If Mumbai really valued its cultural heritage, then the Samovar Café’s cane chairs would not get mothballed or thrown away after the last patrons leave the delightful café on 31 March. Instead, little plaques would be placed on the chairs’ backs and, who knows, the café would resume normal operations on 1 April. In fact, if the city really cared, the Samovar would not be closing down at all.

When I was there on a recent afternoon in December, it was cheerfully full and business remained brisk during the 3 hours I spent there meeting friends. But the first day of April is All Fool’s Day, and miracles don’t happen on that day; it is wrong to dream of happier endings.

If you did have plaques attached to those chairs, you would find the names of painters like Syed Haider Raza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon, Nalini Malani and Jehangir Sabavala; film-makers like Kumar Shahani and Ketan Mehta; theatre directors and performers like Satyadev Dubey, Amol Palekar and Dolly Thakore; journalists like Vinod Mehta, Rahul Singh and Behram Contractor; critics like Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, poet-critic Prabodh Parikh and Sunil Kothari; and poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla and Dilip Chitre. Actually, if you really tried to place a plaque behind each chair, you would pretty soon run out of chairs.

Collectively, these painters, artists, film-makers and journalists represented the cultural microcosm of Bombay, as the city was then known. Now that name has gone like the black horse—the Kala Ghoda—which has galloped away, the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India has become the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, and it is time for the Samovar to close down.

The Samovar may not have started out intending to be a cultural beehive; it was never meant to be a café; it was always the meeting point for conversations. And it became just that because it was the watering hole in the heart of the city’s cultural hub. It was situated in the city’s premier art gallery. The German cultural centre, the Max Mueller Bhavan, was to its right; the Wayside Inn, where you would find poet Arun Kolatkar and writer Kiran Nagarkar, used to be opposite the gallery; Rhythm House, the shop immortalized by Salman Rushdie in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), which was the source of great music for generations of enthusiasts in the city, near it; the museum itself to its left; the David Sassoon Library, where people came for some respite from the city’s afternoon heat to catch up with friends and read newspapers, magazines or articles, across the gallery; and adjacent to it, Elphinstone College, the hotbed of what passed for radical politics in the city in the 1970s and 1980s.

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The tables were close to one another, sometimes too close, and you felt you were in a train compartment, and it was hard not to listen to others’ conversations, so it became a good place to pick up gossip and a bad place to make confessions. The Samovar had its quaint lanterns, and sometimes kites, hanging from the ceiling, and it had a hastily scrawled menu, but you knew what you wanted—prawn curry or kheema paratha or boti kabab roll or aloo chat, ending with pudina chai.

One memory has stayed with me—my first real interview as a journalist was at the Samovar, when I met film-maker Ketan Mehta one afternoon in March 1982, soon after he had made his path-breaking film, Bhavni Bhavai. The interview would appear a month later in Celebrity, the magazine which Shobhaa De edited. Mehta and I spent over 2 hours there; he spoke at a furious pace while I took notes frantically, the table with its uneven legs shaking as I tried to keep pace with the passion with which he spoke even as my paratha was getting cold (when we finished talking, he sent the paratha back and got me another one—it being the Samovar, they didn’t charge me for the paratha that had gone cold).

Yes, the Samovar could feel claustrophobic, and the chairs were too close to one another; yes, during busy times at lunch it was impossible to have a conversation; and yes, the trouble with nostalgia is that you remember the past, and not its inconveniences. But let this be said: The Samovar was an essential part of growing up for many when there were no Starbucks and no malls and you had to be very rich to go to a disco at a five-star hotel, and you sat in the café with someone you loved. There were no mobile phones to distract you then, only you, your love and your conversation, and that moment alone mattered, and time passed.

And now that time has gone.

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