A midsummer evening’s dream

Act One
Grizzled narrator ambles in, props butt against large black cube, the only prop on stage.
Narrator: Back in the day, I appeared in a musical, and got to see a few Bombay theatres from what has always been the right side of the proscenium for me. Later, performance put aside, I did reviews, visited pretty much every theatre in the city. And, despite my early pash for stages large enough to swing a cat (or Cats) in, I fell madly in love with little Prithvi, the first of its kind that I’d ever set foot in. One day, I said, one day..
Editor, off-stage: Get on with it, dammit!
Narrator: Enough about me. A little background to, heh, set the stage?
Lights fade.

Act Two
A clock face is projected on to the backdrop, its hands spinning backwards. Dissolve to sepia-tinted vignettes. A rich, warm voice, Naseerbhai for choice, speaks..
Father Time: In the 1940s, Prithviraj Kapoor strode majestically across our silver screens. He was also actor-manager of his touring theatre group, Prithvi Theatres. And he founded a film dynasty: his sons, Raj, and then Shammi, moved quickly from stage to massively successful film careers. As did the youngest, Shashi; but not before falling, hard, for the beauteous Jennifer, lead actress of Shakespeareana, the travelling theatre company led by her father, Geoffrey Kendall. The story goes thus: at the now-defunct Royal Opera House in Bombay, Shashi peeped through the curtains at the audience, and saw “this fabulous looking girl who looked Russian.” Shakespeareana had the next run after Prithvi vacated; so she was at a loose end. Shashi worked up the nerve to first ask Jennifer out, then propose to her, and eventually, despite initial parental disapproval, marry her.
In 1975, the couple set up the Shri Prithviraj Kapoor Memorial Trust (the patriarch’s died in ’72) and then, in ’78, Prithvi Theatre, on land the old gentleman had once leased, intending to set up his own theatre.
A voice from the audience chimes in. Spotlight on pretty lady sitting on the steps near the exit.
Sanjna Kapoor: I remember a peculiar L-shaped building completely unsuitable for theatre. My grandfather eventually used it to store costumes! The trips out to Juhu were wonderful; I played on the beach with my dog while my mother pored over plans with the architect. Prithvi opened when I was ten. I used to fall asleep in the sofas in the last row! I turned sixteen during the first Festival my mother organised.
She ran Prithvi until she died in 1984. Then my brother Kunal, and Feroze Khan, kept it running smoothly. I apprenticed under them, learnt a lot, and in 1990, I joined in.

Act Three
The narrator saunters back into the spotlight like he owns the damn thing.
Narrator: Prithvi is a ‘little’ theatre, seating 200 on three sides of a ‘thrust’ stage that places the action intimately close to the audience. Despite its tucked-away-in-Juhu location, convenient only for residents of the not-too-far-flung western suburbs, almost every actor of consequence who has set foot in the city has passed through its green room, every theatre lover in the city has applauded here at least a few times. Prithvi also hosts workshops, exhibitions, films, music, and poetry. Integral adjuncts are a wee bookshop, and Prithvi Cafe, hang-out not just for the after-theatre crowd and off-duty actors but also for the suburban folk acquiring cool cred over coffee. Sanjna, fortified by two strong theatre bloodlines and a deep love of the stage, has kept it going—and growing—against the depredations of weekend movies on TV, 24/7 channels, video (and VCD, LD and DVD) libraries, and if that wasn’t enough, multiplexes, malls and downloadable entertainment.
The spotlight shifts again, to the last row, where Sanjna sits, smiling..
Sanjna: I don’t fall asleep in the last row anymore. At least not lying down! (She continues, more seriously..) We have kept Prithvi affordable, both for the players (charges go as low as seven rupees per ticket sold, basic lights and sound free) and audiences (you get 50 rupee tickets on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Sponsorship has kept us going. The Trust, a non-profit, is building up its own corpus. Donations are welcome; you’ll find details at prithvitheatre.org. We have great plans for the thirtieth anniversary. I don’t want to let out too much just yet, but it will be a mix of local, national and international theatre, and I wish my days had thirty-six hours!

Curtain Call
The narrator stands on the black cube, beating his chest, Tarzan-style, and simpering coyly. Simultaneously. Obviously we’ll need a virtuoso performer.
Narrator: Recently, an old, secret dream came true: I was centre-stage at Prithvi. Not quite in the way I dreamt of, all those years ago; it wasn’t a play, it was an evening of poetry, and I was the obscure newbie reading with a half-dozen luminaries; and no, it wasn’t packed to the rafters with screaming groupies. But they clapped. And it was sweet, so sweet.

Published in Outlook Traveller, May 2008.

Tags: Outlook Traveller

Where books go after they’re down-sized.

