Crunching wisdom in the wafer shop
- Meher Marfatia
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
This weekend we celebrate some of Bombay’s oldest wafer shops – felled but never forgotten
You have to agree. A comfort food favourite cutting across generations is the humble but
heavenly wafer. May 30 is designated World Potato Day by the UN at the request of Peru –
the tuber’s birthplace – to highlight its role in fighting global hunger and poverty.
Seventeenth-century Portuguese sailors brought the potato to India’s western coast. To
begin with Bombay’s oldest outlet stocking this palate pleaser. “Over a hundred years ago
our family shop, Golden Wafers, was the first bhatti wafer shop,” says actor Boman Irani. His
grandfather Bomanji set it up in a Grant Road cul de sac behind Novelty Cinema. The little
structure with Mangalore tiles and a chimney was fitted with a large, well-like kadhai behind
the counter, to fry slices and straws (sali) to the mellow gold of their name.
I interview Boman one evening in his Dadar Parsi Colony home. His lovely wife Zenobia has
filled platters of plump mutton and chicken sandwiches (“Do you eat non-veg?” she has
messaged thoughtfully that morning) with, obviously, wafers.
Boman says, “My father Khodadad took over the reins from Bomanji. He coined a good, old-
fashioned tagline for Golden Wafers: ‘Where quality leads, customers follow’. When he died,
too young, my mother stepped in and repaid a debt of 57,000 rupees, a massive amount
then (watch the video). “She stoked the hot kolsa bhatti fumes with courage and
determination, returning home with a blouse rimmed with coal sweat.”
A loyalist declares he will never forget the many kindnesses of Boman’s mother Jeroo and
aunt Khorshed (Khodadad’s sister) who helped run the shop. Waiting at the lane entrance to
hand over a pair of packets for him and his brother, Khorshed would caution them to remove the metal staple pin sealing their goodies.
Continuing his story, Boman says, “I sat there in my mother’s lap as a toddler and later
stopped by on my way back from St Mary’s School. When possible, I served customers
myself at the counter. Retail was done over chai and conversation. It wasn’t merely
transactional. People came themselves to buy, no sending staff or phoning in orders.
“Any wafer shop is a wise space, a khazana of character reading. We had warm interactions
with everyone, from bank managers to actors and directors like Manmohan Desai from
nearby Khetwadi. And it was my privilege once to escort Sharmila Tagore to her
hairdresser’s house opposite, when she came asking for directions (watch the video).”
That iconic counter was where he met Zenobia Panthaky. “My wife-to-be turned up every
evening. How was I to know this daily customer was coming to see me?” he quips. “I only
thought her regularity was because of the Parsi craze for ‘kurum kurum’. That’s anything
crisp. We even top rice dishes with a dash of kurum kurum.”
Other shops also thrived because of amazing shared camaraderie, says Boman. His
mother’s relatives owned Victory Wafers in Colaba. Janta Wafers was gaining ground in
Malad after Dhirubhai Khakhar introduced the brand in the mid-1950s. Flourishing with
Golden Wafers were A1 Wafers on Balaram Street, OK Wafers at Tardeo and Colaba,
Coronation Wafers at Foras Road and B Wafers on Forjett Hill. “The A1 Wafers people were
particularly supportive,” Boman adds. “Back in the day, shops helped replenish each other’s
stock. Kishinchand Chainani of A1 told my mother, ‘Any problem Jeroo Ben, let us know.’”
At A1 Wafers, I chat with Kishinchand’s son Ramesh Chainani. Kishinchand’s wife Usha
smiles from behind the counter. Her unexpected presence is a pleasant change from the
“manned” counters of these shops. Exceptionally, A1 stays rooted at the spot where it
opened in 1950, behind Apsara Cinema. Quite a few wafer shops used to brush walls with
cinema halls, like Golden with Novelty and Sun Wafers behind Alfred Talkies in Khetwadi.
“If the Golden Wafers bhatti wala didn’t report to work one morning, my father took care of
it,” says Ramesh. “Boman’s mother was a really remarkable lady.” Ramesh and his mother
slowly thread together the story of his grandfather Gokuldas Chainani arriving from Sind
post-Partition (watch the video).
Gokuldas’ sons – Ramesh’s father Kishinchand and his brother Naraindas – succeeded
him. “But my father underwent a 360-degree turn after a life-changing illness. He was on a
search for more meaning,” says Ramesh. “Surviving a tetanus bout that the doctors didn’t
expect him to, he sat me down and said, ‘I realise things differently and must question: am I
in this world to just cut wafers?’”
