18 January,2026 07:24 AM IST | Mumbai | Meher Marfatia
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic therapy, at his home office in Vienna. Pic/Getty Images
January 2025 began unusually in the middle of an annual Jewish feast. Hanukkah is the festival of lights in Judaism. The eight-night feast started on Christmas day of December 2024 - a special occurrence last witnessed in 2005. The Jewish month of Kislev (or Chislev), remarkable for the festival of Hanukkah beginning on its 25th day, aligns with the Gregorian calendar any time from November 28 to December 27. The first day of Hanukkah falling on December 25, coincided with Christmas 2024 for only the fifth time since 1900.
This tradition of lighting lamps or candles over eight consecutive nights derives from the period when the community won back Jerusalem's Second Temple after a band of brave Maccabees revolted against the Greeks around 164 BCE. Rejoicing with a rededication ceremony on defeating Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid empire, they found there was enough olive oil to light the wick of the menorah lampstand for a single night. To their astonishment, the pure oil instead lasted eight entire nights.
To commemorate that miracle, Jews light the nine-branched Hanukkah menorah candelabrum eight nights in a row. The main flame - a central "starter" called shamash (attendant), on either side of which are four upturned branches - is lit the first evening. It in turn illuminates the second lamp and so on⦠till nine flames glow on the eighth evening.
As the oil burns for long, fried foods are an essential part of this week. The city's Jewish families eat chicken, kanda bhaji, and potato pancakes, with sweet rice cooked with ghee, cashews, and saffron. And there remains the belief that one who sees a Hanukkah light should recite a blessing. A poignant tribute to a miracle of faith two millennia ago.
Some mysteries are resolved in strange ways. This one fell into place while I was digging into the history of Malboro House on Peddar Road. Formerly Kamani House, this Claude Batley-designed gem, with deep circular balconies skirting spacious apartments, was intended for a German lady who left in World War II before she could move in.
Why is this Malboro House - not Marlboro House - on Peddar Road? Pic courtesy/Art Deco Mumbai
Not content with collecting its construction details - like the fact that contractors Messrs Gannon Dunkerley executed the vision of the firm of Gregson, Batley and King here - I was curious about a first "r" absent in the "Malboro" name.
Apparently, poet-editor Pritish Nandy balked at the thought of postmen associating his august address, which once attracted royals (the Nawab of Sachin occupied a flat above), with the Marlboro cigarette brand. We hope the built-to-last elegance of Malboro House remains an Art Deco feast for a long while, without attracting the undue attention of builders.
In a column titled "Eternal storehouse of the eclectic mind", I learnt more about one of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai's most prized antiquities. Eighth- to ninth-century relics excavated in 1882 at Nala Sopara, by Pandit Bhagvanlal Indraji, the archaeologist, numismatist, epigraphist, and Honorary Fellow of the Society.
The Sopara relics: five caskets from the stupa and a bronze image of Maitreya, the Future Buddha. Pics courtesy/Asiatic Society of Mumbai/Anurag Ahire
Receiving notes on these remains from the Bombay Gazetteer compiler James Campbell, Pandit Bhagvanlal visited the spot, to dig, in situ, a large stone coffer of a stupa. Its centre contained eight significant bronzes - the Seven Buddhas and Maitreya, the Future Buddha - seated around a copper casket, which in turn encased four more caskets. Nested one within the other, these were of silver, jade, crystal and, finally, gold. Evidenced from relevant Buddhist texts, Pandit Bhagvanlal suggested the 13 fragmented earthenware pieces in the gold casket, with gold flowers, were relics of Gautama Buddha's begging bowl.
Bhagvanlal's finds fanned a stir across India, Sri Lanka, and Europe. The Bombay Government presented the Sopara relics to the Society, which displays the coffer in the vestibule, while the relics are retained in safe custody.
The Autumn season of SOI (Symphony Orchestra of India) concerts seemed ideal to research a logo familiar to generations of music lovers. HMV: His Master's Voice. Nipper, the Jack Russell terrier, named perhaps for the unfortunate manner in which he excitedly greeted visitors, peers into an Edison cylinder phonograph - the first device to record and play back sound.
Internationally recognised, appealing to notions of loyalty and fidelity, the symbol dates to 19th-century England. Nipper was the real-life pet of Mark Henry Barraud, scenery designer at the Prince's Theatre in Bristol. On Mark's death in 1887, his brothers Francis and Phillip cared for Nipper till he died in 1895. Three years after, Francis painted him from memory, quizzically listening to recordings of his beloved dead owner's voice.
