Earlier personal associations with iconic city monuments strike sad to glad notes

The Sir JJ School of Art

In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, the crab and the dab, the plaice and the dace, the skate and his mate, the mackerel and the pickerel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel.”

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How I too giggled, I remember, reading aloud to my four-year-old daughter that quirkily rhyming opening of How the Whale Got its Throat, the introductory tale of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. We were having fun under the shade of a fragrant mango tree on the campus of the Sir JJ School of Art. Shopping at Crawford Market, we happened to find ourselves across it. She was carrying this favourite book by Kipling, whose childhood bungalow stands on the grounds of the school where his sculptor father John Lockwood Kipling taught and was the Dean. Surrendering to serendipity, we had chosen an apt corner to hear the delightfully nonsense-nuanced passage in a match of monument to mood. Those beautiful buildings will always bear for me the memory of this ma-beti moment.

Illustration by Rudyard Kipling for How the Whale Got its Throat, opening Just So Stories. Pics/Wikimedia Commons

A few summers before, her brother amused us no end. With such an original take on the Rajabai Tower that I laugh quietly each time I see this stunning Gothic edifice that Premchand Roychand gifted Bombay in the name of his mother Rajabai, described by intention to be the tower holding “a large clock and a set of jolly bells”. 

My husband and I were astonished to hear what our son said in response to the kindergarten headmistress’ question, “What would you like to be on growing up?” Around them swirled wishful ambitions of astronaut, pilot, doctor, cricketer, policeman. Picture the plain astonishment when our firstborn solemnly said, “I want to be the man who gives people permission to go up to the top of Rajabai Tower.” Thrown flat by the offbeat reply, Bombay’s answer to Big Ben brings back that motherhood memory that still surprises me.

Bombelli’s at Breach Candy. Pic Courtesy Anita Bombelli

Such episodes are no rarities. As with cities anywhere in the world, most of us harbour happy to heavy associations with certain neighbourhood sites and sights.    
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