At B Wafers, I meet an experienced hand, who had joined the trade as an 18-year-old. Now
63, Mohammad Abdul tells me, “Bachpan se mein yehi karta aaya hoon – this is what I’ve
been doing since childhood.” The single-counter he manages in Tardeo’s Matrumandir Lane,
hawking farsaan, sandwiches and cold drinks, is the palest shadow of the earlier B Wafers
shop at Forjett Street in its 1960s-’70s heyday (it is replaced by a hairstyling salon). “I was
trained to slice potatoes,” says Abdul. “There’s a lot of difference between the two shops.
Imagine, no less than Indira Gandhi sent for our wafers when she visited Bombay.”
B Wafers, Golden Wafers and Victory Wafers were food writer Kunal Vijayakar’s haunts.
“You got the best aromas from all three shops,” he says (watch the video). “I clearly recollect
walking three steps up and into B Wafers at Forjett Street. Regular and masala wafers were
stored in huge aluminium dabbas with kadis and dhakkans on them. My strongest memory is of dark patches of oil on brown paper bags in which they weighed the amount you wanted. Dig into them, they were delicious! When B Wafers shut, I felt so bad I actually cried.”
There seems more to cry about. Rare to find a shop equipped with the old-fashioned vat
crisping chips on the premises, behind the counter. But this was what Ideal Wafers, in a
corner of Khotachi Wadi, has had till recently. Knifed spuds in vanaspati (an unusual frying
medium for wafers) sputtered in a gigantic pan, then were cooled and packed by Venkatesh
Subbiah and his wife Vaidehi. After more than 60 years of customers addicted to its salted
and pepper banana wafers, this outlet is on the verge of downing shutters. “It is extremely
hard getting man power,” says Subbiah, struggling with his ancestral shop till its brave end.
Labour shortage, soaring rents and heavyweight outsider contenders like Lay’s and Pringles
are constraints impacting the savviest proprietors who have tried to innovate with the times.
Like Welcome Wafers in Attarwala Chawl of Mahim. Velji Manshi Gada left his Kutch village
of Vagal to open Welcome in the 1970s. Potatoes were crisped in two pans from a backroom
before they went on to produce 200 kilos an hour from a Govandi unit. The Gadas employed
boys on bicycles to deliver at doors from Mahim to Byculla. “Teh cycle no jamano hato, that
was the age of cycles,” Gada had said when I interviewed him some years ago. “Our skilled
men could slice a potato and instantly gauge its starch content by the crunch made.”
Welcome experimented with new flavours (the tomato was perfected after more than a
hundred tries) and noted inputs from clients and retailers (Gujaratis are partial to sweet-sour
flavours; North Indian communities want masala chips; kid-friendly tangy flavours do better
during holiday months). Yet, the writing on the wall came to pass.
As it did for Victory Wafers of Colaba. At the entrance to Windy Hall Lane, ahead of Navy
Nagar, this reigned supreme where Tier Nom Patisserie now stands. “Happily, this shop was
next to where I lived in Usha Sadan,” says Shakeel Kudrolli, founder of Aquasail India.
“People crowded to buy big quantities in white butter paper. The proprietors were given to
using some colourful language, though always in a playful manner. Remember, in the 1960s
and ’70s, comfort food was restricted to wafers, chocolate and toffees. Victory Wafers
remains the benchmark, so outstanding that I yet feel the taste on the tongue.”
Introduced in 1962 as a makeshift counter selling hand-cut wafers from a home kitchen,
Pankaj Farsan and Wafer Mart, in Vile Parle east, probably sustained itself thanks to a cult
following among Gujarati and Maharashtrian residents.
Besides undeniably popular Camy and Balaji, Mota Wafers is a major contemporary player.
Birthed in 1992 by Ajit Mota and his wife Amrut, as a 1000 square feet operation in Andheri,
Motas is firmly entrenched with multiple factories and a deep retailer network. Offering
interesting market insights and comparisons, Ajit Mota’s son Jeegar describes brands like
Uncle Chips and Simba Chips. The latter was a surprising, if short-lived, challenger. “Simba
stopped manufacturing before we started. But their typical masala chips were simply superb, with a great flavour which even we can’t match today.”
How can I close this column without mention of the wafers I grew up craving? To the left of
our home was Mac Ronell’s, Cajetan Pereira’s contribution to 1970s Bandra. With that
pioneer confectioner’s chicken patties, lemon sponge rolls and cakes possible to shape
“from a pipe to a piano”, were wafers that flew off the shelves of his flagship Hill Road store.
But the ones I still dream about were from Blue Circle. That shop was located within easy
reach. Next to New Talkies, where my brother and I were members of a children’s film club.
The magic of the movies was a weekly ritual. Picking up those chips doubled the fun. Which
Bandraite of a certain vintage has stayed unseduced by Blue Circle’s buttery orbs of bliss, I’d
like to know.
© Meher Marfatia Multimedia production & digital marketing: Danesh Mistry
Comments