Sounds like…

Memories come in all shapes and sizes. Some are sights. Some are smells. Others are sounds. One of my most distinct aural memory is the almost unearthly “uulfeemalaay” cry of the kulfi vendor who went down the Khetwadi Main Road on his nightly round around nine o’clock. His creamy kulfi used to come in little aluminum cones the mouth of which was sealed with a seal made out of dough. A little later, a fakir would go on his alms collection round. Strangely enough, I could hear him approaching and retreating but never stopping to receive alms. He must have been a Sufi or a Kabirpanthi, judging from the fact that he used to sing a doha (hymn) of Kabir, the weaver saint who lived between 1398 and 1518. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabir. (I knew it was Kabir’s poetry because I grew up listening to my father singing it.) Then there was the sound of a hack Victoria clop-clop-clopping along our road in the dead of the night. If it was coming from the Charni Road and going eastwards, I would start hearing it in my bed as soon as it approached the Girgaum Police Court. Then as it took the right turn at the corner, the pitch of the clop-clop would rise, reach a crescendo as it passed our house – the third house on the right – and then start receding as it drew away out of my aural range. Sometimes, I would wake up suddenly around midnight just when the 9-30 film show at the Krishna Talkies (later renamed Dreamland soon after 15 August 1947) got over. There would be a lot of approaching sounds – people talking and laughing raucously, hack victorias clopping along, stragglers waiting at the corner for the last tramcar that would arrive soon and clatter along the Charni Road on its last journey of the day – all of which eventually would die down. Then all I could hear no matter how much I strained my ears was the deafening sound of silence.

The morgue.

Strange though it sounds in retrospect, I used to live on top of a morgue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortuary in Khetwadi. No, not directly on top of it. There were two floors between our third floor flat and the morgue on the ground floor or rather in the garage in the south-east corner of it. How it came to be there is an interesting tale. We moved to the first floor of 233 Khetwadi Main Road, the first of the three identical Arab Houses, after my birth in 1936. (Before that the Mankars used to reside on top of the Girgaum Police Court next to the Krishna Cinema, now Dreamland.) The second Arab House was and even now is occupied by Vanita Vishram Girl’s School. And, the third one was and even now is owned and partly occupied by Bhagini Samaj, a social group. I don’t exactly remember when we moved to the top floor flat but it must have been soon after 1936 because I don’t have any memories associated with the first floor. (By the way, somewhere around 1947 or thereabouts, the first floor was rented by the Communist Party of India and was called the Red Flag Hall. There was a commune of families leaving there for the next ten or twelve years. Among them were Kaifi and Shaukat Azmi and their daughter, Shabana, as well as Sardar Jafri.) Arab House was bought over, around 1949, by the Trust running the Sir Hurksondas Narottamdas Hospital which loomed just behind our house abutting the Vanita Vishram Garden. My father who had resumed his law practice after his stint as a Presidency Magistrate had been appointed around then as the Coroner of Bombay. In one of the matters that came before him, he had passed strictures against the Hospital, our exalted landlords, for failure to offer timely medical attention to an accident victim (if memory serves). The Trustees took this act as a matter of personal affront and decided to teach him a lesson. They were also keen to evict all the tenants so that they could raze the building down and use the space to extend the hospital premises. Just to harass the residents, the first step they took was to shift a part of their morgue and cold storage in the garage at the back of our building. The tenants were initially horrified, no doubt. But nobody slunk away post haste as a result of the macabre and temporary fellow residents. It was a continuing nuisance, though. Whenever there was a death in a Gujarati or Marwari family, there would be a troop of hired mourners and breast beaters lounging in the passage just outside the entrance to our compound. The show must go on, as the saying goes. (P.S.: Arab House at 233 Khetwadi Main Road was finally vacated and razed down in the mid.90s.)