At last, I have come back home again and how !... Ali Peter John

I have never liked coffee in all my life. I had to love it once because I used to give tutions to little boys early in the morning before going to school and their parents used to force me to have a glass of coffee and the coffee was besides the 5 rupees, I was paid per month to give their sons tutions.

But neither the coffee nor the 5 rupees interested me even in my poverty to continue giving tutions and with that came to an end my affair with coffee and I switched over to chai which became my source of life and later my source of inspiration.

I could live without eating, but not without several glasses of tea with milk or without. This affair with tea continued till a seductress called Sharab came swaying my way and held me firmly in her arms and refused to release me for the next several years.

And when i finally shirked of my relationship with Sharab I went back to my old beloved chai and stayed with her.

Till the building of a road in my way and the way to my cafe called Chayoos was blocked and I didn't know whether i was coming or going and it was while I was in this dilemma that I met a young friend called Fakeer who when he came to know of my problem with chai again led me to a cafe and spoke to the management to allow me to sit for as long as I wanted and write.

But I didn't know that the gracious offer included cups of coffee and tiny plates of chocolate cookies. The first time I tasted the coffee, I felt like calling my undertakers because I knew that no doctor would be able to save me from the bitterness of the coffee which I later came to know was called Cappuccino.

And so for the last one months, i have been sitting in this cafe quaintly called Blue Tokai and i have been trying to know why I like this place so much that i want to reach here as soon as I look presentable enough to sit with the new generation or is it the 4th generation after me?

I have felt guilty at times when I have realised that the cup of coffee i have costs 220 rupees which is 2 times and more the money my mother spent in a month over rice, wheat, daal, vegetables, oil,sugar, milk and other expenses she needed to keep her family alive.

And this was not very long away but in the 60s because all these luxuries stopped for me abruptly when she suddenly died one day in November 1965....

Life has come a long way. I have lost. I have gained. I have lost and gained but life goes on. And as I sit here with this cup of Cappuccino in my fingers I suddenly realised that I am sitting in the same place where my provisional (kirana) store was, and which was owned by my friend Dharamsi khetsi whoes forefathers hailed from Junagadh but whose parents had come to Bombay in search of a livelyhood and had found a place to live in somewhere in this place called versova which was a desserted place except for the village where the fishermens community lived.

He had started off by owning a small grocery shop and as versova village prospered with the coming in of people from all over, especially the film community, his shop also prospered and it became a full fledged store.

I suddenly look around and see that this cafe is in the same place where Dharamsi had his store and where he used to sell coffee worth 100 rupees in a whole day, I was having a cup of coffee for 200 rupees.

I looked a little further and found that this was the same place where boney Kapoor had built the set for Mr India where Anil Kapoor who played lived with his "children" and a domestic help called "calendar" and who had a beautiful tanent in a journalist played by Sri Devi.

I remember how I used to pass through this set every morning before I went to office and how I had made friends with everyone who was a part of the unit and all those who visited the set as it was one of the most talked about sets.

I am still holding on to my coffee when my eyes look into the distance and besides the sea, i can see a number of bunglows,a part of my growing up. There is entire versova village where nothing has changed because the villagers have not allowed anyone to Change anything because they have always believed that anyone who changes anything in the sea or anywhere around it will be cursed by the sea Goddess.

The one film shooting I remember which had taken place inside the village was the one in which Dilip kumar runs around every gully in the village in search of his son, Amitabh Bachchan who is a criminal.

I remember how when Shakti was screened at the minarva i was sitting next to Raj Kapoor and his wife Krishna and when Raj saw dilip kumar running around when he was more than 60, he had said to his wife, "Ye Yusuf kya kar rha hai is umar me?"

Back to my day dreaming. I see the first bunglow before the village can start, it is called Herness bunglow and i remember it best as the bunglow where i had seen Divya Bharti for the last time on evening and she was found dead after she had fallen 5 floors from a building called Tulsi close to my house.

My eyes travel to other bunglows like the Captain Bunglow where Amitabh Bachchan had told me a lie for the first time. At 10:30 he had told me that he was not standing for elections from Allahabad and at 2:30 the entire country knew that he was the official candidate of the congress from Allahabad.

The other bunglows that my still aware eyes catch glimpses of are the Old bunglow of Shahir lundhyanvi which is now being demolished for a multistory building to come to, the bunglow where Geeta Bali once used to live, the Piknik where Premnath used to spend his weekends and is said to have had orgies in the 60s the building where Kamaal amrohi live and Meena Kumari lived with him towards last stages of her life, the building called Quarterdeck where Nanda lived after her bunglow Indira was demolished and where she died at the age of 75, i see the bungalow called Dariya Mahal where the most expensive parties were held by Subhash Ghai and which is now supposed to have been bought by Priyanka Chopra and as I have one full round of the beach And finish my coffee, i am absolutely delighted to see that have reached my own home, Mon apartments where I used to live on the ground floor before I left in 2020 and where the "banglewalli" Kangana Ranaut was my neighbour (she was an unknown paying guest).

KYA ISILIYE LOG KEHTE HAI KU DUNIA GOL HAI ?