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SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, BENGALURU2 SUNDAY BEST MARCH 20, 2016
OLD IS COOLTHIS SUMMERGlobal warming might be eating into the city’s uber cool reputation but trust the old Bengalureans to know how to beat the heat.
Much before the advent of ACs, coolers and molecular gastronomy mojitos,
they relied on local delicacies to quench thirst. There is no dearth of patrons for outlets that sell homemade ice creams, native gulkand, kulfis, and juices of cucumber and good ol’
Bangalore Blue grapes at affordable rates. Meet a few
who have withstood cafés that churn out pricey smoothies and shakes
BOMBAY CHOWPATTY KULFI, FRASER TOWN
On an unusually hot day, the bright board screaming Bombay Chowpatty Kulfi does a good job of tempting you to try the kulfi.
It started in 2000 when local resident Sayed Mumtaz Ahmed decided to start a shop that served Mumbai’s popular Chowpatty kulfi on the busy Mosque Street. Sixteen years later, his ‘100% vegetarian’ kulfis are a favourite with anyone who loves the delicacy. “Everything is made with natural ingredients. We use real fruits, and don’t add preservatives,” says Sayed Khaled, Ahmed’s brother and store manager. Malai kulfi at `60 is a perennial hit but fruit kulfis like guava, sitaphal, mango, chickoo and strawberry with real fruit pieces are the real heroes. The guava kulfi is so close in taste to the fruit that you find yourself missing that dab of chilli and salt. Kulfis start at `35 and Honey Dry Fruit at `160 is the priciest on the menu.
SRI BHAGYALAKSHMI BUTTER AND GULKAND STORE, MALLESWARAM
You know a place is iconic when it is the landmark people use to give directions. Located on Sampige Road, Sri Bhagyalakshmi
Butter and Gulkand store has grown into being one such Bengalurean mainstay, since founder Thiruvengadam started it in the early 1950s. “It is more than 60 years old and our focus is on gulkand. Today we
are possibly the only store that manufactures and sells it,” says Alagiri Swamy, Thiruvengadam’s son and owner. Quality is key when it comes to this delicious preserve made out of rose petals. “Roses are from Hoskote but when there is a shortage, we get them from Rajasthan,” says Swami
whose only challenge is “scarcity of roses when rains fail”. With summer leading to cases of sun stroke and mouth ulcers, the demand for gulkand will rise. “It has a cooling property,” says Swami. While the basic butter gulkand and bun butter gulkand remain popular, the store is experimenting with sugar-free varieties too. Butter gulkand costs `20 and dry fruit gulkand with ice cream is the priciest at `40.
HOPCOMS, CUBBON PARK
For most Bengalureans growing up in the 80s, glass bottles filled with grape juice is a fond memory. Priced at 75p, it was extremely
affordable. The price may have risen to `15 per bottle, but the popularity of the indigenous Bangalore blue grape juice hasn’t waned. At its plant, the society crushes the fruits for pulp, which is boiled at 90 degree°C and kept in a cold storage unit in 50-litre cans, ensuring year-round availability. While the juice is available across all HOPCOMS stores in the city, the one that is idyllic is the open stall inside Cubbon Park. Here they stock up on grape and mango juice during the summer. The fans include walkers and motorists, who stop by to quench their thirst. Business is brisk with stock clearing out before the end of the day.
ALIBABA CAFE, FRASER TOWN
It is a nondescript place and the carved old teak frame from Bhatkal looks incongruous inside. At
this popular eatery, which came up in 2000, you get Persian, Arabic and Bhatkali cuisine. The summer special here is the Bhatkali speciality called tausha sherbet. A simple concoction of grated cucumber in its own waters along with a little sugar, the sherbet is a meal by itself. One could also go for doogh, a Persian summer drink made with yoghurt, soda and seasoned with mint. A glass of both drinks is priced at `55 each.
AMRITH ICE CREAMS, MALLESWARAM
Please don’t bargain. Please tender exact change. Animals will not be permitted beyond this point. No admission without
permission. Don’t be put off by these curt posters at Amrith Ice Creams. Only one of them should matter: ‘We will be open on Tuesdays in summers’. With demand for its homemade ice creams peaking with patrons driving down from JP Nagar and Jayanagar, there is little else proprietor Ramapriyam can do except to forgo the weekly holiday. Started by the late MN Sarathy, the unassuming exteriors belie the fact that about 50-60 litres of ice cream is churned out daily by
machines. The shop is run by his son, Ramapriyam, who says that everything has remained the same since Amrith
opened in 1993. Flavours like Caribou coffee, honey dew and manoranjini keep the crowds coming in. Ice creams start at ̀ 20; Amrit special at ̀ 70 is the costliest.
There’s a line in Terry Pratch-ett’s novel Guards Guards which goes something like this: “A good bookshop is
just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” It also has the first refer-ences to L-Space, the dimension caused by the warping of reality by any good book depository. Step into Blossoms and you know it’s true – no equations linking knowledge to pow-er and power to mass and gravity re-quired. Reality warps inside.
At some level, writing about Blos-som Book House seems redundant. If you like books, you’ve already been here. And you know that it’s a place where books are more important than customers. And if you are a book lover, you know that is how it should be.
There are, of course, the usual best-sellers. The Amishes and Chetan Bhagats, the Rowlings and the Gaimans, the Tina Feys and the Amy Schumers and all the others.
But those books aren’t what make Blossoms Blossoms.
It’s the sight of a mother who warned her child “Two books, no more” staggering out with what looks like a dozen after an hour of intensive shopping.
It’s all the things that make up the entries in the “Overheard at Blos-soms” Tumblr. (Es-pecially a remark by
a fellow unfortunate who said “Oh man I feel like a blonde here,” at be-ing caught in an animated discus-sion on Murakami).
Yes, the Kindle is a wonderful thing. You can carry a library’s
worth of books in it or on your iPad. But shopping online just can’t com-pare to poking around the shelves and finding, say Volume 4 trade pa-perback of Mac Raboy’s Flash Gor-don comics, lying there. And sud-denly – there’s a whole new branch of books to look forward to – the Alex Raymond comics – and who knows, even the comics that Ray-mond created of Dashiell Hammett’s secret agent X-9, comics that were later written by Leslie Charteris.
There are days when you climb up beyond the first floor – into that inter-mediate area that forms the chil-
dren’s section and find, along with the Percy Jacksons and the Artemis Fowls, Willard Price’s stories of Hal and Roger Hunt or Richmal Cromp-ton’s William books. You may find Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter school stories. And if you are lucky, you may even find Anthony Buckeridge’s Jen-nings books.
And that’s the power of a good book shop. It sends you through time. You’re no longer an adult. You’re back to your school days, back in your uniform, on an equal footing with the kid next to you, reading the books you read so long ago, smiling at all the familiar situ-ations – Bunter’s postal order, the
Five Find Outers at the Peterswood dairy with lemonade and macaroons while Buster the Scottie circles Mr Goon’s ankles or Hal and Roger Hunt finding albino pythons and two-headed snakes in the African jungle.
It’s not just kid’s books, of course. Browsing the stacks at the back of the first floor, you’ll find hidden treasures – literally hidden. A first edition of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, tucked away behind Chekov’s plays. A copy of Lampedusa’s Leopard lurking among Georgette Heyer’s romances. You wonder how many you could find if you looked long enough and hard enough.
Sometime last year, if you’d walked in as usual, you may have no-ticed an old fat hardcover, bound in plain blue. If you opened it, you would have seen these words “The Strand Magazine, An Illustrated Monthly, Vol X, July to December, 1985. Ed-ited by Geo Newnes”. The first story in the magazine collection was by one A Conan Doyle. Of course, you can wait for another copy to become available, but the odds are rather against it.
