The Pillai brothers, Krishnan and Shaktivel, at their 80-year-old shop Madras Paan, which stocks provisions typically catering to Matunga’s Tamil community. Pic/Sayed Sameer Abedi

Some neighbours are more special than others. Like ours in Matunga, skirting the Dadar Parsi Colony where we used to visit grandparents. Overdosing on Bawa boom, my cousins and I would slip away next door for quieter fun. We’d trail friends through leafy lanes as one reported for dance class, another rehearsed for a Shanmukhananda concert (without knowing Tamilians in 1960s-70s Bombay, you're forgiven for thinking that hall only hosted Filmfare Awards). Practices done, we dashed off for games of Chain Cook to Five Gardens, whose soft grass lawns weren’t yet heaped with hard plastic play mazes.