of this ma-beti moment.
Illustration by Rudyard Kipling for How the Whale Got its Throat, opening Just So Stories. Pics/Wikimedia Commons
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A few summers before, her brother amused us no end. With such an original take on the Rajabai Tower that I laugh quietly each time I see this stunning Gothic edifice that Premchand Roychand gifted Bombay in the name of his mother Rajabai, described by intention to be the tower holding “a large clock and a set of jolly bells”.
My husband and I were astonished to hear what our son said in response to the kindergarten headmistress’ question, “What would you like to be on growing up?” Around them swirled wishful ambitions of astronaut, pilot, doctor, cricketer, policeman. Picture the plain astonishment when our firstborn solemnly said, “I want to be the man who gives people permission to go up to the top of Rajabai Tower.” Thrown flat by the offbeat reply, Bombay’s answer to Big Ben brings back that motherhood memory that still surprises me.
Bombelli’s at Breach Candy. Pic Courtesy Anita Bombelli
Such episodes are no rarities. As with cities anywhere in the world, most of us harbour happy to heavy associations with certain neighbourhood sites and sights.
Jumping to my own childhood… Rolling further back in fact. In the late 1950s, when my father popped the question and my mother murmured “Yes”, they went to Bombelli’s on Warden Road to seal the deal with vanilla ice cream drizzled with chocolate sauce. Having lived, for 35 years now, minutes from where Freddy and Betty Bombelli’s confectionery stood on the Breach Candy strip, I keep reimagining the magic of the pair of them together there.
The day after deciding to get hitched, they enrolled in JJ Rodriguez’s famed dance class at Sethna House on Allana Road, off Colaba Causeway. After feather-footed Joao Joaquim Rodriguez of Margao wowed the city with his school in 1951, it was considered de rigueur to show the object of your affection smooth ballroom moves. I often pause to think what pirouettes they must have practised here. While researching this lane’s heyday five years ago, I met JJ’s wife Dorothy, who pointed wistfully to a photograph of her and JJ gliding with grace across the studio floor for students.
JJ Rodriguez and his wife Dorothy in their Colaba dance school. File pic
Not long after, around my fourth or fifth birthday, came a first brush with city love, which has left me viewing the Gateway of India as much with healthy ego, as with heritage pride. That enduring symbol of Bombay has my birth date carved in yellow basalt stone. Informed as a toddler feeding pigeons there, that the King and Queen of England sailed in grandly at that spot over a century ago on December 2, I chuckled non-stop. The parents formed an annual practice of bringing me to Wittet’s welcoming monument as a birthday outing at the end of each year. A long drive in those days sans direct connector roads linking Sobo to suburban Bandra. They made mine the city they had so joyfully claimed and explored as theirs.
Moving further inward midtown to the Masina Hospital in Byculla—a facility serving both the 1918 Spanish flu spread and the Coronavirus crises. It was founded by Dr Hormasji Manekji Masina and his wife Jerbai Masina, who grew it from a four-bed dispensary into a 270-bedded multi-specialty, tertiary care hospital credited with offering the city a pioneering neonatal care unit. A striking statue of Jerbai at the hospital grounds honours her legacy to this day.
Statue of Jerbai Masina at the Masina Hospital, Byculla. File pic
My aunt once helmed its paediatric department, so we often swung by the hospital to take her home. Waiting for her to finish putting a stethoscope to tiny baby chests, there was enough time to savour this statue’s glorious carved details, depicting human qualities and guiding principles. Masina Hospital was previously the 19th-century residence of the eminent Baghdadi Jew merchant, David Sassoon. It was called Sans Souci, French for the classic “no worries” dictum.
Some years after, I was spending nights at the hospital when my grandmother was admitted. Well into her eighties, she took a most keen interest in my work. Waiting for me to finish writing text for a photo essay, she said, “Don’t sit with me. Go find out the history of this hospital.”
