Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Three Cities

There's the Bombay one imagines. There's the Bombay one remembers. Finally, there's the Bombay that is. The triptych was on display all day yesterday.

Two old buddies and I ambled through the city. Cafe Samovar's chicken vindaloo rolls were good and the service was above par. The portrait painters operating outside Jehangir Art Gallery were superbly awful and tacky. The two or three remaining street-side booksellers still sold pirated versions of Norman Vincent Peale books. While I was sad to see my favorite vinyl record stands had disappeared from Fort, one brave Luddite still operated, enticing his all-important dread-locked, tank-topped demographic. He had a well-preserved Kraftwerk album to sell. Major salivatory occurrences on the way home. Oh, to be doing the robot while eating Usal Pav...

5 comments:

??! said...

two or three remaining street-side booksellers
I can't believe the morons still haven't relocated the ones from along the CTO footpaths. Idiots!

km said...

??!: i am told they did relocate everyone. And what we have now is the re-emergence. Supply and demand? Maybe, but I like to think of it in slightly less prosaic terms. People want books, very cheap.

??! said...

They did? Where to?

Rukmini said...

mango lassi at samovar. low-profile, expensive, sounds rather disgusting... but good!

neha vish said...

Sigh! Bombay!
As long as junk jewelery still sells..