Wendy's: no better wool till there are better sheep." Which knitter could resist the sweeping assurance of that tagline? Piled skeins of the British brand flew off shelves of filmmaker Rafeeq Ellias' grandfather's haberdashery. Mohammed Joosab Ellias opened Amir Store on Clare Road, in East Byculla, around 1945, naming the shop after his son Amir.

This was a street elegant as the eminence it acknowledged. John Fitzgibbon, second Earl of Clare, Governor of Bombay from 1831 to 1835. North-ended by the Y-flyover, Clare Road is ushered in by the statue of "Khada Parsi" Cursetjee Manockjee, who offered Indian girls the first English school in 1859 from his home, Villa Byculla. The road is rechristened Mirza Ghalib Marg, though it is debatable whether or not the legendary poet lived hereabouts. But a definite lodger at 17A Adelphi Chambers, in the 1940s, was the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto.