Dada-Moshai Of Carter Road

Not only has Hrishida (as he is universally called) lived on Carter Road,Bandra, for almost fifty years now, but he must be the one person whose house(former house, now) ‘Anupama’ (opposite Otter’s Club) has featured themost in Indian cinema. He had moved into the house in 1960, soon after Anuradha,the successful remake of Madam Bovary, with Leela Naidu and BalrajSahni. The shoestring budgets on which he made his films on the one hand, andthe debilitating Gout condition which used to frequently immobilize him sincethe late 1970s resulted in his making a series of ‘home-bound’ films like Golmaaland Khubsoorat in which the main set was his own house. There was aperiod when, for some five years at a stretch, every time you visited the houseyou could lose your way as major portions of it would have been remodeled for aset.

Hrishida said it was cheaper than hiring studios. I remember rushing inthrough a door where I was sure a toilet existed and stopping petrified at thesight of Utpal Dutt sitting in an easy chair rehearsing his lines for a shot. Helooked up, understood the situation in a jiffy, and returned to his reading witha bemused shrug. The toilet had been ‘redesigned’ to look like an officeroom. It was an oblong, barrack-like, one-storied house whose best feature wasthe front portico with its swing and coconut palm and its room-size balconyupstairs, from where you could sit and gaze at the sea and the tides and sunsetsover Danda beach for hours on end.

This is the house where on any given day you would bump into Sachin DevBurman coming in with his starched white Banglaa dhoti or a young Amitabh andJaya in deep conversation or a Ritwick Ghatak sprawled on a bed or a SalilChoudhury and Utpal Dutt exchanging notes or a Rekha giggling as shedemonstrated some aerobic exercise or a Rahi Masoom Raza and Rajinder Singh Bedisharing Urdu shairs or a Deena Pathak re-living her lines (on dancerChandralekha’s request) from the famous IPTA play Jasma Odhan or UshaKiron carrying armloads of Maharashtrian mustard-chilli pickles, while Hrishidawould have found a little time between two takes to make a lethal move on thechess board against long-time chess foe Rajnibhai (the diamond jeweler andphilanthropist Rajnikant Mehta from Madras) and soulfully sing dostdost naa raha, as Rajnibhai tried to wriggle out of the ‘check’.Ashok Kumar, David and Gulzaar were like members of the household. Being at ‘Anupama’was like being in the warmth of a creative community. Tea, food and convivialitywere constant. Other friends of mine Darryl D’Monte and Zarine were a stone’sthrow away to the right and Basu Bhattacharya and Abdullah Kandwani a stone’sthrow away to the left.

The house also doubled as Chandralekha’s pad whenever she was in Bombay andthere would also be a crowd of her friends in the picture – from Kumar Shahaniand K.K.Mahajan on one side to Indira Jaisingh, Achala Rao and Zahida Ranjan onthe other.

On occasion, there would be Harindranath Chattopadhyaya walking in from ‘KismetApartments’ across the road with harmonium slung on his shoulder and animpromptu mehfil would begin. Harinda (Baba to all of us) had themost extraordinary repertoire of the classical, the frivolous and thepolitical/revolutionary songs. I still remember my goose-pimples one evening inHrishida’s balcony, when Baba first rendered Nishi they jaiyyophoolo bane, o bhanwara (the Banglaa song which Sachin Dev Burman madefamous in Hindi as Dheere se jaana bagiyan mein, o bhanwara) in theexquisite classical style of the Kirana Gharana (he was a shaagird of UstadAbdul Kareem Khan himself), and then suddenly just switched the pace of the sameRaga and belted out the famous song of the 1942 ‘Quit India Movement’ he hadwritten and sung Aa gaya din Swadhinta ka, aage chalo aage chalo,bhayi. He later gave us an unforgettable lecture-demonstration on howit was possible to take ‘soft’ Ragas and infuse them with radical potentialby merely changing the beat and tempo of the Raga.

Interestingly, the popular songs Rail gaadi and Nani kinaav chali which Ashok Kumar has sung in Hrishida’s 1968 film Ashirwadwas originally sung impromptu, in the 1950s, by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya tohumour Chandralekha, when they used to live together on Krishna Iyer Street,Madras. Chandra had written them down (as she wrote every nonsense rhyme Babacomposed for her merriment) and had later presented him the diary in Bombay. Itis ironic that Baba played an important role in Hrishida’s Ashirwad, butit was Ashok Kumar who rendered the songs after being coached by Baba.

