Of serendipity and suggestibility… starting with the street where I live
Neil Warden and his wife Lindsay in their Suffolk garden holding a portrait of their ancestor Captain Richard George Warden, “direct ascendant” of Francis Warden after whom the Mumbai street is named. Pic/Prakash Nayak; (right) Zareen Engineer and Sooni Davar at their grandfather Mancherji Joshi’s statue in Dadar. Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
The years render everything relative. We live daily disconcerted, dwarfed by dizzying tower heights. Hard to think an 11-floor “high-rise” was Breach Candy’s tallest skyscraper around 1960.
At first a bungalow, Mecklai Mansion, opposite the sea-hugging American Consulate (at the time) in Lincoln House, was bought by a Sindhi builder two decades after the Aga Khan had presided over its 1936 housewarming ceremony. The result was this building I live in. Peacock Palace on Warden Road, officially named Bhulabhai Desai Road, to honour the patriot-philanthropist who as well lent his name to a most vibrant cultural hub on the street: the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, considered the forerunner of the National Centre for Performing Arts.
While that’s a fairly known fact, I was eager to find out more about the Warden who gave the street its former name. At least, more than the three-line descriptor in Samuel T Sheppard’s handy compendium, Bombay: Place-Names and Street-Names.
Voila. Serendipity stepped in softly to work the magic it so often does. It happened a few years ago. Walking with me in the garden across our road, my friend Khorshed Nayak suddenly shared a remarkable experience. She and her husband Prakash had returned from visiting their daughter in England. Out on a stroll there, they’d taken a wrong turn along remote paths of the small wool town of Lavenham in Suffolk. Crisscrossing in confusion, they realised they were properly lost, never dreaming a memorable encounter lay literally round the corner.
Dr Ernest Borges. Pic Courtesy/The director, Tata Memorial Hospital
Exploring that quaint Tudor village — with timber-framed, two-colour tiled cottages dripping medieval heritage — the couple spotted, with some relief, an elderly gentleman raking fallen leaves in his rambling garden.
Khorshed recounted, “He saw us poring over our map. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked. Visibly excited when we said India, he added, ‘Which city?’ The moment we said ‘Mumbai’, he said, ‘Oh a Mumbai street is named after my ancestor. Warden Road.’ In unison, we burst out saying, ‘What, that’s our road!’”
The astonished gent was Neil Warden. Grabbing them inside the house to introduce his wife Lindsay, he quickly brought off the wall some portraits of Captain Richard George Warden, a “direct ascendant” of Francis Warden who christened the Breach Candy strip the Nayaks and I call home.
Chief Secretary of Bombay Presidency in the 19th century and an East India Company director, Francis Warden has been the subject of research by Neil’s sons, the chartered accountant Nicholas Warden and actor Richard Warden (think Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, and Rome), with help from the family history forum RootsChat.
Nick and Rick — as they signed a series of mails to me — have followed their forefather’s career in the civil administration from 1795, the year he returned from England after his education. Nick expressed his intention of exploring Warden Road someday.
Sir Homi Mody. Pic Courtesy/Mody Family
Rick wrote: “We deduced that Francis Warden — a high-ranking civil servant in Bombay and beyond — was a cousin of our great-great-great-grandfather Richard George Warden, dying on January 6, 1853. The riddle isn’t made any easier by all of the generations above calling themselves George [or indeed Francis or Richard]. I visited a Putney cemetery on Nick’s recommendation. To my amazement I found this grave, aged because it has been walked on over a 150 years. If you look carefully, you can make out ‘Francis Warden’ and his death date suggested above.”
Elsewhere it emerges that Francis was a fearless senior administrator who took on the high and mighty on behalf of Indians, including spirited educational debates with Mountstuart Elphinstone, the Governor of Bombay.
“What were the odds? It was fantastic, the power of coincidence,” Prakash Nayak marvelled. “Thirty seconds more and we may never have enjoyed this chance meeting. Neil was about to disappear inside. He had finished sweeping to spruce his house for a tourists’ viewing the next day.” Khorshed added, “A good thing that we were as curious as Neil.”
Now for chuckle-worthy episodes probably familiar to a few. When the name of the lane on which Bombay House stands, changed in 1973 from Bruce Street (after a member of the Bombay Municipality around 1890-1900) to Homi Mody Street (after the noted industrialist associated with the Tatas), a delightful anecdote circulated. It is said that Russi Mody, the baronet-banker’s son, was pulled up by a policeman while parking his car on the narrow road. Admonished with the standard Bambaiya dare — “Tumhara baap ka rasta hain kya?” — the young scion pointed to the road sign, imprinted with his distinguished father’s name.
The eminent histopathologist Dr Anita Borges has another incident to narrate. Once, as she pulled out of the compound of the Tata Memorial Hospital at Parel, a rash motorist almost hit her car. Belligerently, he posed that identical question in the same lingo, translating to: Was this her father’s road? Under the signboard dangling where they stood, announcing “Dr Ernest Borges Marg”, she retorted, “Of course.” Leaving behind a puzzled but steaming individual.
Next up is not strictly a single street but the lovely maze of leafy lanes that make up Bombay’s sole unwalled baug, supposed to be the world’s largest ungated Zoroastrian enclave, inhabited by every fourth member of the community. The Dadar Parsi Colony’s other name — Mancherji Joshi Colony — commemorates an ancestor from my maternal family. Down the quiet cool of two arterial roads is the memorial bust of philanthropist Mancherji Edulji Joshi, my mother’s grand-uncle. Both my parents grew up here and cousins continue to live in century-old apartments around Mancherji’s statue.
Zareen Engineer and her sister Sooni Davar relate the story of their grandfather’s exceptional vision in raising the colony. A Karachi-born civil engineer with the Bombay Improvement Trust, Mancherji focused on accommodating middle-class Parsis on marshland the British developed under the 1899-1900 Dadar-Matunga-Wadala-Sion Scheme. “Bhejoo khasee gayooch ke [have you lost your head]?” exploded the first women, in Gujarati, to the husbands who brought them to these then soggy, inhospitable acres.
There was no option, Mancherji explained, persuading the British authorities to reserve over 100 plots to rehouse Parsis from cramped, plague-affected areas in South Bombay. The visionary planner that he was, Mancherji designed this colony with such exceptional attention to details that matter, it still reigns as one of the city’s greenest, cleanest, airiest neighbourhoods.
Why do I wander to different corners of the city every other week? Because Bombay holds soul-soothing hidden gems simply waiting to be discovered. It’s about seeing beyond the squalor. The adventure lies in finding out.
As Kannada fiction writer Yashwant Chittal says, “I don’t write what I know. I write to know.” And filmmaker Danny Boyle precisely observed, “It’s not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it’s what you learn about yourself.”
Every person one meets has precious stories to offer. Chronicling the past makes better sense of the present and holds hope for the future.
So, I’m a believer. Believing in the logic of lineage, in the beauty of bonds, in the likelihood of probabilities, possibilities and the pole-vault of “perhaps”. Initially, it does seem like embarking on a quest of the unknown. But you finally have engrossing oral history.
Preserve the pieces. Save the scraps. Join the dots. Cast around. Our neighbourhoods thrive with an inspiring autumnal generation whose unique veteran experiences we cannot begin to imagine. Their recollections are our rewards.
Locate. Listen. Lengthen. Roots before wings, the generations after us absolutely deserve to know. Dig out that story. Tell it with passion. Tell it with pride. Just tell it.
I have, on these pages, for years too many to count. But I’m moving on next month. From print to blog (www.mehermarfatia.com/blog), it’s an onward march to a digital platform which is an independent Bombay history archive of my own.
Toying with this decision for a longish while (pretty hard after 41 years of newspaper bylines for someone who cut her teeth on journalism in the 1980s before even a “box” computer screen flashed forth), I look forward to switching tracks. The same columns at the same frequency. Every alternate Sunday as usual. Promise.
This is not an absolute goodbye to print altogether. Not when the sight, smell and feel of it remain enchanting. This is about relevance. The crazily changing contours of our city split wide by relentless redevelopment demand to be documented with moving images. Still photos cannot adequately capture these constant changes which are fast leaving us bereft. Now, more than ever, it’s imperative to view the fragile Bombay fabric through a multimedia microscope with kaleidoscopic glass.
Yes, it’s a lonelier path to tread. Having freelanced for this paper itself since 1990 with different columns, I shall miss the interaction with the best page editors any writer can land. Courteous in correcting, how gently each has smoothed the occasional stammer of grammar in my text.
Admittedly, I am overwhelmed. Fortune may favour the brave, sure. But the bravest can crumble without the warm sustenance of loyalists. Thank you, dear reader, for keeping the faith. Stay with me. As they say, see you on the other side.
Author-publisher Meher Marfatia writes fortnightly on everything that makes her love Mumbai and adore Bombay.
This is her last column on these pages. She will continue chronicling the city from next month on: www.mehermarfatia.com/blog
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