MUMBAI: Partying in Mumbai would not be the same without Rustom Irani. He's the man behind Icelings, the company whose trucks are seen outside clubs and restaurants in the morning, or at wedding venues a couple of hours before the event, unloading big bags of readymade ice. So it's rather surprising to hear that this segment is not the bulk of his business. "Human consumption varies from 30-40% of our sales, depending on the season," he says.The bulk is industrial ice use, like the ice used to transport fish from the docks or freshly killed chicken. Some chemical industries such as dyeing also use ice and so do bakeries, to cool dough as it is kneaded, so that the yeast doesn't rise too fast, especially in Mumbai's muggy heat. But perhaps the most surprising use of ice is in concrete-making, since concrete will crack if it hasn't been mixed at an even, cool temperature. "When you see transit mixers parked on the roadside with the drum covered in gunny sacks to keep it cool, you know ice is being used. Construction is a major consumer of ice," says Irani.It may seem strange to think of ice being used to make high-rises, but then the ice industry is full of surprises and perhaps it is only to be expected. It involves defying nature at the most basic level, bring chilling into a climate opposed to it. Rudyard Kipling captured this in The Undertakers , one of his most offbeat stories, where a trio of unpleasant characters, a crocodile, a jackal and an adjutant, the ugly looking scavenging stork, discuss morbid issues on a riverbank.The adjutant recalls once seeing a boat unloading "great pieces of white stuff" and when one chunk breaks off, the bird swallows it: "Never have I felt such cold. I danced in my grief and amazement till I could recover my breath, and then I danced and cried out against the falseness of the world; and the boatmen derided me till they fell down." The biggest wonder of all, the stork adds, "was that there was nothing at all in my crop when I had finished lamenting".Kipling's story specifies this was Wenham Lake ice from America, which ties it to one of the most audacious commercial enterprises ever to involve India. Wenham Lake is in Massachusetts and in the early 19th century became famous as the focus for the business of cutting ice from the lake in winter which was then stored in ice-houses to last through summer.It was Frederic Tudor, a young man from Boston, who decided to try extending this local convenience to tropical areas that never saw natural ice.To most people in Boston, the idea appeared as ridiculous as it seems now. Wouldn't the ice just melt, literally sending all profits down the drain? But Tudor realised that combining the fast new sailing ships with good insulation in the form of easily available sawdust from the many local sawmills could keep enough of the ice solid through the voyage, while at the other end overheated inhabitants would provide enough demand. It took some time, and several brushes with insolvency to accomplish this, but by 1833 he had established a decent trade with the West Indies and the American South.That was the year when he was approached by another merchant, Samuel Austin, with the proposal to send an ice cargo not just relatively close to home, but to the other side of the world. Austin was trading with India, but had a problem: there was plenty of demand for Indian spices and silks in the US, but little to send there - the main US items of export at that time, fur and dried fish, obviously had no takers here! But ships needed a cargo for ballast, so instead of the unprofitable sand they currently carried, Austin suggested they try ice, which would serve as enough weight on the voyage out, and if any of it remained at the other end, it could be sold at a profit.Tudor was always up for a challenge and in May, exactly 170 years ago, a ship called the Tuscany set sail with a cargo of ice for India. They decided to sail to Calcutta, the headquarters of the British in India, which was a four-month voyage. About one-third of the ice melted en route, but that still left a hundred tonnes to unload before the astonished British at Hooghly. Advance reports of the cargo had been sent, but most people in Calcutta dismissed it as a joke of the kind that the crude Yankees were famous for liking to pull over their old British overlords.But it was true, and Calcutta went crazy. Ice of a kind was not unknown in India. The Mughals used to have it sent by boat down river from the hills, and a technique had been devised using a solution of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) of creating near-frozen liquids. Rich families even had a special servant called an aubdar whose job was to cool drinks using this technique. But all this was far short of the large, clear, hard ice that the Americans brought, from lake water reputed to be far purer than the highly suspect local water. But now they could have iced drinks, chilled wine, cool beer and cold desserts, and just the delight of some relief from the heat. Gavin Weightman, in his book 'The Frozen Water Trade', writes that in no time "a committee was formed to collect subscriptions to build an ice-house - not a wooden American structure, but a grand stone edifice more fitting to the 'city of palaces...'"And not just in Calcutta. As news of the shipment spread, the British in Bombay and Madras were clamouring for American ice. It took some years for a regular service to be put in place, but the profits were too tempting for Tudor to ignore. He also realised that it was possible to send items such as apples and butter preserved in the ice which also found enthusiastic takers and increased his profits. It was one of the first examples of an international cold chain that could now link the US and India.Bombay, in particular, realised that it was the logical first landing for ships from Boston, which would give it a rare advantage over mighty Calcutta. It would need its own ice-house though and the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, which would later become the Times of India, took a lead in pushing for the creation of a Subscription Committee to raise funds for this. On July 9, 1842, the paper hosted a meeting in its office for this purpose, and reported with satisfaction the collection of "Rs 3,835 from 116 Subscribers, and they have much pleasure in stating that the whole of this sum has been realised, except for Rs 70 still due by 3 Subscribers".This was not quite enough, even with collection of that Rs 70, and it took a few more years before the ice-house was built, close to the docks to allow for minimum loss of ice in the transfer from the ships (the KR Cama Oriental Institute now stands on this site, which is still a stone's throw from the Lion Gate entry to the docks). The ice-house was to be a source of many problems - reports in the Times over the years bitterly castigate its poor hygiene and inadequate capacity. It was a sign of how much demand there was for ice, even though the reports often draw attention to the peculiar reluctance of the natives to take to it. Demand was mostly restricted to the British and Parsis - the only non-British name at that early Times meeting was C Jamsetjee - and that was still plenty.Ice had become an obsession for the British in India. Reports in the Times anxiously track news of ice ships, and break into laments when, as occasionally happened, a ship and its precious cargo got lost. "We understand that the agent of Mr Tudor in Bombay has given up all hope of the arrival here of the American ship Eagle's Wing... there is too much reason to fear she has foundered at sea," notes one sad report from August 11, 1865. The timing was particularly bad since higher demand over the summer months meant all ice was over, and now the only hope was another ship due to arrive in October.Among all these complaints, one person was proof against them - Tudor was probably the most popular American in India, and not just for his success in getting the ice, but for a clever marketing decision. Given his control over such a prized commodity, he could have made big profits by pricing it high, and many advised him to do just that. But he always resisted, preferring to price it low in order, he said explicitly, to get people addicted to ice.And this is just what happened in India, with the added benefit that Tudor reaped tonnes of admiration from the British for his judicious pricing. Many of the Times reports are full of estimations about the near-loss he was making and how this had to be solved in order for this precious trade to continue. There can be few comparable examples where customers have been as eager for their supplier to make a profit as with the British and Boston's Ice King, as Tudor was called.Bombay's ice trade with the US continued through much of the 19th century, even getting a boost with the American Civil War when some Yankee traders realised that Indian cotton could be used to fill the ice ships on their way home. But it finally ended towards the end of the century once the technology of making ice by the mechanical means of pumping a pressured gas such as ammonia became viable on a large scale. And just as the Parsis were the first native Indians to appreciate ice, they (and their Irani compatriots) were the first to invest in this in India.The Tatas, always on the edge of technological change, were pioneers, setting up a plant at Sassoon Docks in Mumbai. But after some years they decided to exit this sector and this was when Irani's grandfather bought over the machinery. "I am the third generation in this business," he says.