Initially titled "Dog Looking at a Phonograph", Francis showed "His Master's Voice" to the Edison Bell Company, which unimaginatively questioned: "Surely dogs don't listen to phonographs?" Sold later for £50, the painting over time had the original black horn transformed to one of the Gramophone Company Ltd's modern brass gramophones and adopted as its trademark. The American rights were acquired in 1929 by RCA, making Nipper its de facto mascot. Twenty years later, the audio company placed a memorial plaque on Nipper's grave beneath a mulberry tree in a garden at Kingston-Upon-Thames.
Presenting the life and work of music teacher icons is always an honour. Mine was the privilege of profiling a pair of legends in back-to-back issues: multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Josic Menzie and Jini Dinshaw after the city lost her in October. Dinshaw offered generations of musicians a platform with the Bombay Chamber Orchestra (BCO) which she founded - and which survives as the city's longest-running Western classical music ensemble. In 1985, the BCO had the distinction of accompanying India's first live ballet - Giselle - by the Royal Ballet Company. The next year saw Dinshaw awarded an MBE for her role in promoting cultural ties between Great Britain and India.
A cultural gem birthing the country's largest art fest (the Kala Ghoda Art Festival), the Army & Navy Building stands grand, all the way from a triangular crowning pediment to its entranceway arches. Diving into its past, I rediscovered a pair of unique features about it. Most strikingly, this is among the city's earliest structures to have a basement and arcade with granite shafts. Before the "colonnaded arcade" concept ran visibly along the length of DN Road, this was evidenced at Army & Navy Building and two buildings flanking it: the 1860s-erected Watson's Hotel (Esplanade Mansion) and the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room. Also interesting to note is the fact that the offices of the Bombay Municipal Corporation were initially at the site of this building.
I stumbled on a delightful double treat interviewing residents of the cul de sac called Spence Lane in Byculla. Norma Arklie Otter (soon to turn 92) and her husband Colin Otter were the first tenants to occupy Maimoon Manzil at the end of the gully.
Norma Arklie (standing leftmost, last row) with the first women's hockey team to England, at the international tournament in Kent, 1953. Pic/Facebook@Anglo-Indian Stories
In the earliest hurrah for women's hockey, 19-year-old Arklie represented India among 16 participant countries at the International Federation of Women's Hockey Association Conference and Tournament in Folkestone, Kent, England in 1953.
MM Somaya, the Olympic hockey champ, lived in Karani Building at the start of the lane. He said, "Spence Lane knew me as Prem Muttana. Prem being my name at home, Muttana my father's. When newspapers referred to MM Somaya bringing India a Gold, neighbours didn't realise it was me at the Moscow Olympics!"
A Vishnu statue resting on the work table of the father of psychoanalysis? Not entirely unimaginable, but how exactly did those dots connect? The Indian Psychoanalytical Society (IPS) was established in Calcutta in 1922, just three years after the British Psychoanalytical Society, and is affiliated to the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Working on the trajectory of the Psychoanalytic Therapy & Research Centre (PTRC) in Bombay, I realised that the pioneer of psychoanalysis in the country, Girindrasekhar Bose, was a University of Calcutta psychology student. Subsequent to his 1917 doctoral thesis, "Repression", he exchanged correspondence with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, focusing on a discussion of the Oedipus Complex. Though the two men never met, a Vishnu statue gifted by Bose stood on Freud's desk.
He made me think differently about a community I share my home-state with. Salil Tripathi, releasing his book, The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community, said, "A Gujarati is one who speaks the language, possibly counts in it, dreams in it, thinks in it; the ones who moved to the land where Gujarati is spoken by the majority; the ones who may speak other languages but have made Gujarat their home and preserve their minority identities; and the ones who may live anywhere else in the world but are of Gujarati heritage." Tripathi's Gujaratis include Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists, Dalits, Christians. Positing expansionist definitions (Sardar Patel and MA Jinnah) and paradoxical juxtapositions (the Mahatma and Modi), Tripathi said, "The Tatas are prominent Gujaratis, not only Ambanis. There's also Azim Premji - for what are Premjis and Tatas, or Khorakiwalas and Godrejs, if not Gujaratis too? We are not a monolithic, unidimensional cardboard cutout."
Author-publisher Meher Marfatia writes fortnightly on everything that makes her love Mumbai and adore Bombay. You can reach her at meher.marfatia@mid-day.com/www.meher marfatia.com
