As Bombay turns to dusk, sorrow for a tower

Until he switched schools a year ago, my son used to walk to and from his Bandra school. Nice, but as a student commute, not a patch on the run up and down Malabar Hill that I used to do, years ago. The path starts to the left of the Babulnath temple, as you face it. Those days, there was invariably a quick sustenance halt at Gelabhai Karman’s store, around the corner. Stock up on multi-coloured sugar-coated jeera sweets (how much nicer the Marathi term, badi-shep, or the Tamil one, palli-mutai) and I’d set off, munching all the way. Great stands of bushes and trees on either side. Little hideaway under one bush which we stocked with water and biscuits, from where we threw tiny pebbles on the tin roofs below, causing mirth (in us) and rage (under the roofs). July rains burbling down the hillside. Young-ish couple necking under a bush, whom we teased for days. Then he told us, genial to a fault: OK, you’re having fun, but when you’re 30 like we are and looking for some quiet, it won’t be such fun any more. [caption id=“attachment_226728” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“For me, the Tower Bungalow was more than a landmark; it was the comforting familiarity of home, peeping above the trees on the hill as the 123 double-decker bus swayed along Marine Drive.  Martin_Bishop Via Flickr”]  [/caption] We snorted. Who would ever hit 30? Have a girlfriend? Been there, done that, walked up recently. We have liberalised and we’re licking poverty, but the lower reaches of this sumptuous slope are lined nevertheless with shacks and littered with 21st Century trash, in parts so filthy that it is a mental effort to step through. There were always gentle steps all the way up, but today they are ripped apart as if somebody took a giant can-opener to them. Higher up we find out why: an enormous pipe yawns out of the concrete. The crew that’s at work is replacing the British-era water pipes that run under the path, pipes that take the city’s water supply to the Municipal waterworks at the top of the hill. I mean, this new pipe is wide enough that I, at six feet, can stand upright in it. The last stretch is a steep 30 steps, and as I climb, the excitement mounts just as it used to years ago. For home, then, was right across the street — in a stonecut edifice known as, yes, the Municipal Waterworks Bungalow. Today, we wait for a break in the evening Hanging Gardens-to-Kemp’s Corner traffic, dart across to the little guard’s hut, look down that long and familiar waterworks driveway. Memories of chest-high days float up. There’s the balcony from where I’d fling bananas, to evade eating them, into the next-door Parsi Panchayat, itself adjoining the Towers of Silence. Got caught when my uncle, breakfasting downstairs, looked up idly just as a skinned banana skidded across a cloudless blue sky. There’s the little niche where I particularly liked hiding when Raju Gulgule was the den at hide-and-seek, because I knew I could beat him in the pounding race back. There’s the spot right above the den where I’d sometimes climb… … but hey, it isn’t there! Wait a minute, something’s missing in this view down the driveway! Of all things, it is an entire stonecut 5-storey tower. For several seconds this evening, I’m speechless, physically unable to make a sound. We’re talking here about one of Bombay’s original landmarks, the Tower Bungalow that was once at the end of this very driveway, part of this Municipal Waterworks complex. Our home was below and beside it. So for me, the tower was more than a landmark; it was the comforting familiarity of home, peeping above the trees on the hill as the 123 double-decker bus swayed along Marine Drive. The highest point in the area for years, it housed one of the sirens that blared out 9 am to the city. No more siren, no more double-decker 123, OK. But no more tower? “Torn down several years ago,” mumbles the cop on duty. Why demolish a tower? More images flit past. Buddies Jamshed and Sohrab lived in the Tower. We rigged up a toy telephone between their bedroom and ours. Struggled to use it, then emerged on the balcony — the banana balcony — and told them in their window, irony lost on us all, that it wasn’t working. Their cook, Theresa, had a husband who would turn up drunk, brandish a pocket-knife and bellow below the tower: “Therese! No phood phor me!” Think I hear him still. For here I stand as Bombay turns slowly to dusk, sorrowing for, of all things, a tower. I feel like bellowing myself: “Dammit! No tower here no more!” Age must be catching up. We saunter back down the slope, gasping again at the size of the yawning pipe. At Babulnath, just for fun, I peel off to see if I can get myself a supply of badi-shep to munch on. … but hey, wait a minute, Gelabhai Karman’s not there either! Oh man, what’s the world coming to?