If Sister Maria, the nun who taught me English in fourth standard, were to read this title she would fix her icy blue gaze on me, peer right into my doomed soul and ask: “What were you thinking, Nathan?” Sister Maria always addressed me by my surname – Geeta being a generic name in those days, there would be at least three Geetas in a class of thirty, so she preferred surnames to chide us. My homely Tamil surname she would pronounce as Naythan, convinced as she was that it was a Biblical Prophet’s name.

Higginbotham's, a bookworm's Shangri-La.

It should be Mount Road and I, she would have said pulling the wooden ruler out of her huge billowing habit and rapping me hard on my knuckles to make sure I never ever made that mistake again. Brushing the tears which spilled more out of anger than shame or pain, and heaping hell and brimstone on her head, I would have slunk back to my desk and, yanking my pigtails and sucking the end of my well-chewed pencil, continued the essay of the day. But Sr. Maria is not around and I shall defiantly retain the grammatically wrong heading ... (“Don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction...” ah, Sr. Maria’s voice from Beyond!).

Mount Road may have officially started from St.Thomas’ Mount or from somewhere near the Cooum, depending on which way you were heading but, for me, it started with India Silk House. My earliest memory is accompanying Mother on a trip when she wanted to buy brocade curtains for the house. The furnishings were on the first floor and Mother dragged me purposefully up the stairs. After sufficiently fussing over colour and texture (I have inherited my fabric-junkie traits from Mother) she settled for rich maroon and gold jacquard. Quite pleased with her purchase, Mother was in a truly benevolent mood. While heading up the stairs she had noticed me gawking at the dress materials and decided to indulge me. Of course, it was also a reward for coming along with her and for not whining and complaining of boredom while she selected the curtains. So, after placing
the order for the stitching, she took me to the counters downstairs.

There were rows and rows of rolls of material all leaning on each other and thrusting themselves forward from shelves reaching, it seemed to me, right up to the ceiling. Pure white cotton with tiny blue and orange flowers, powder blue with pretty pink paisley, fresh lime green with white and orange sprays and polka dot prints in every hue and size enticing me to indulge. How I wished Mother would buy me all; but Mother was strict and saw no reason why I should have too many clothes when I spent more than eight hours a day in school uniform. She bought two yards of each; despite the metric creeping into usage, Mother still worked in yards. Mother also bought me some white handkerchiefs embroidered with tiny roses worked in French knots. For the uninitiated tissue generation, handkerchiefs are the non-disposable re-usable face cleansers on which you dabbed your favourite perfume.

Whatever fleeting disappointment there may have been at Mother’s under-indulgence, all melted in the falooda from Jaffar’s, a few doors from India Silk House. En route to Jaffar’s was the infamous Elpinstone Theatre – Mother would hastily pull me along the pavement every time we went that way preventing me from catching a glimpse of the “new wave” Malayalam cinema posters with voluptuous women in low-cut blouses peering lustily from the walls at the fantasising men crowding around them. Mother would mutter something about the Last Days and God’s Wrath under her breath.

Jaffar’s was nothing like the kitschy, over-colourful, excessively cheerful ice-cream parlours of today. Ambience was not a priority – delicious rich ice creams and faloodas-to-die-for were. I would climb on to the contraption that was a cross between a bar stool and a backless chair and study the grubby menu with far more attention than I had ever done with my history or geography books. Those were depraved times when no one cared (and very few actually had heard) about those vexatious things called calories. Mother loved the pista ice cream and would never deviate from her favourite. After pretending to be an adult and wanting to make my own choice from the menu, I would fall into the waiting falooda trap. Mother’s pista ice cream was served in an ice cream bowl with a flat ice cream spoon (no characterless Styrofoam cups and small plastic contraptions with the ignominious one scoop or two scoop syndrome), just dollops of lip-smacking fun. My falooda was a regal creation. It came in a tall fluted glass which was narrow at the base and wider at the rim like some exotic long stemmed flower, permitting one to soak in the visual before digging into the luscious concoction. The transparent, glass-like sev at the bottom soaked in the rose syrup, which went gently swirling upwards in the cold milk creating marbled patterns, and balanced playfully the vanilla ice cream gently oozing downwards. The whole creation was topped off with tiny black falooda seeds. I scooped mouthfuls of the falooda with the long handled spoon.

Sometimes the whole family ate out and the choice was either vegetarian at one of the various Udipis called variously as G...Cafe or R... Lunch Home or K...Vilas or the non-vegetarian at Buhari’s. Mount Road Buhari had family rooms with swinging doors and waiters dressed in white uniform with white caps bordered with red or green. It served the aromatic biryani (when biryani meant succulent mutton pieces in spicy flavoured rice – no one had yet conjured up the totally unacceptable mutations yet). Each of the adults would tuck into a plate (half plate for the children) with some spicy fish fry and fiery prawn masala and round it off with a beeda (ice cream for the children, please). Sometimes, if Father was in a real good mood, I could cajole him unto permitting a beeda. I felt all grown up chewing the coloured coconut-shaving-and -gulkund (sweet rose preserve) – filled betel leaf with a clove stuck into it to hold the fold, while the slaked lime tickled my tongue. My other favourite at Buhari’s was the mutton cutlets. They were juicy, delectable, minced meat cutlets with the perfect grainy texture that you could feel with your tongue. You had to wait awhile for them to appear, as they were shaped and fried fresh, and were always slightly imperfect in shape and size – quite unlike the dehydrated, frozen and quick-fried perfect-shaped photogenic ones served now – and worth the wait: they were absolutely delicious! Who cared if the music that blared from the Murphy radio was full of static and the tables and chairs were old – it was the food that mattered.

