Bimal Roy never lived in the lovely little cottage on Mount Mary Road which bears the nameplate of the Roys. Nor did his wife and one of India’s earliest known professional women photographers, Manobina Roy. But their legacy lingers on in the many keepsakes inside. Like the strapping old sofa set, the gorgeous triple-seater (called ‘chaperone seat’) and the solid centre table in the living room, around which the creative geniuses of the day used to sit on the floor for long conversations. “Yusuf saab [actor Dilip Kumar], [writer] Nabendu Ghosh, [editor-filmmaker] Hrishikesh Mukherjee…,” reels out Roy’s daughter Yashodhara, who lives there now along with her brother Joy, and, not to forget, 16 cats.
There’s more of Bimal Roy in the cottage. Eight of his 11 Filmfare trophies, the photographs he clicked, one of the letters he wrote to Manobina from a stint abroad where he calls her Moni (jewel), the trophy he won at the Karlovy Vary film festival for Bandini . Some more memorabilia and furniture lie in a godown; the house can’t accommodate it all. “A lot of it — a teakwood cupboard, a rosewood table — were gifted away. We didn’t want to sell what Maa and Baba had bought,” says Yashodhara.
Each of the objects has a story behind it. One story seamlessly segues into another. Stories live within stories, as though they were a Russian matryoshka doll.
The most abiding reminiscences are those of Roy’s actual house, which was once to the right of the present cottage, but has given way to a shiny high-rise, quite like many other old star homes in Mumbai swallowed by the builders over the years. The one I remember distinctly is Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama on Carter Road, a little further down from Otters Club, which is now some indistinct apartement block in its new avtar.
The original Roy home was called Godiwala Bungalow, which he had rented from a Parsi family. It was where the filmmaker lived from 1953 to 1966, when he died. It was where Roy reached his creative peak and made all his big films, from Do Beegha Zameen to Bandini . “They were 12 of his most fruitful years,” recalls Yashodhara. The home can be seen in a film made by Nasreen Munni Kabir in 1999, called Bimal Roy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore . It was where the Roys continued to live even after Bimal Roy’s death, till Manobina Roy passed away in 2001. In 2002, Godiwala Bungalow was demolished to give way to the current building.
A road outside the former bungalow and the present cottage is being named after Bimal Roy on Sunday, his 51st death anniversary. Yashodhara is struck by a happenstance — receiving three black and white pictures taken decades ago by her father’s art director Sudhendu Roy from the sixth floor of the building on the left. One of the three is the view of the same lane, from the time when the present building on it, Silver Cascade, was still being built.
The naming of the road has come through with the efforts of corporator Karen D’Mello. But it was Roy’s daughter Rinki Roy Bhattacharya who had been working assiduously towards it for a very long time. She proposed it first in 2003 to late MP Sunil Dutt. “Two years ago, she handed over the papers to me, but me being me, I didn’t do anything,” says Joy. Priya Dutt, Baba Siddiqui and former corporator Asif Zakaria were all instrumental in making it happen. Abraham John Architects, run by actor John Abraham’s brother, Alan, has designed the plaque for the lane that states very simply: Bimal Roy Path ( path spelt in devnagri).
The lane used to be a short cut down to the sea for the kids with their ayah s (governesses). “We used to go with our jam jars to collect fish and tadpole,” says Joy. “[An] enchanted life,” is how Yashodhara remembers their childhood in Godiwala Bungalow. It had a badminton court, a beautiful wooden swing, a see-saw and nature all around. “My father used to love growing fruits and vegetables and my mother loved flowers,” she says.
But it wasn’t the first place that Bimal Roy made his home. He moved to Mumbai in 1951 to join Bombay Talkies, after working in New Theatre in Kolkata. Along with him, others in his team also shifted here: Nabendu Ghosh; Hrishikesh Mukherjee; filmmaker, cinematographer, writer Asit Sen; actor-writer Paul Mahendra; cinematographer Kamal Bose; and later music composer Salil Chaudhury. He stayed initially in Malad in a house originally occupied by actor Devika Rani. “Maa used to cook there for everyone. Hrishi da used to tell us stories from Mahabharata over tea and a huge bowl of kurmura. Asit Baran, who acted in Parineeta, stayed in the house. We grew up thinking they were all Baba’s brothers,” recollects Yashodhara of the community life.
It was Manobina who spotted Godiwala Bungalow when she came to visit her first cousin Sonali [who was later married to filmmaker Roberto Rossellini] who used to live there. She wanted to rent it when her cousin moved out, but the quiet Parsi owners were not willing to give it to anyone from the world of films, considered the people to be loud, rowdy, party animals. The Roys were far from it. “We weren’t allowed going out for films. Baba used to show us films at home with a 16mm projector. He loved [Alfred] Hitchcock, [Charlie] Chaplin, [Frank] Capra and Russian films, especially [Mikhail Kalatozov’s] Cranes Are Flying ,” recalls Joy. The owners still would not relent. “But my mother was determined to rent it; she even prayed at the Mount Mary Church to grant her the wish.” And then, just like that, things fell into place one fine day, and the owners decided to give them the keys to their castle.
The Roys used to be a rare film family residing in the Mount Mary area back then, apart from that of filmmaker S.L. Dheer. Now, it is home to Subhash Ghai, Jackie Shroff, Siddharth Malhotra, and, of course, the Khans, Shah Rukh and Salman.
The present cottage also has a backstory. It was bought in stealth from the filmmaker. Roy, who came from the zamindar family in Bangladesh, had lost all his land there. He was against buying such assets. “He didn’t want to leave any property behind,” says Yashodhara. He was made to sign the documents and instalment cheques covertly, which he only discovered at the very end while signing the last cheque. By then, it was too late, the cottage was already his. And, it’s now also part of cinematic history, in his absence.
