When home was on Altamount Road

After about 20 years, people are suddenly talking about Altamount Road. Usually half the people you meet in Mumbai have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when you mention Altamount Road (and they will have even less if you mention Sheikh something-something Barodawala Marg, which is actually the same thing just as Bombay is now Mumbai) but their eyes will light up if you say 'Palm Beach Road'.

I have tried this as an experiment and it works. I have never been to Palm Beach Road and as a purist I know that it is not in Mumbai. That is, Jairaj Phatak has no jurisdiction there and he definitely has jurisdiction over Altamount Road as well as Sheikh something-something Barodawala Marg (because they are the same). By the way, Phatak is Mumbai's municipal commissioner.

But this Altamount Road has been picked as one of the world's 10 most expensive streets. As you can imagine, this has seriously upset all the people who live on Malabar Hill, especially Mount Pleasant Road or Bhau Saheb Hire Marg, which is where the chief minister also lives, though he neither bought Varsha nor inherited it from a rich daddy. Everyone always assumed that Malabar Hill (Bhau Saheb, Napean, Little Gibbs, Ridge and such) came first, Cumballa Hill (including Altamount or something-something and other assorted roads), then the roads at the bottom of the hills, plus hills like Pali Hill but not Antop Hill.

Of course, people who live in Palm Beach Road were really fuming because they all paid crores and crores for their homes but they don't make the list and Jairaj Phatak has no jurisdiction over them.

This Alta-something-something was one of my childhood haunts. That is, a little lane off it called Anstey Road, opposite what was then the Mafatlal bungalow but has now become several buildings. Then it was one, and the garden changed every six months.

The end of Anstey Road had a house covered in greenery and the building where we lived. The two shared a common fence and the people in the house kept rabbits. Us building girls ran a private "club" on our side of the fence and while we strategised on how to keep the boys out, we also fed the rabbits. Sometimes an old man chatted with us from that side of the fence, mainly about the rabbits and how much and what they ate. It was a very long time ago, we were very young and anyone over 20 seemed old to us - much like young people nowadays. Later my father told me that was JRD Tata.

He rented that house and a few years before he died he sold a flat he had bought on Pedder Road in Sterling Apartments. He was so shocked that he got Rs5 crore for the flat that he gave all the money to the family planning programme. He thought it was vulgar that a flat could cost so much. I don't think JRD Tata would be happy to discover that he had once lived on one of the 10 most expensive streets in the world.

Of course, part of the reason for Altamount Road's catapult into global big time is the edifice that Mukesh Ambani is building for himself on it. So the world moves, from one industrialist to another.
b_ranjona@dnaindia.net