When I first visited ‘Anupama’ in 1977 along with Chandralekha, Hrishidawas living there with his two sons Babu and Tutu, his faithful driver-cum-cookGopal and his thirteen dogs. His own Studebaker car he had loaned to artist andfriend Dashrath Patel, an important member of the National Institute of Design (NID),Ahmedabad. So Chandra had driven her Fiat car over from Madras and left it at‘Anupama’ for Hrishi’s use. Like the house itself, this Fiat car too, withits Madras number plate 2205, was destined to become an important prop inHrishikesh Mukherjee films – not to speak of several objects like a coppervessel or a ‘mata-ni-pachedi’ textile hanging, etc. besides playfulreferences to Chandra’s quotations from ayurvedic texts or her dance guruKanjeevaram Ellappa Pillai or her Gujarati origins.

From the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, Hrishida had onerous commitments asDirector of the NFDC or Chairman of the Film Censor Board. Every time the carleft the compound, the thirteen dogs would rush to the gate to see him off. Butthe amazing thing was to see them (Bhombhol in particular) dash to the gate agood five minutes before he returned (perhaps, almost as the car would beturning into Turner Road) and wait in anticipation. And then all hell wouldbreak loose as Hrishida alighted from the car. And he would have time for eachone of them and a different thing to eat for each one. And woe betide you if yougot bitten by one of them (as dance critic Sunil Kothari once did). As far asHrishida was concerned, it could only have been your fault.

A little over ten years ago, Hrishida sold ’Anupama’ and moved into afourth floor flat in the adjoining ‘Rock Cliff’ apartments. Hrishida, almostimmobilized now, has lived confined to the northern bedroom of his flat. Babuworks in Boston. Tutu died of an asthmatic attack on his way to Delhi some yearsago. All the dogs have died one by one, save the lovely Bhuti, grown old andweak. She is permanently sprawled on Hrishida’s bed. It is from the windows ofthis room that he befriended two crows, which became regulars at feed time.Hrishida used to feed them Britannia Marie biscuits with his own hands. Thesewere the crows who lent voice to his last film Jhooth Bole Kawwa Kaate,which was as much a tribute to the crows as to his ‘jigri dost’ thelate Raj Kapoor. The only other time he moved out of this room other than tomake JBKK, was once to rush all the way to Sakshi Gallery (then at Kemp’sCorner) to check on my condition as I lay breathless on the gallery floor, priorto the opening of a Dahsrath Patel exhibition, with a serious attack ofBronchitis; the other time was when Amitabh Bachan very sweetly personallysupervised all arrangements and accompanied him to Delhi when Hrishida receivedhis Dadasaheb Phalke award.

For the past two years we have been watching as ‘Anupama’ was demolishedand an eight-storied flat has come up there completely blocking Hrishida’snorthern and western view and eliminating all possibility of a return of thecrows to those windows. From the time the demolition began and earthmoversrolled in excavating the site for the foundation of the flat, I have beenphotographing the process once every four or five months that I make it toMumbai from Chennai. It has been like an entombing of memories. Eventually evenHrishida, frail and in agony that he is, could not take it any more and has nowmoved to the south-side bedroom, which is like a return to breeze and light. Hisgreatest excitement is to have someone stopping by to discuss national politics.His favorite subjects with me are the ‘failures’ of the ‘Left’ and theshenanigans of Chief Minister Jayalalitha. But mostly he is alone. "All myfriends are gone. No one comes to meet me now," he says with a tinge ofuncharacteristic bitterness.

He also makes it a point in the evenings to get himself carried out on to hisbalcony from where he looks out on to the bustling Joggers’ Park below and,beyond it, the flaming sun as it settles soundlessly into the Arabian Sea. And,somewhere in the distance, from someone’s Sony-Max channel, you can hear thestrains of that song from the 1970 hit Anand, Kahin door jab dindhal jaye…

The piece first appeared in a souvenir for the festival, Celebrate Bandra, dated 30 November 2003. It was later also reproduced in Man's World, January 2004 issue