Once upon a time Brigade Road wasn't a stream of honking horns

An armchair walk

The Hindu

Once upon a time Brigade Road wasn't a stream of honking horns...


Listen up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, tourists, new arrivals to the city. Let me take you on a little heritage walk. You know about heritage walks, don't you? The leader takes his followers on foot to historic sites in specific areas of the city such as City Market or Basavanagudi or M.G. Road, and you are pumped full of anecdotes about Tipu's Armoury, Churchill's house or the Kadalekai Parishe.

Allow me to be your armchair guide and take you on a heritage walk down Brigade Road. A walk that takes you back 20 years, not 200. That tells you about shops and restaurants, not palaces and temples. Who says history always has to be centuries old? "Ancient" is a relative term. Memories are getting shorter than ever. Youngsters who say "way back in 1998" or refer to 10-year-old songs as "classics" would find my description of Brigade Road circa 1982 positively Stone Age.

Mind you, the history I recount will be highly subjective and not necessarily comprehensive. The amazing facts I dish out will not help you win a quiz contest. They'll resemble the thoroughly useless information you get in emails that begin "Did you know... " and continue "that the acid content of an ant's urine is 236 times that of a ladybird's?" But I can promise you a unique narrative. For example, no tourist would get to hear how the guide once walked down Brigade Road with her fly open until a salesgirl quietly drew her attention to it.

Let's begin at Yoosuf Sait's Corner. Don't know where that is? Shame on you. Find out, and hurry up and join the rest. Imagine there's no stream of honking cars and you're walking in the middle of the road. On your right was a watch repair shop that was christened Metro when the city was still a town. Facing it, on your left, you'll find another that has managed to survive, the only difference being that in those days you would find an old man peering through a magnifying glass fitted into his eye socket as he delicately adjusted the mechanism of watches that needed winding. Next to it was a stationery shop named Spinker because the owner, Govindarajulu, wanted to give the Brits an easier name to pronounce. It was one of the few that sold letter pads of onionskin paper, lightweight and therefore used primarily for airmail so one could save on postage. It also had beautifully maintained 19th Century printing machines for printing letterheads, wedding invitations and so on. Beside this shop was a pharmacy, West End, and a furniture shop that I shall never forget because when I wrote a feature on it, I killed off one of the owners who was very much alive and he wrote a stiff letter to my editor. Come on, the man had a traffic circle named after him, what was I supposed to think?

Back to the right side of the road, now. See that Keralan restaurant named after a rare jewel? It survived while many shops around it were demolished, including Tarapore's which sold greeting cards and magazines, HMV which sold LPs, and Rice Bowl, a Chinese restaurant run by Tibetans. It was to Rice Bowl's gloomy interiors that those with lean purses flocked, while Continental opposite it, with its cubicles and wooden décor, was meant for fancy dining.

Eyes left. Forward, march. The star attraction of Curzon Complex was a discotheque called Knock Out. It had ropes around the dance floor like in a boxing ring, and a punching bag behind the bar. On Saturdays, swarms of college-goers would climb the narrow staircase that now leads to a music store. Entry: singles Rs. 15, couples Rs. 25. Inside, strobes, lasers, strip lighting, lurex shirts and pedal-pushers. Limbs moved spasmodically as the deejay spun his magic. Autos waited outside past midnight to take revellers home.

Eyes right. Ashoka Electricals has vanished and so has Brigade Road Post Office, the last to go. You could buy expensive handmade footwear from the Chinese shoemaker at the corner of Rest House Crescent Road, and gawk at the guitars and saxophones in the show window of Premson's. Further ahead was Geetha Exports, which sold the dirt-cheap export rejects that were my staple wear. Bosco's was a cabaret joint I once went to with a couple of male friends, where middle-aged women in skimpy underwear danced boredly in front of stony-faced men. Ramchand, a man of few words, used to sit in a cubbyhole in front of a tower of secondhand books. And Punjabi's, where you'd get hearty khana at rock-bottom prices, was run by bewhiskered Sharma who had a limp and a military air.

On the left was the idli-vada restaurant Ranganatha Café, formerly Hotel Breeze, where you could sit in the quadrangle or in the long, covered veranda that skirted it. In a plot on the right, Snaize coffin-makers happily co-existed with a steak house and cheap lodging for foreign backpackers. Gone is the gas agency next to Rex and the pharmacy at the end of the road. Opera is but a name, a shadow of its former self.

Franchises selling branded products dominate Brigade Road today. Family-owned businesses, which gave the road its character, have all been driven away.