New and Secondhand Bookshop

A hundred years ago, Jamalbhai Ratansi, who ran a business in the raddi trade, decided to start a shop on the Kalbadevi Road, near what is now the Metro junction. You see, along with the old newspapers, he also frequently bought bundles of discarded books by weight. So he decided to start selling them piecemeal, at prices way below the original cost, but still a tidy mark-up from what he paid for them.

Thus was born New And Secondhand Bookshop, Bombay institution and landmark. In 1917, it moved to its current location, just across the street from the now-demolished building that was its previous home.

Jamalbhai has since departed for the Reading Room in the Sky, but N&S is still very much here, run by Sultan Vishram, Jamalbhai’s grandson and the current proprietor.

Over the years, N&S has had a long string of famous customers. Sultanbhai pulls out a fat file of press clippings, and tells me that B R Ambedkar, R K Narayan, Manohar Malgaonkar, Mulk Raj Anand, P L Deshpande and Osho Rajneesh all bought books from the shop.

Ambedkar, he says, never came in, always staying in his car outside, while someone else bought his books. Rajneesh (then plain Acharya) would come in at least once a week, and spend an hour browsing, before bargaining vigorously over the books he wanted, “He would say he was a sadhu, and the books should be given free. But my uncle would tell him, ‘Aap sadhu hain, hum to sansari hain na?’”

Which is not to say, he continues, after the chuckles have subsided, that commerce ever dominated love of books. Jamalbhai would frequently told customers who couldn’t afford books, “Go ahead, pay later. Learn, learn!” And his son, Sultanbhai’s uncle, loved to say “Saraswati and Lakshmi can’t sit in the same place.”

The “New” in the shop’s name is technically accurate – they do stock new titles on certain subjects like interior decoration and art – but the tight margins in that trade make it an unattractive business proposition, so they make up less than 10% of inventory. It’s the musty smell of old books that dominates. The very rare finds are stored under lock and key. But out there in the open is the gamut from a 1955 Encyclopaedia Britannica set and Shaw’s Complete Prefaces to elderly pulp paperbacks and mildly bruised coffee-table books. (My personal finds dating back from impoverished college years include a treasured 25th Anniversary Peanuts Collection, a stack of cloth-bound Wodehouses, and much crime and science fiction.)

Sultanbhai only began managing the shop actively in the last few months, after the retirement of his manager, Chandrakant Mankame. Mr Mankame had served the shop for sixty years, starting at age 11, as the founder’s gofer. Jamalbhai had sent him to night school, where he learned English. As he grew up, he was given more and more responsibility, till he became manager.

He has a mind like a computer, Sultanbhai tells me. In sixty years, he had bought almost every book in the shelves, and could remember exactly which dusty pile in which crammed shelf in which narrow row housed a certain book. Without this human database (in January, after seeing the shop into its centenary year, Mankame finally retired), Sultanbhai has begun to reorganise the shop so that less elephantine memories can cope, rearranging sections, making out an inventory, and perhaps, if he can bring himself to go entirely modern, a computerised database.

“There’s no other proper shop like ours in Bombay,” says Sultanbhai. And, unfortunately, there soon might be none.

“The book trade on the whole is suffering,” he says, “There is TV, computers… People don’t read that much anymore. And all these books, until we get a customer, they’re just someone’s discarded junk. [The reorganisation and renovation] is my last effort. If business does not improve, I will have to close down and sell.”

Isn’t there a market for rare books, I ask him. He shakes his head. “Once, yes, we’d find some rare books in our purchases. Now,” wry smile, “people are smart. They know what’s rare.”

Yes, I murmur to myself on the way out. But then New And Secondhand is rare too. And I hope to hell enough customers keep trooping in to take it into its second century, that Lakshmi can give Saraswati the teensiest helping hand.

New And Secondhand Bookshop, 526, Kalbadevi Road, Mumbai 400002. Ph: +91 22 22013314 Fax (care of): +91 22 22072024.

Published in the Outlook Traveller, May 2005 edition, in the column Favourite Things, under the title "Old Curiosity Shop" or some such.

Tags: Outlook Traveller, Favourite Things

Drool, Britannia

A year or so ago, a friend lunched at Britannia with his mentor, a famous film director. The mentor, he says, has “this dictatorially democratic set-up” where the hired help often eats with her in the same restaurant. So her driver – let’s call him A-bhai – was ensconced at the next table. Lunch, which included the restaurant’s signature Berry Pulao, made with berries imported from Iran, was ordered, and consumed. (“And their orgasmic Caramel Custard for desert,” Vijay adds, misty-eyed.)

