I left the hotel after keeping my bag inside, so I hardly saw the room. It’s nice. Wooden floorboards (or is it linoleum?). Thick white curtains to compensate for the fact that it has no view.
I wanted to stay here because it’s an art deco building. And because it’s Churchgate. I couldn’t imagine what it means to spend the night at Churchgate.
*
I invite Ramu to give it the once-over. He comes up in the lift. Although the room’s on the first floor, you don’t take the stairs, and you tend to obey the liftman when he tells you to step in.
‘This is what I’d expect a room here to be like,’ he observes, standing by the bed, looking round him, taking responsibility. His hair is thinner than last time. He looks settled and respectable. ‘It’s good.’
‘It’s good,’ I echo.
We turn to leave. We proceed through the corridor, realizing it’s here – outside the rooms – that the hotel’s presence can be sensed. We opt for the stairs. Before even attempting the first step downward, we discuss the staircase.
‘Fuck,’ says Ramu. ‘Look at that space!’
I know why he’s agitated. There’s an opening-up here, dim and clean, corresponding to the lightness we feel inside.
‘W-where you’ll get that in modern buildings?’ he challenges me, querulous.
*
Although it’s fairly early for dinner, we notice the restaurants as we walk towards Marine Drive. I was never on this boulevard in my growing-up years at this time of the day – in the light rising after dusk. For some reason I feel I live round the corner. In fact, it’s like I’ve been here all my life. This unspoken sense of belonging to Churchgate doesn’t dilute my encounter with it. ‘Look at that!’ K. Rustom and Sons. People biting into ice cream sandwiched by two brittle wafers. A ghostly congregation. ‘I don’t believe it,’ says Ramu. I thought it had slipped into history. What’s difficult to account for is that it’s identical to what we remember.
*
We walk past Pizza by the Bay – once Not Just Jazz by the Bay – which I went to with my parents when it was Talk of the Town. I remember the polite nervousness with which we watched askance, eyelids blinking, a couple pirouette and dance the Salsa. Since then, I’ve only ever seen this place from a car, a few seconds at a time. We cross; we’re at the sea. We turn our back to it. We sit. We don’t bother with the men in t-shirts on our left and discreetly turn away from the Muslim couple on our right (they must be Muslim – the woman is delicate and beautiful).
We catch our breath and study two edifices – the Talk of the Town building and the Iran Air building. We lean, propped on our palms. I identify the style, mention the curves and vertical lines that mark out art deco – not because it explains anything or helps us better understand our rapture, but because it’s always pleasurable to talk about something you like.
‘Achha,’ says Ramu as I talk. He can be compliant. ‘Achha.’
We began to note the Marine Drive houses one day not long ago in a car, going towards Nariman Point, glancing left – I must have come in for the launch of Calcutta. He was two years back from his terrible stint in Alibag (which he never believed he’d escape) and this was a new lease of life for him in a city he’d detested, and he was seeing it with new eyes. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, peering as houses flitted past. We observed this flank curving on the left, ignoring the sea, as if the panorama had no relevance – as if the houses held the key to how life might be lived here. I felt a repressed niggle as I stared. Suddenly, I said, ‘Look at the windows.’ ‘Huh?’ Then he saw it too. ‘Fuck, you’re right.’ Frame after aluminium frame had replaced the casements. The gesture by which you push a window open was now unnecessary. ‘Fuck,’ he said glumly. It was as if a part of us that was air and breeze had been denied entry. Resentful, temporarily silenced, we gazed, for the next five minutes, upon the swift, unvarying succession of aluminium frames travelling the opposite way.
