Giving home an imaginary spin

Home is a place of refuge It offers the comfort of family and friends and great neighbours If you are a Catholic from Cavel the small Christian neighbourhood of South Mumbai the church also finds its way into this listThats how I arrived at multiple definitions of home when I moved here in 2003In the beginning I thought little of an area locked by the teeming markets of Chira Bazaar Bhuleshwar and Kalbadevi The Church of Our Lady of Health situated at the far end of Dr Viegas Street and named after Dr Acacio Gabriel Viegas who rescued Bombay during the Bubonic Plague of 1897 had barely 300 parishioners It was years later when a research project took me to the Asiatic Library that I first stumbled upon Cavel in the yellowing pages of a hardbound book by Goan historian and physician Joseacute Gerson da Cunha 18441900 Cavel he said got its name from the Kolvars or the KolisFrom his work and later that of historian Teresa Albuquerque I had to learn of how this Latin quarter had experienced three lives in a few hundred years Once home to the Portuguese missionariesmdashthe church used to be the private chapel of a Portuguese gentleman Pedro Jose de Mouramdashthe place soon came to be overrun with native Christians today known as the East Indians By the turn of 19th century the Goans migrated to the port city for better opportunities settling down in Christian pockets Cavel was the new address away from home not just for Da Cunha but for Salvador Patricio de Souza who ran the famed Padaria de Cavel back in the 1800s The bakery distributed bread to all and sundry in the city until it shuttered Cavel would see many glowing names in the mid1900s It gave the city three mayorsmdashDr Joseph Collaco Dr Joseph Alban DSouza and Dr Joseph Leon DSouza They lived on different floors of 183A Pius X Mansion a centuryold building that still stands Its most likely that Dr Viegas too had a connection with this placeThis indeed was a neighbourhood with a rich legacy And the more I delved in the more there was to find Why then did Mumbai forget Cavel There is no real answer to this question For a shrinking community there are bigger problems at hand than preserving historyThats why I wrote Bombay Balchatildeo WestlandIt allowed me to reimagine Cavel one that resembled the glorious place of yore and drew inspiration from its treasuretrove of stories But instead of Dr Viegas I introduced Dr DLima a fictional contemporary after whom I named the street that would lead to my CavelI refrained from telling the real stories because memories in Cavel are now fractured Everyone seems to know a story but a different one Many years ago my late neighbour Lulu Days mentioned how her brotherinlaw Arnold Days a firefighter died in the 1944 Bombay Port explosion He was not supposed to be at work that day It was the saddest day in Cavel Arnold inspired David Lawrence a character in my bookMy protagonist Michael Coutinho is a work of imagination But former veteran journalist Ervell E Menezes a resident of DMonte Building had shared an amusing incident once of how he was forced to grow a beard as a decoy to keep away a bunch of goons who he had written about He wore that beard till he passed away last year So does MichaelVivienne Gaudet a former hockey player for India now based out of Canada was kind enough to lend me a memoir she had written for her son It had tales of celebrationmdashthe baan dance and rock bandsmdashlove and camaraderie in Cavel all of which helped me place my characters in a world that was close to realEvery chapter in this book is fiction and I wouldnt have wanted it any other way But its still Cavel like the one everyone forgot to rememberCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news crime news current affairs and also a complete guide on Mumbai from food to things to do and events across the city here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates