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By Root 11999 0

shops and Irani cafés; and then Hornby Vellard was on our right—where promenaders watched as Sherri the mongrel bitch was left to spill her guts! Where cardboard effigies of wrestlers still towered above the entrances to Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium!—and we were rattling and banging past traffic-cops with sun-umbrellas, past Mahalaxmi temple—and then Warden Road! The Breach Candy Swimming Baths! And there, look, the shops … but the names had changed: where was Reader’s Paradise with its stacks of Superman comics? Where, the Band Box Laundry and Bombelli’s, with their One Yard Of Chocolates? And, my God, look, atop a two-storey hillock where once the palaces of William Methwold stood wreathed in bougainvillaea and stared proudly out to sea … look at it, a great pink monster of a building, the roseate skyscraper obelisk of the Narlikar women, standing over and obliterating the circus-ring of childhood … yes, it was my Bombay, but also not-mine, because we reached Kemp’s Corner to find the hoardings of Air-India’s little rajah and of the Kolynos Kid gone, gone for good, and Thomas Kemp and Co. itself had vanished into thin air … flyovers crisscrossed where, once upon a time, medicines were dispensed and a pixie in a chlorophyll cap beamed down upon the traffic. Elegiacally, I murmured under my breath: “Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite! Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White!” But despite my incantation, the past failed to reappear; we rattled on down Gibbs Road and dismounted near Chowpatty Beach.

Chowpatty, at least, was much the same: a dirty strip of sand aswarm with pickpockets, and strollers, and vendors of hot-channachanna-hot, of kulfi and bhel-puri and chutter-mutter; but further down Marine Drive I saw what tetrapods had achieved. On land reclaimed by the Narlikar consortium from the sea, vast monsters soared upwards to the sky, bearing strange alien names: OBEROI-SHERATON screamed at me from afar. And where was the neon Jeep sign? … “Come on, Pictureji,” I said at length, hugging Aadam to my chest, “Let’s go where we’re going and be done with it; the city has been changed.”

What can I say about the Midnite-Confidential Club? That its location is underground, secret (although known to omniscient paan-wallahs); its door, unmarked; its clientèle, the cream of Bombay society. What else? Ah, yes: managed by one Anand “Andy” Shroff, businessman-playboy, who is to be found on most days tanning himself at the Sun ’n’ Sand Hotel on Juhu Beach, amid film-stars and disenfranchised princesses. I ask you: an Indian, sunbathing? But apparently it’s quite normal, the international rules of playboydom must be obeyed to the letter, including, I suppose, the one stipulating daily worshipping of the sun.

How innocent I am (and I used to think that Sonny, forcep-dented, was the simple one!)—I never suspected that places like the Midnite-Confidential existed! But of course they do; and clutching flutes and snake-baskets, the three of us knocked on its doors.

Movements visible through a small iron eye-level grille: a low mellifluous female voice asked us to state our business. Picture Singh announced: “I am the Most Charming Man In The World. You are employing here one other snake-charmer as cabaret; I will challenge him and prove my superiority. For this I do not ask to be paid. It is, capteena, a question of honor.”

It was evening; Mr. Anand “Andy” Shroff was, by good fortune, on the premises. And, to cut a long story short, Picture Singh’s challenge was accepted, and we entered that place whose name had already unnerved me somewhat, because it contained the word midnight, and because its initials had once concealed my own, secret world: M.C.C., which stands for Metro Cub Club, once also stood for the Midnight Children’s Conference, and had now been usurped by the secret night-spot. In a word: I felt invaded.

Twin problems of the city’s sophisticated, cosmopolitan youth: how to consume alcohol in a dry state; and how to romance girls in the best Western tradition, by taking them out to paint the town red, while at the same time preserving