Rock-a-bye baby.

At the foot of my bed is a steel cupboard. As I lie in bed reading, I sometimes lower the book and look up. My eyes fall on the very special baby rocker stored on top of it. This rocker was specially made when I was born in 1936 in my uncle’s house opposite the Roxy Cinema close to the Royal Opera House. At that time, my father was a Presidency Magistrate presiding at the Girgaum Police Court one the top floor of which the Mankars resided at that time before they moved to 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/08/family-car.html. The rocker is a rectangular cage open at the top with columns on three sides and two poles at the centre of each of the shorter sides. There is a detachable strip on top resting on two knobs at the end of the poles. The aforesaid poles extend downwards and are fitted with two crescents at the floor-level end that allow it to rock without losing its balance or stability. The wood is of an excellent quality and the craftsmanship is so intricate and exquisite that the final effect is what you would call a work of art. You put a baby bed in the cage, cover it, add pillows and bolsters to make the baby safe and secure, slip a mosquito net over the top strip. Quite ingenious, what? Apart from me, several other babies have been rocked to sleep in this rocker. My three nieces: Rekha (now in New Zealand), Shubhada (still in Mumbai), Dnyanada (now a medical practitioner in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada), our sons Ashu and Abhi as well as Ashu’s younger daughter Avantika (now in the US of A one and all) are the ones that readily come to mind. It’s possible that the rocker may have rocked many more infants in its seventy and odd years on Planet Earth. (In fact, Ujwal says she can think of at least two more occasions when the rocker went to homes of strangers.) Of the seven known babies it rocked, five now happen to live abroad. This may be no more than a coincidence, of course. I remember the name-giving (christening) ceremony of Ashu. The father’s and the mother’s respective sisters “give” out, i.e., announce, the names chosen by either side. (In Ashu’s case, the two names were Ashutosh, a name of Lord Shiva, and Ashish = "benediction".) Before that, the baby is lifted by one of the aunts and passed to her counterpart from under the bottom of the rocker – a somewhat dicey and risky procedure as far as the poor infant is concerned. I remember seeing this curious rigmarole on six occasions, five of them at 233 Khetwadi Main Road.

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.)