Of Windy Hall and dhobi chawl

Tucked away in west Colaba, but with interesting surprises to spring, Windy Hall Lane deserves a little mapping

This isn’t just another column. I look at it as a promise kept. To fellow journalist Farrokh Jijina, who was Bombay buff enough to be an integral member of two teams – Parsiana magazine and Khaki Tours. Farrokh always responded to my fortnightly columns. “Write someday about forgotten Colaba by-lanes like Duxbury and Windy Hall,” he suggested, shortly before he passed away last year. 

While beautiful bungalows in Duxbury Lane are felled for new structures, the latter still invites exploration. Here’s walking Windy Hall Lane for you, Farrokh.

Treading on from Colaba Post Office toward Navy Nagar, which was once Holiday Camp for recuperating soldiers and sailors… After St Francis Xavier Chapel, a signboard announces the gully (see map). Going in westward, before gently right-angling south, Windy Hall Lane lies sandwiched between the buildings Usha Sadan and Daulat Shirin. 

“Where Usha Sadan stands was a sprawling, Mahableshwar-style bungalow called Windy Hall, owned by Bapai and Jehangir Cooper,” says octogenarian Rashne Dubash, explaining the lane name. “Behind it, in Morfa House, lived my aunt Kamal Wood (English Literature professor and Shakespeare scholar), whom I loved visiting.” 

A few feet into the lane looms the signage of Tier Nom Patisserie on the left corner. This was earlier the famous Victory Wafers, from where the aroma of potato chips would waft wide. It offered crushed “wafer chura”, scooped into paper cones sold for 1 anna – roughly 6 paise – before escalating to 10-paise packs.  

“As kids we were particularly excited running to Victory Wafers in the lane to buy them freshly fried,” writes Homi K Bhabha from Harvard University where he is the Anne F Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Departments of English and American Literature and Comparative Literature. “The owners were burly sadra-clad Iranis with bellowing voices. Wafers have never tasted the same again.” 

Sea Foam, on Windy Hall Lane, built about 100 years ago by his grandfather Hormasji Bhabha, provided a corridor from the family’s Cuffe Parade residence to access the rest of Colaba.

Every road needs a guide to traverse it and a guardian to nurture it. Dubash has willingly assumed both roles: my guide and the gully guardian. When her family settled in five-storeyed (only two are visible from the front) Bueno Vista a year after it was built in 1936 by Gustad Irani, it was the lane’s tallest building, situated at its cool southern end. 

“Buono Vista”, in raised capital lettering, crowns an off-centre entrance framed by blue reeded bands. My attention moves from accented grooves on the minimally ornamented facade to the painted entrance grill door replicating a quintessential Art Deco design. This was later installed by Dubash and Gita Mistry two floors above her. Having known each other from the day they were born 80 summers ago (watch the video), the two are completely invested in maintaining the building. 

Gita Mistry and Rashne Dubash outside Bueno Vista where they have lived for over 80 years

“Let me show you around before going into our building,” Dubash says. She is keen to correct a misconception – “People believe the entire street outside is Shahid Bhagat Singh Road but it isn’t.” From the bus station onward, this becomes Nanabhai Moos Marg, named after the first Indian director of the Colaba Observatory which the East India Company set up in 1841.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/35599e_456e52ecbcff4499a577d878afc885fb/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Rashne Dubash and Gita Mistry discuss the views of early Colaba landmarks from their terrace  

Windy Hall Lane was dubbed Dhobi Gully because at least six of them cleaned clothes in the small lane. I steer through rowed doorways of dhobis and mechanics in Hashim Premji Chawl. Sprawled over a major section of the gully, this two-level chawl accommodated drivers employed in buildings like Connaught Mansions, facing the main road. They parked cars in garages here and occupied quarters above. 

With the familiar ease of a lifetime spent on the same home turf, Dubash waves to practically everyone we encounter. Washermen families at their windows to boys on bikes whose fathers she has seen grow up, greet her at each step of our stroll. 

The chawl now holds outlets like a liquor bar, gradually changing the complexion of the neighbourhood. Watching me make notes, a cat curls languidly outside A-1 Paan Bidi. She darts off with sudden mews, disconcerted by the loud revving of a repaired motorcycle. 

“We are here since my grandfather arrived from Allahabad for a job as a driver for British officers,” says Mehmood Alam of Sayed Auto Garage, named for his father Sayed Israr Hussain. Across, at Popular Battery, his elder brother Khurshid Alam adds, “Since 1973, I’m at this shop our father opened in 1969. The gully hasn’t changed much over years.” 

Mehmood Alam at Sayed Bike & Car Washing Centre  

Ramesh Kanojia, a dhobi, thinks similarly. His father and uncles came here from Unnao in Uttar Pradesh in the mid-1950s, he says, “Except that the road becomes higher each time it is paved, things stay the same. The real change is our number of customers. With washing machines in homes, dhobis are reduced to being istri walas ironing clothes.”

Beside Sea Foam, presenting a picture of serenity is quietly classic Maskati Villa. Intended as a beach house on the rocky sea front, this was built before the Maskatis – textile traders with Far Eastern countries like Thailand – moved in. “Waves would reach up to our garden before reclamation,” says Zehra Maskati who came to stay as a bride from Surat in 1959. 

Views of original stained-glass craftsmanship in Maskati Villa, including the family name written in Gujarati

Her mother-in-law could see the Rajabai Clock Tower from where she sat painting seascapes and other scenes of 19th-century Bombay that line the walls of their interior staircase. Up there, the eye flies straight to an exquisite rendition of the word “Maskati” in Gujarati script in stained-glass above a central window. As arrestingly glinting in the luminescent glass are her father-in-law’s initials – ATE – for Abdul Taiyab Esmailjee.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/35599e_f5e162bca64946458a4a36c5326b5fc0/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Zehra Maskati on the traditional wall cabinet, called bhandarya, a furniture fixture in old Surat homes   

Shaded, almost a mini forest, the garden which west-rims the bungalow bursts with greens like giant-leafed alocasia. In temperate climes, gardens in the lane saw silkworms creep in. Mulberry trees grew wild on the old Cuffe Parade pier where children picked and sometimes tasted the creatures within white shells washed ashore. 

Beside Maskati Villa, where the wooden bungalow Sea Dream stood (two crumbling, yet impressive, gatepost pillars are all that remain of it), a banyan tree casts soft shadows that sway and skitter in the breeze. The ladies point to the rear of Windmere (the entrance is from Cuffe Parade), the apartment block where Noel Tata lives. It replaced a bungalow called Windmere built by a Scotsman. Among those tenanting it, briefly, was philanthropist Bapsy Sabavala from the Cowasji Jehangir family, when her sons Sharokh and Jehangir were young schoolboys. 

Returning to Bueno Vista, I find the ladies veritably brim with quotable memories they are eager to share. We laugh to hear how they have actually received mail addressed “Toofani Gully”, from a sender who confidently, literally translated “Windy Hall”.

And Mistry quips, “Our architect must have been related to Pythagoras, going by all the triangular spaces he put in.” Peering from the terrace atop the fifth floor, we see a mosaic-tiled, triangle-shaped terrace, which Dubash’s father fitted with a trapeze and where her sister had a Navjote party.   

“We’ve sat here all our lives,” Mistry says, perched precariously on a pipe against a water tank. “The sweeping harbour view was a joy, with lit ships in the night and vessels navigating around Prong’s Lighthouse until reconstruction spoilt Duxbury Lane. The gorgeous steeple of Afghan Church is half hidden and you just glimpse Oyster Rock.” 

An unusual narrative follows. Mistry’s mother would gather family and friends at their home for weekend card games like Oklahoma, a bit like gin rummy with a couple more players. Bored of cards, Dubash’s mother went to sit at the piano, to witness strange drama outside a window of the room. The huge water tank was being stolen and she was watching it get winched lower, inch by inch.  

“The water tanks were also where Cyrus (Guzder) told us ghastly ghost stories,” Dubash recollects with a shudder. “Guilty as charged,” admits industrialist and environmentalist Guzder, who lived close in Windmere. “Scary tales about children in a haunted house in Mumbra. I even recreated the sound of creaky windows flying open!”  

Inhabitants of Bueno Vista included the Sri Lankan painter George Keyt, who formed the Colombo-based ’43 Group, fusing Western Cubism with South Asian cultural motifs. Another was renowned pianist and music teacher Olga Craen. Listening to Dubash's brother hit correct notes while whistling a difficult part of the Emperor Concerto, she declared, “He’s got his Beethoven right.” Incidentally, this very composition had attracted her Belgian husband, Jules. In the audience for Olga’s 1937 rendition of the Emperor at Regal Cinema, Jules – violinist and founder conductor of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra with Mehli Mehta – confessed he was “flabbergasted”. 

As talk turns tangential, to describe colourful neighbours fringing Windy Hall Lane, I try to track back conversation to focus on this gully. But some asides are too tempting to dismiss. Most riveting is an account of the British surgeon Dr Bond’s pet python, which apparently slithered with abandon on the keys of his piano. 

Other entertaining anecdotes abound. Like Dr Bond’s, though, they fall beyond our ambit, being in or around Hampton Court out on the Colaba Post Office stretch of street. And that’s another story.

© Meher Marfatia

Multimedia production & digital marketing: Danesh Mistry