Driving down Memory Lane


More than a decade after Shelter, the old spacious beautiful villa, part of which had been our family’s home for almost four decades, was razed to the ground, passing in a taxi edging down Kohinoor Road, I found myself looking up at a nondescript rather drab-looking multistoreyed structure that now occupied the plot where our old house had stood for the better part of a century.

This new building seemed to be some kind of minor hotel or residency, judging by its sign and the uniformed doorman sitting on a high stool next to some potted palms and a flight of steps leading up to a large wide door. Striking dread into my heart at first sight, the nondescript edifice rose straight up, most unaesthetically, just feet from the sidewalk, the potted palms in the front the only flimsy reminder of the prolifically blooming garden that had once occupied part of the space.

Looking around, I could still recognize some of the older houses on the block, all looking familiar but weather-beaten. But the road itself had changed almost beyond recognition. For some reason, it now seemed vastly shrunken. Looking at the crowded scene before me teeming with people and vehicles and assailed by a cacophony of car horns and traffic sounds and screeching noises from buses and trucks punctuating the steady ambient hum of the traffic on Ambedkar Road further ahead, I could see parts of a grimy pavement curving towards the glittering arcade of stores which made up Khodadad Circle in the distance. Nothing seemed familiar any more, I could have presumed that I was anywhere else except for the fact that I knew where I was in that time and place. But somehow, this was not our Kohinoor Road any more, not the way that I remembered it, at any rate.
Into my mind’s eye, unbidden came many memories of the quiet spacious tree-lined street it had been when I was very young and which, on some weekends, fire-engine crews would hose down with generous streams of water. Barely half a mile long, Kohinoor Road was a like a conduit connecting Dadar station with the busy arterial Ambedkar Road on which buses plied and lorries/ trucks and trams - as well as bullock-carts and hand-drawn carts, at one time - trundled from well before dawn to well past dusk.

On either side of our road were large multi-storeyed houses, some with flat roof-top terraces, and others with tiled sloping roofs like our’s had been, large glass-paned windows, some with shutters, large and small balconies, carved facades and wide stone steps leading to roomy verandas on the ground floor. All the houses stood with wide spaces bordering them where cars were parked and children played, some with gardens like our’s, bounded by high compound walls with gates that often stayed open for easy access for residents, sellers of wares, and visitors alike.

Our house was the last such building on our side towards Ambedkar Road; beyond one of our gates opening towards Kohinoor Road, the sidewalk broadened suddenly where the line of shops began. Most of the shops and stores along the curve of the sidewalk where the two roads met, occupied the ground floor premises of several large stately buildings of varying vintage built with spaces between them. If you looked between the buildings, you could catch glimpses of side entrances, small backyard gardens or makeshift structures that housed smaller shops.

Every time that a local or long-distance train stopped at Dadar station, taxis scooted down our street laden with luggage and passengers and turned the corner down below outside our bedroom windows. People swarmed down the sidewalks, most walking towards Ambedkar Road to the shops or to ride a bus or tram to their next destination. Some would pause for rest under a shady tree or for a glass of ice-cold sugarcane juice from the thatched-roof lean-to little stall outside one of our compound walls. The human streams would dwindle to small assorted groups or single people by themselves on various errands and swell again with the arrival of the next train. Like the memories that flow thick and fast sometimes and, at other times, waft into the air like the scent of laden blossoms hanging down from the garden arches.

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