`I speak to you after years of silence, my son. Verona is no more…’
-Czeslaw Milosz
All landscape is part memory and Bombayites of a certain vintage are going to lose some of theirs. After over half-a-century, Café Samovar shuts down on March 31.
We heard Samovar’s dry death rasp some time back when they stopped serving beer. Samovar was the cheapest and nicest beer dive in town, with free and endless mixture of murmura and peanuts, overlooking the rainwashed gardens of the Prince Of Wales Museum, tungsten-lit on dark, cloudy afternoons, some students from Elphinstone College (across the road) singing Dylan at a table and your own golden glass of sun and surf. A briny wind would blow carrying glimpses of sea and sail. You may have never had dreams as beautiful as this.
Besides the many libdem proper nouns that hung out at Sam’s, there would typically be an assortment of lawyers and academics from the High Court and the University diagonally opposite, brokers from the nearby stock exchange, artists, journalists, and couples taking a moment.
It would always be abuzz, crowded and musky with the fragrance of good food, lager and chatter.
Indeed, for the many hippies who visited the place, this would be the gateway to the Mumbai high, more than the Gateway of India close by.
Way, way before the awesome Bindeshwar Pathak waged the Sulabh Revolution, Sam’s had a paid loo on the premises. I don’t know who ran the loo, but it was sound business strategy. Much of the revenues of said loo would flow from the beer – after all, one has to empty in order to refill.
Buck-a-pee I think it was when I last checked in.
Personally, with this, among the final frontiers of an older, elegant Bombay would have fallen in these parts. There used to be Wayside Inn across the road, a lovely colonial construct with liveried waiters and silver butter bowls. Ambedkar had apparently written parts of the Constitution there.
Next to it was the sprawling, high-ceilinged Rhythm House, with many soundproof Music Rooms equipped with stereos, where you could take a selection of songs and soulmates, shut the door and listen to music (what else?). After some reasonable time, there would be discreet knocks on the door that would gradually get louder if one were too busy with the jazz. Rhythm House’s shell is there but not the soul, man.
Sam’s will soon be long forgotten. From its fertile ashes will rise a shiny new cityscape with ATMs and Sushi Fine Dine, where the price of beer will make you think you’re drinking half your iPhone. Which will take the piss out of your buzz. For which you will have to hit Nashik (the government is building the DMIC – the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor -- might as well put the expressways to some use)...
And maybe this is how we prepare to die, as things and people we deeply love disappear from our lives and we are no more in touch with this world…
Good night, dear Sam’s. You shall be missed. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…
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