I followed the advice. The philanthropic Sassoons bequeathed the property to Dr Masina in gratitude for having cured David Sassoon suffering an acute hernia attack. The third Indian to be granted the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, Dr Masina raised charity funds for the institution of his dreams, with his devoted wife Jerbai. This is probably Bombay’s first private hospital in 1902, followed by the Parsi General Hospital in 1908 and Harkisondas Hospital in 1925.
Jerbai established the Postgraduate Medical College and Lady Broacha College of Nursing in 1923. Her statue, greeting patients on the sprawling lawns, is inscribed with a quote from a verse by HW Longfellow: “There is no death, what seems so is transition, from breath to life Elysian.”
The line is indelible enough to recall each time I lose someone loved and it helps cope. Yet, it did little to soothe me on receiving jolting news in the middle of a Kala Ghoda festival event in the lovely garden of another striking example of the munificence of the Sassoons—The David Sassoon Library and Reading Room. An all too familiar number flashed on my cell phone, announcing a call from my parents’ home.
The news got me pulling my shawl tighter around the shoulders as I shivered. Not solely on account of the cold of that January night. My ailing mother had more or less stopped eating. Quietly, I fled to her, with half a hundred grim scenarios whirling wild in my head. Grey moments linger equally long and stab sharp. When on the steps leading into this pretty Victorian Gothic structure, I would replay that disquieting hour.
Ten years after she passed, the same soil transformed into a space suffused with warmth and well-being. That very spot was transformed on an evening to cherish. The occasion was the release of my collection of Bombay writings bearing the name of this column. Pure privilege to have Once Upon A City launched by Gerson da Cunha, along with Shanta Gokhale’s seminal book, Shivaji Park Dadar 28: History, Places, People. As appreciation for our efforts became evident, my thoughts turned to Mum. Feeling unalloyed joy, I could veritably sense her beaming down in approval.
A building I have not dared revisit, after it quite literally rocked my stability eight years ago, is Ruby Mansion on Forjett Street, off Gowalia Tank. I heard that the Jaipur gharana singer Mogubai Kurdikar, from Motiwala Mansion, had asked Anwar Hussain Khan in next-door Ruby Mansion to expose her daughter Kishori Amonkar to the Agra gharana. A pupil of that legendary dynasty of maestros, Mogubai was taught by Vilayat Hussain Khan and Basheer Ahmad Khan.
“Our Ruby Mansion remains a music mandir,” said Anwar Hussain Khan’s son Raja Miyan. His uncles, the great Vilayat Hussain Khan, Khadim Hussain Khan (Raja Miyan’s guru), Azmat Hussain Khan, Anwar Hussain Khan and Latafat Hussain Khan tutored legions of talents. Honouring their legacy, Yakub Hussain Khan, Aslam Khan, Raja Miyan Khan and Rafat Khan continued to teach inspiringly.
It was joked that any stone thrown from Ruby Mansion’s terrace would hit the building of one of their students. Climbing the rickety stairs to their high floor, propped by limp scaffolding at the time, a dizzying vertigo attack seized me. True, I’m prone to these. But why here, I panicked, halfway on an ascent that appeared interminable while every banister and balustrade swam around. An old phoolwala appeared from nowhere, delivering floral torans at a door. Watching me clutch a banister, desperate for giddiness to settle to steadiness, he chanted, “Om Sai Ram” and “Theek toh ho aap? Baba sambhaal lenge.”
That attack cleared as suddenly as it crept up. I did stop at the gate of the Saibaba Mandir in Haji Mohamed Kasam Building, sharing the compound with Ruby Mansion. A stream of devotees garlanded the Shirdi saint’s four-foot statue on a teak altar within the 1942-constructed temple. I added a small string of marigolds to the heap.
Author-publisher Meher Marfatia writes fortnightly on everything that makes her love Mumbai and adore Bombay. You can reach her at meher.marfatia@mid-day.com/www.meher marfatia.com