Sated, they trundled out to the car, where A-bhai, who had preceded them, held the door open. As he closed the door behind them, to his horror, the car rolled backwards and crunched into a tree, smashing its rear window. The shaken chauffeur had no explanation for the car’s behaviour, but film folks are nothing if not resilient, and since there was no further damage to vehicle or passengers, the company moved on, unruffled, no doubt to make Better Cinema.

Many days later, Vijay managed to cajole A-bhai into admitting, “Saab, sach boloon toh, jab madamne humko khaane ko aane ke liye bolaa, to hum uss Pulao ke khayal me itne kho gaye ki handbrake lagaana bhool gaye.”
Such, gentle reader, is the power of Britannia’s Berry Pulao.



Britannia looks like a generic member of that fast-disappearing breed, the Bombay Irani joint. High ceiling, peeling paint, bentwood chairs, thick glass protecting chequered tablecloths, a wooden mezzanine, elderly gentleman presiding over high counter at the entrance, dispensing change to the waiters, unlocking drawers to ration out precise measures of special ingredients.

But it doesn’t offer the traditional Irani dawn-to-midnight chai, bun-maska and bread pudding. It is open for only lunch, six days a week, and serves mainly Parsi food.

The owner of the mischievous eyes that greet me from behind the counter is Boman Kohinoor, who has been here since he was a schoolboy (he’s a spry eighty-four now). His father, Rashid, opened Britannia in 1923, serving mainly western food to toffs – Collectors, Officers and suchlike. During World War II, the restaurant was requisitioned for use as barracks. By 1948, when it reopened, its time in the sun had passed.

We move to one of the tables, and he delightedly shakes my hand again, on discovering that I had studied in his alma mater. His late wife, Bachan, he says, spent many years working in Iran, and returned with a trove of Iranian recipes to add to the Parsi dishes she already knew. She trained the cooks to prepare all these, and Britannia revived.

Aside from the famous Iranian Berry Pulao, the other specialities are: Fish Patra, Fried Bombay Duck, and of course, Dhansak, which like the berry pulao, is available in mutton, chicken and vegetarian varieties. But, as that inimitable Bombay foodie, the late Behram Contractor, said: “Of course, there is nothing like a vegetarian dhanshak, just as there is nothing like a non-alcoholic beer or an eggless omelette. Still, there you are. And, while I am at it, I would like to add, the only bona fide dhanshak is with mutton, not chicken.”

The usual clientele is wall-to-wall officewallas. Today, a public holiday, the pace is filled with families out to lunch. People drive in from far and near, says Kohinoor. Gerson Da Cunha, Anil Dharker, Farzana Contractor, they’re all regulars here. Dilip Vengsarkar, like so many others, sends in for takeaway. And there was this editor who would sit alone at the table near the door, reading a book while he ate his lunch. (Later, when i am leaving, the old gentleman gently, but firmly refuses my efforts to pay my bill. Mr Vinod Mehta has given us enough business, he chortles.)

A rooster’s picture adorns one wall. A stylised version on the menus is surrounded by this cheery motto: “There is no love greater than the love of eating.” Kohinoor reminisces about that rooster, a family pet, which strutted the counter in the eighties. It drank only Mangola and ate only pista-badam, except now and then, when it ate chicken. “He was a cannibal!” he informs me gleefully.

Running Britannia is tough, Romin, Kohinoor’s son, tells me. He personally buys supplies, supervises the cooks – “It’s manufacture, not trading, not like those places that only open your beer for you.”

But change is imminent. Option One: a face-lift, spruce up the place, bring the old marble-topped tables back from the godown, and, abandoning decades-old tradition, open for dinner on Fridays and Saturdays. Or the family may sell – a potential buyer has come to talk to Kohinoor Sr as we chat.

If that happens, Britannia’s devotees will be bereft. But A-bhai has no cause for gloom. Romin will then start a small Britannia takeaway counter somewhere in Fort. So if Madam sends him to fetch lunch, all A-bhai must remember is to use that handbrake.



Britannia & Co Restaurant, Wakefield House, 11 Sprott Road, 16, (opp. New Customs House, nr. War Memorial), Ballard Estate, Mumbai 38. Ph: (022) 2261 5264. Open Mon-Sat, 11.30-4.00.
Berry Pulao: Ch. Rs 160; Mut. Rs 180; Veg. Rs 90. Dhansak: Ch. Rs 130, Mut. Rs 150, Veg. 90. (Huge servings: two moderate eaters can share one dish.) Also, Chicken Farcha Rs 110, Fry Bombay Duck, Fish Patra (price varies as per size), Mutton Sali Boti Rs 130. All chicken/mutton served boneless. No alcohol. No exclusively snack orders between 12.30 & 2.30.

Published in Outlook Traveller's October 2004 issue.

Tags: Outlook Traveller