A few steps from Buhari’s was the store that added just a bit of intrigue to my staid and studious student life – the M.S. Stores. I really didn’t know what the M.S. stood for, but assumed, because of the fullstops after the two letters, that they were the store owner’s initials. The name may have been prosaic, but the store was full of possibilities. My first visit was with a pipe-smoking “Uncle” (the ubiquitous term for Father’s male colleagues) from Calcutta. He needed pipe cleaners and had found out the store where they were available. I was deputed to be his official guide and so off we went with the driver in our little black Morris-8 to M.S. Stores.

It was here, while peering into the glass cases when the “Uncle” fussed over his pipe paraphernalia, that I spotted my secret key to happiness. It was a tiny box that would develop into the greatest ice-breaker ever and give me an opening line for making friends. We could not make friends by sending a request on social networking sites to a friend of a friend of a friend (ad nauseam) with the byline that we were interested in friendship, networking and men (or women as the case may be). It was an art to make friends (there were books written on how to do that) and almost everyone (except the very brave and the very foolish) was terrified to make the first move with one’s own sex or the opposite sex. There lay inside the glass case this tiny cardboard box of mouthfresheners called Jintan imported from Japan (or so the salesman told me, justifying the cost). Those tiny pungent silver balls caused enough curiosity when I tapped them from the teensey box into the palm of my hand, and sharing them was a great way to start a conversation. The habit continued while I was in hostel doing my undergraduate courses. Every month I would make a trip to the store to buy another little magic box and would also buy some biscuits and the basic toiletries while I was there. The store also had a few knickknacks you could pick up as gifts for the impromptu birthday parties in the hostel.

Walk along the pavement and on the opposite side loomed huge Higginbotham’s. It was a bookworm’s Shangri-La. The smell of paper and print ink always cheered me up and I loved to walk on the marble floor, look up at the high ceiling, go up those wide curving stairs, and stand tiptoe to reach the topmost book on the high stately shelves. Every year, Christmas time, Father and I would go there to buy greeting cards. Father was particular that the cards only said ‘Season’s Greetings’, so that they could be used during the entire festival season. Higginbotham’s would have some crepe paper streamers in red, green, blue and yellow and a few tinsel decorations that were always discreet (this was before the everything-in-shiny-plastic era). I always went there when I needed birthday cards – not a difficult task choosing them, for they all had pictures of bunches of white and pink roses tied with satin ribbons and almost the same unimaginative syrupy lines inside. Although Higginbothams did stock pulp fiction and bestsellers, somehow I never had the courage to pick up a Harold Robbins or a Jacqueline Susann, in case the bookshelves frowned disapprovingly down at me for tainting the grandiose air.

To pick those up you just had to walk further down to the next signal, to Kennedy Bookshop. This was a small shop which you could never enter for two reasons: one, it was too small and like a train bogie had one small entrance and stretched inwards (in this case I could never see the end of the shop) and two, because it was so choked with books that only a single person could slide in sideways. When you needed a book you just had to mention the title to the ever-smiling owner who would produce it before you could say Arthur Hailey. Father did not encourage pulp fiction, so I skimped and saved and from my meagre pocket money committed my first cardinal sin (for which I repented a million times in case Divine Wrath makes me forget all my dates during the history exam) and bought A Stone for Danny Fisher for six rupees. Soon I became a secret addict to deviant literature and often picked up books that used colourful Anglo-Saxon terminology.

A passport size photograph would be required for the airline concession form or for the Board Exam form or any such identification paper and all of us would en masse turn up at G.K. Vale’s. The solemn coloured photograph of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan hung on the wall opposite the entrance, next to the elegant and smiling M.S. Subbulakshmi. Colour film was not used and so an artist painted the pupil black, the lips pale pink, and the jewellery yellow hoping to pass that off as gold, with gaudy green, red and blue for gemstones, thus turning them into coloured photographs in one sense. In smaller studios it was less subtle and provided a lot of mirth but at G.K. Vale’s it was rather elegant and tastefully done. Behind the low desk sat numerous sales people, including the smiling owner himself in white shirt and white trousers. We were ushered one by one into the studio and flash went the bulb capturing our dour expressions forever. No instant delivery system existed, and so we had to come back the next day to collect the pictures. That provided us an excuse to visit Spencer’s for some pastries but, if we were broke, then it was the Aavin milk parlour for an ice cream cone on the go.

I never did learn where Mount Road ended, but all my shopping and eating ended with Spencer’s and the only reason I ever ventured beyond it was when I wanted to go to the movies (we called them ‘flicks’) at the Sapphire complex.