Thursday, June 02, 2016

Visnagar


At some point in the late 1880s or early 1890s, a young man left the little town of Visnagar, then part of the northern division of the territory ruled by the Gaekwads of Baroda in western India, and traveled to Bombay, to make his fortune. And that he did, in the gold bullion trade of India's commercial capital. He married and had one daughter, before being left a widower. Several years later, he married again, and had seven children with his second wife.

That man was my maternal grandfather, Sheth Dosabhai Maganlal Parekh. My mother is the youngest of his four daughters, and along with a younger brother, the only living children today. My grandfather died in 1935, when my mother was four years old, leaving the care of his business, and his children, to his 29 year old widow, Jasumatiben. My mother has very faint memories of going to his pethi (office), in Bombay's share bazaar (stock exchange) as a little child. The family home -- Dosabhai Mansion in Khetwadi, as well as the later Chandan Niwas on Chowpatty (of which I have fond memories from my childhood) have both long gone the way of so many of Bombay's old buildings -- razed, to make way for modern condominium skyscrapers.