And that’s the important thing. You can go there looking for a spe-cific book, buy it and get out. Or, if you can, you just linger. Start any-where, go anywhere. And you never know what you may find.
(In this column, residents of the city record their impressions
of Bengaluru)
CITY FRAMES
Finding first editions on the racksYou never know what hidden treasures can be unearthed at old bookstores where customers take second place to all those books
FINE PRINT: (Left) There are a host of bookshops that yield a goldmine of rare books if one cares to search; (top) Mayi Gowda of Blossoms
Every evening, a state-ly old man in a spot-less white veshti would go past young
Marianne’s house off Rich-mond Road. One day, she couldn’t contain her curiosi-ty and called out to ask his name. He paused in his per-ambulation to reply: “Kerala Varma.” The girl ran back to her father who told her that their neighbours, the Var-mas, in the sprawling bunga-low with its gardens and reti-nue of servants, were royalty.
That was in the 1970s. Thir-ty years later, Marianne and her mother walked up to the gracious old bungalow on Richmond Road for the first time, to see if they could buy a few of the antiques on sale there. “There was French por-celain, Venetian glass, and a lot of Chinese Ming vases. And fabulous chandeliers! We stood there with our mouths open. Of course, we couldn’t afford any of it and politely walked out,” laughs Marianne De Nazareth, adjunct faculty at St Joseph’s College, who still lives next door.
Recently, she discovered the history of her neighbours — the last queen of Kerala’s Travancore kingdom and her immediate family. The politics, the palace intrigues, and the dramatic rise and fall of the charismatic regent queen Ma-harani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi detailed in Manu Pillai’s book ‘The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of The House of Travancore’ made her head spin. “I couldn’t believe these were the same Varmas! It was an ‘oh my god’ moment,” says Marianne.
Rukmini Varma, grand-daughter of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, is slowly getting used to similar reactions from those who read the book. “I lead a reclusive life. But a few close friends called up as nobody knew this was the background of our family,” says Rukmini, amused by attention but refus-ing to elaborate.
The surprise is mainly be-cause Bengaluru society is used to the affable and highly sociable Varmas, especially princess Lalitamba Bayi and her husband Kerala Varma, who left behind the palaces and protocol in Thiruvanan-thapuram and relocated to the city in 1949. “It was a sensa-tional thing to do. They were the first in the family to move out,” says Rukmini. Nobody in Thiruvananthapuram knew such a plan was afoot. “Father was apprehensive and there were four of us, all small chil-dren. But mother was brave,” recalls Rukmini, who was a wide-eyed nine-year-old when she came to the city and is now in her 70s.
There were several reasons why Lalitamba Bayi, known in Bengaluru as Lalitha Var-ma, left her hometown, the capital of the kingdom which her mother ruled between 1924 and 1931 on behalf of her mi-nor nephew Sri Chithira Thirunal. “She probably want-ed to get away from the court intrigues,” says Manu, who tracked down this branch of the Travancore royals. Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s troubled rela-tionship with her cousin, who was also the mother of the minor king, led to conspira-cies, court cases, smear cam-paigns in the media, and ap-parently use of black magic and assassination bids.
Lalitha was also never comfortable with the pomp and pageantry associated with her station. “She was a bit of a rebel, and wanted to be just
another Mrs Varma,” says Manu. In her matrilineal fam-ily, husbands of princesses are consorts with no equal status. “They walk behind at (formal) processions, and have to follow their wives in another vehicle while travelling. Mother hated it and wanted an ordinary life where she could send her chil-dren to school,” says Rukmini. Moreover, there were many restrictions. “There was no freedom of thought or expres-sion. It was really a gilded cage,” says Rukmini.
In comparison, Bengaluru was a slice of heaven with its agreeable weather and cosmo-politan denizens. “In the 1950s, it was a welcoming place and had a large number of foreign-ers,” says Pillai. They and the rest of the elite gathered at posh clubs to socialize.
