Every time TV actor Bakul Thakkar drives from his place in Kandivli to South Mumbai, his subconscious feels thirsty. It urges him to take that treacherous road next to Reay Road station where, on a pedestal of weeds, stands a dehydrated drinking water fountain. Built by his grandfather in memory of Bakul's aunt, this fountain is permanent proof that his sweet old grandmother wasn't kidding. Her favourite annual story about her husband, that stern, conical-pagri-clad man on Bakul's living room walls and his doting love for that little girl whom Thakkar only recalls as a vague painting, is literally written in stone here.
'The Public Gift Of Mr. Lowji Megji In Loving Memory Of His Late Daughter Kusumbala AD 1924,' says the memorial plaque on this 90-year-old fountain. When travel blogger Sudha Ganapathi read it for the first time in 2011, she was inspired to construct an entire fictional tale around it which spoke about a cotton merchant who was extremely fond of his daughter, Kusumbala. A kind-hearted and cheerful soul, she loved going with her father to his cotton godown and giving drinking water to the workers who loaded and unloaded cotton bales. When sickness claimed Kusumbala young, Megji decided to build a fountain in her memory as charity. As it turns out, many of Ganapathi's conjectures are spot-on.
This is confirmed by the cotton merchant's 81-year-old son, Anil Thakkar. Clad in a peach Khadi shirt, he is sitting in his old-worldy Kandivli home where two deer horns, purchased by his father, protrude from the wall behind. "My mother only told me about the fountain in 1950," confesses the son, who first saw his father's public gift over half a century after it was built and did not know of a half-sister named Kusumbala, till then. He was barely four when his father died of pneumonia. So to him, the patriarch is chiefly a confluence of sepia photographs, grainy 6mm films, laminated certificates from the time he served as an honorary magistrate with the Raj and stories of his mother, Godavari, who referred to her Kutchi husband as'Seth'.
Godavari was Megji's third wife. Kusumbala was Megji's daughter from his second wife and the first one to have survived for more than nine years. "He had two offspring before Kusumbala who died soon after birth," says Bakul, adding that Kusumbala would accompany Megji to the cotton godown during festivals and distribute sweets and water to workers. So when Kusumbala died because of a terminal illness, a terribly shaken Megji approached the Mazgaon Cotton Depot with a proposal of the perfect farewell gesture — a drinking water fountain.
A while ago, Bakul tried tracing the architect in vain. But the vision of his grandfather, a Kutchi from the Narayan Sarovar area, is evident in the memorial located in the godown compound. Instead of gargoyles and other western elements that so often marked other fountains of the time, Megji's fountain contains eight Indian-style pillars that support a chhatri or umbrella-shaped dome and four gomukhs (cow heads) that were considered a source of pious water. In fact, Megji had not only borne the expenses of the fountain but also of the pavement next to it, as mentioned by Dr Varsha Shirgaonkar, professor and head, department of History at SNDT University, in her book, Exploring The Water Heritage of Mumbai. A pair of tracks run next to the structure, possibly for the carriages that would ferry and offload cotton here from the dock area, says Shigaonkar. In fact, after the cotton business began to decline, the godown area was taken over by the Food Corporation of India in 1955. Retail suppliers would come there with their bullock carts and release their cattle there for a rest. "The fountain is made of Malad stone which is off-white in colour," says Shirgaonkar.
Today, however, pollution and soot deposits have turned it gray. Cordoned off by a thick mesh of weeds and surrounded by discarded playi ng cards and used condoms, the %fountain is not how Megji would have wanted to see it. The cows have long stopped spouting water. Grafitti dots the walls of empty warehouses around, urchins play cricket with %a piece of thermocol for a stump on the pavement Megji paid for and a %cop on a bike warns us of thieves lurking around.
"We want to restore it and perhaps build a garden around it," says Bakul, whose grandfather turned religious after Kusumbala passed away. Desperate for a child with his third wife, Megji had decided to heed the advice of a Koli worker who suggested celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi at home. "After that, call it a coincidence, but he had two sons and two daughters."
((This series looks at little-known places in the city)
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Reay Road Kusumbala Fountain
Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.
Subscribe to Top News Newsletter
Get updates on the most important happening of the dayAnda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Doting father built pyau in child’s memory
Dengan url
http://cegahkeropostulang.blogspot.com/2014/10/doting-father-built-pyau-in-childas.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Doting father built pyau in child’s memory
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Doting father built pyau in child’s memory
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar