Curtains of chile-pepper lights that look like Christmas at the bordello, sitar players in every window, seven courses of food for $7.95: I’ve always thought of Curry Row on East Sixth Street as one of the great minor mysteries of New York City. How did a clone colony of Indian restaurants sprout on one random block in the East Village? Is it true that they all share a kitchen? And why are they lit like a rager in the art-school darkroom?

Fifteen years after my first Sixth Street saag paneer, I was finally getting some answers from Shelley Mubdi. “We weren’t the first to open, but we were the first to open in style,” he said, smiling widely. Mubdi is retired, but in 1984 he got in the curry game, opening the restaurant Gandhi — a little bigger and brighter than his peers’, he noted proudly — when there were about 10 restaurants on the block, before they rocketed to 27 in the ’90s.

Nearly all these Indian restaurants were actually owned by Bangladeshis like Mubdi, in the classic “my cousin showed me the ropes when I got here” way. The old joke of them all sharing a kitchen was nearly true — because there were so many personal ties, workers and costs and recipes flowed freely from one to the next.