Though Lalitha and Kerala Varma didn't know anybody here, the family’s background helped open doors, including that of the Bangalore Club. No 8, a 200-year-old British-era house on Richmond Road, was
procured from the family of former Mysore Diwan Sir Mirza Ismail. “Streets were clean, and there were beauti-ful flowering trees. It was like a paradise,” recalls Rukmini.
Though she came with a host of servants, Lalitha took it upon herself to learn house-hold work and befriend peo-ple. “I remember her optimis-tic presence. She wore her hair short, had dogs with Russian names, and loved Russian literature,” says Pra-teeti Punja Ballal about her
family friends. While the chil-dren happily took to their school life at Baldwins next door, the elder Varmas at-tended plays and performanc-es, and threw parties. “Once I went shopping with mother down Commercial Street, and it looked as if every single person who was there knew her,” says Rukmini.
Soon, her other sisters also moved out. A few years later, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and husband Rama Varma also left behind their increas-
ingly alienated existence in Thiruvananthapuram and set up house next to their daughter. “They adapted well and there were no hurdles to my parents’ way of life,” says Rukmini. Unlike her daugh-ter, the former queen led a quiet life, reading and tend-ing to her rose garden. “She loved gardens and would walk around in the morning with a pink silk umbrella, inspecting each rose,” smiles Rukmini.
Initially, the g r a n d p a re n t s were horrified to see the children cross the road to go to school. Those fears soon vanished, and the children went on to pursue various vocations. By the time royalty was well and truly abol-ished in India, the pensions stopped, and the land ceiling act imposed in the 1970s, the family had moved on.
“They never talked about the problems they had though we knew life wasn’t easy earlier,” says Prateeti. The elders didn’t prevent two of the great-grandchildren from marrying outside the community, or stop them from pursuing careers in medicine, sports and science. Rukmini, an accomplished dancer-painter, has exhibited her works in India and abroad. Her sister Uma had her own boutique in the city. There are engineers, writers, artists and doctors in the family, with Dr R Marthanda Varma being the founder-director of Nimhans.
Rukmini’s son Jay Varma, who is pursuing advanced art studies in the US, remembers the queen as a “grand old lady” who was mostly con-fined to her room. “She was warm and knew most things under the sun. As a child I knew that she was someone special as everybody listened to her, and deferred to her,” says Jay. Towards the end of her life, she distributed most of her possessions, he says.
After her death in 1985, a portion of her house was turned into a housing society. “It is ironic that the builder chose to call it Regency Place,” says Manu.
To the younger genera-tion, the royal tag is a strange one. “I used to think it was a bad thing,” says Jay, who was relentlessly teased as ‘prince’ in school. A visit to Thiruvananthapuram is bewildering because of the ceremonial deference that his Kerala cousins, the de-scendants of the last king, take for granted. Jay, who considers himself a typical Bengalurean and at one point was partner in a pub and a magazine, sees no point in holding on to the past. The 54-year-old shrugs off the fact that he had to sell his penthouse at Re-gency Place.
He is proud of his ances-tors such as the composer-king Swathi Thirunal, the famous Attingal queens and the illustrious Raja Ravi Varma. But past is past. “My great-grandmother came out out of the palace and became a progressive person. For all practical purposes, royalty is irrelevant,” he says.
Home remains Bengaluru for the family, which will have a reunion at No 8 during Ker-ala Varma’s upcoming 100th birthday celebrations. “The family is going to come from wherever they are all over the world,” says Rukmini.
ROYALS MADE GARDEN CITY
THEIR HOME
The last queen of Kerala’s Travancore royal house and her family found a safe hometown in the city in the 1950s, leaving behind politics and palace intrigues. Her descendants have contributed to the art and medical worlds, and helped set up Nimhans in Bengaluru
PRINCESS DIARIES: (Top) No 8 in the early days and now, (left) hemmed in by high-rises; Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi (below) lived a quiet life here; Princess Lalitha (in sari) with friends at the Bangalore Club; a merry party at her house
Chethan Shivakumar
Pics courtesy: Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi Collection
Syed Asif; TOI
