Bachi Karkaria's Tales from TJ Road: How street-level shops tell the story of stagnation and change

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Old vs New in the Survival Stakes

My cousin Firoza has lived next to Mumbai’s Sion Circle for all her 70 years. The area has always been solidly middle class; has a good residential-commercial mix; sits on an arterial avenue connecting North and South; leads off to east and West; has easy connectivity on bus and commuter train to say nothing of the serial flyovers. So, here, real estate value and change are as dizzying as the traffic on the five-point roundabout. But it can’t be called gentrification because, unlike this column’s TJ Road, it didn’t start out socially and physically depressed. At least not in living memory.

Still, catching up with Firoza’s khabar last week, I realized that address-wise, like Kipling’s ‘Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady’ we were ‘sisters under the skin’. My cousin told me about her grandson having done what all 15-month-olds derive their greatest pleasure from. Chubby Zane had pulled her specs off her face with such force that they’d bent totally out of shape. Which meant my cousin had to mask up, brave over-zealous curfew cops and walk up to the Circle optician’s shop she’s been going to ever since she got her first glasses at 15. If you are wondering why I’m inflicting this family kahani on you in a column dedicated to metromorphosis, bear with me.

Firoza told me how many shops in the area had changed in keeping up with changing demands, and how many, like her optician’s, had remained the same. Not quite. One family member had turned his share into a travel agency, which too Firoza  patronised when wanderlust began gripping her some years ago.

Which got me thinking — and gave me this fortnight’s theme. Stingy TJ Road or magnanimous Sion Circle, there’s much in common across Mumbai, or any other dynamic city. Some gives way to new; some remains old; and as always, street-level shops tell the story of stagnation and change more openly than the closed doors of buildings.

Sewri may be ‘lowest Parel’, but even in the designer malldom of Lower Parel, you’ll find the detritus of its past persona. Shabby shops and scabrous tenements continue to hold their own amidst the commercial and consumerist towers. On TJ Road’s busier top end, just four shops remain in their original form; the others are in a constant state of flux. Why? Since rentals have kept pace with the area’s gentrification, most of the sons of the original owners have preferred to farm out their inheritance. But the new shopkeeper discovers that income doesn’t match the out-go, so the ‘gala’ changes hands again. That of another tenant with his eye on the main chance.

As with Firoza, old customers continue a generational bond with old shops. New residents may prefer online, but in an emergency will still rush to hole-in-the-wall Popular at lane’s end. It is, in fact, a whole-in-the wall shop, peddling every item of stationery, aluminum-foil containers, even Velcro by the yard.  Old is old and new is new, and occasionally the twain do meet on our multi-social street.

‘The rising tide lifts many boats’ was an axiom I had thought would anchor a series on gentrification. However, 22 columns down the river, I’ve quietly abandoned it. Each time I ask the old shopkeepers if the new, well-heeled neighbours have improved sales and/or upgraded wares, I get an indifferent shrug. The bulk of their clientele continues to be the one that was always there. If there’s a Mongini’s in place of a mithaiwala, it’s because the families of their old customers have done better for themselves.

So, like Tennyson’s Brook, new shops/residents may come and go, but the original, deep-rooted ones which have survived the area’s eye-popping change will most likely go on forever. Maybe we can draw an analogy from Cyclone Tauktae. The native trees remained; the flamboyant exotic ones did not.

A reality check for us, movers-in, who think we are the shakers-up. It is that old, sobering thought: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.