Suddenly, I am Back to The Times of My Guru, K.A. Abbas, Bajraj Sahni and Sahir

I have just finished trying and failing in an experiment to stay at home and write. I with the permission of my caretaker Pushpa and with the support of my young friends Bihaan and Nitin get into an auto and leave for Juhu where thousands of people go especially on a Sunday to forget the worries of the world and I go to Juhu to find my footprints I had left 50 years ago…  - ALI PETER JOHN

Juhu is not the heaven it was and selfish man has turned it into hell and he pretends he has created heaven which is like having a false celling in an apartment of a smuggler. I reach the place where my guru K A Abbas lived in one of those old cottages called Philomena Cottage (and has now been demolished for a monstrous building to come up). It was here that Abbas Sahab lived in a two bedroom house with the minimum comforts and paid 100 rupees as his rent.

Just behind his house is the North Bombay Housing Society where Abbas Sahab had his office on the 5th floor which was gifted to him by his friend Inder Raj Anand, a very prolific and very rich dialogue writer. It was in this office that I had met Abbas Sahab for the first time and so had a struggler called Amitabh Bachchan. It was in this office that Raj Kapoor came to meet Abbas Sahab after climbing up five floors only to be thrown out by Abbas Sahab because he was drunk.

How many more memories do I have about these places? I will go on talking about them till the end of my life. The flat in which Abbas Sahab lived during the last years of his life was supposed to be turned into some kind of an archive but nothing has been heard after it was announced with a press conference. It has remained shut for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why. The board I had got erected in his honour has started developing cracks and the inscription on it is threatening to fade out.

The board placed by the Mumbai Municipal Corporation in the honour of Abbas Sahab insults his memory by writing his name as Khwaja Abbas and no effort has been made even after I have complained several times. The dry leaves of the tree which was witness to the life of Abbas Sahab fall on the floor near the board as if in honour of the great man they had seen walking up and down…

With my heart heavy and my mind full of memories, I drive in my royal auto to beach the broken down house of Balraj Sahni. It lies in a run down condition and is said to be facing litigation between the kin of the great actor. This house was built by the actor against his principles (he was a practicing communist). He called it “Ikram” (prayer or gift). The bungalow proved positively unlucky for him. A young maid committed  suicide as soon as the family settled down in the new house. Sahni’s beautiful daughter also committed suicide just before Sahni did his last film “Garm Hawa”. And then Sahni himself died of a massive heart attack when he was only 56. His son Parikshit had moved out of Ikram and shifted into his own house in Piroja Court with his wife and two little daughters. Sahni’s second wife Santosh kept living in Ikram till she died some years ago. The bungalow is now the stuff of a litigation going on between Sahni’s only living daughter, Sanober who continues to live in the broken down house and fights for the possession of it with the daughters of Parikshit who has thrown up his hands and said that he has nothing to do with his father’s house. Looking at the bungalow as it is now is like a painful punishment. And I wonder what the future about this house will be.

Just next to Sahni’s bungalow is the building Sahir Ludhianvi had built after he had lived in different houses in the Seven Bungalows area of Versova. Sahir had the best parties and mushairas in his 5th floor apartment and had his writing corner where he wrote his masterpieces like “Parchhaiyaa” which is the name of the building he built. This was also the place from where his body was taken to the Santa Cruz kabarstan and buried in a corner where the poorest of the poor were buried and their graves sold out to other new occupants. A memorial was built for him on the busy Linking Road, but was vandalized on the very next morning. His apartment was once opened only to see his precious books and prestigious awards lying on the floor in a destroyed condition. I had seen this destruction personally and I wish I don’t have to witness such scenes again because they give me a feeling that they are like victims of a great war which has never or rarely been fought before