A cafe goes reminiscing

WORDS WORTH

For someone who accidentally became a restaurant-owner and has fed so many hungry thousands, it seems apt that my birth took place in the kitchen of our family home in Rawalpindi in 1927.

You wouldn't be wrong to assume at the start of The Making of Samovar: How a Mumbai Cafe Became a Metaphor for a Generation that the book is as much author Usha Khanna's life story as it is an ode to the 41-year-old, zestful (and now beleaguered) history of Mumbai's first and only art-house cafe adjoining Jehangir Art Gallery.

But since her life "" teenage membership of the Women's National Militia in Srinagar, fruitless leftist leanings, sensational marriage to a revolutionary "" is one of those that makes yours feel so terribly unexceptional, you allow her the indulgence.

And to the credit of the author "" assistance was ably provided by Khanna's daughters Devieka Bhojwani and Malavika Sangghvi "" the book alternates between the two tales effortlessly. The evening of the book launch was a celebration of the wilful idealism of Khanna and the gentle charm of her cafe.

It was like preaching to the converted; the room was filled with dyed-in-the-wool "Samovarians" who return as much for the reassuring permanence of its recycled furniture and cut-and-paste festooning as for its dahi vada and khatta-meetha chutney. Patrons like Deepak Parekh, HDFC chairman, who recalls pretending to listen to professors as he dreamed of parathas in a cafe where "if you were short on cash, a smile bought you credit".

The cafe had modest beginnings "" an old cupboard, a stove and donated pots and pans that produced cups of tea for 50 paise. The menu grew along with its community of struggling artists, poets and writers: Nissim Ezekiel, Ara, Pupul Jayakar, Husain... Samovar saw its dreamers through "the progressive art movement, the parallel cinema of the '70s, the yuppie '80s and reformist '90s".

Recipe ideas came from different customers but went together in complete harmony "" Russian salad, Kabuli chole, mango lassi and strawberry paratha. As an added treat, some of those recipes are included in the book.

What would Samovar have done without The Almighty Binder Fevicol?... It's the super glue, the great binder and in many ways the reason we're still around. In fact, I believe that if one by one, I peeled off the main panel decoration behind the cash counter, I would go back, sheet by Fevicol-stuck sheet, over forty years.

Once Jatin Das decided on impulse he had to marry one of his many suitors at Samovar. A pandit was summoned and they were married while diners toasted them with chai. Das returned another day and in a moment of Nietzschean madness jumped atop a table and painted a vivacious nude on the ceiling. Ironically, the nude outlasted the marriage.

We became something of Mumbai's official grapevine... Want to know which marriage was on the rocks? Which minister was getting the sack? Which editor was swiching newspapers? Come to Samovar.

As Shabana Azmi said, the book is full of "delicious little vignettes", not sensationalistic but penned as personable insights into quirky old friends, like Anjolie Ela Menon's petulant scribbles on a napkin each time she couldn't have a particular dish, or Bianca Jagger's visit dressed in what was alarmingly similar to a shaadi bandwallah costume. And although there's generous mention of celebrity customers, there's plenty of accounts of eccentric unknowns and staff histrionics.

Khanna keeps her long-standing tussle with museum authorities for the end. Several eviction notices were served over the years but Khanna, in her firebrand style, managed to hang on, sometimes just by a thread. Undoubtedly the release of the book will re-energise protest motions.

But Khanna says she's happy to have finally, at age 80, written her first book. "Samovar took up so much of my time that my love for writing lay dormant. Finally, the pile of my scribbles from four decades just grew too large to not chronicle," she says. She's already onto drafting her next book Three Sisters. "There's stories all around," she says,"so much to tell."

Fortunately, for those visiting, there's very little evidence of things being awry at Samovar itself. The question is: will it continue to be a metaphor for generations to come?