'Bombay Velvet', a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory

"Nostalgia is the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone." That's Don Draper in Mad Men, an American TV series now entering its last episode. It could not be more appropriate for Bombay Velvet, which has an ache at its core, a wound that has never quite healed, a deep hurt for the loss of an era, or a way of being.

Anurag Kashyap, the guru of Bihar gangsterdom, is the unlikely chronicler of an age where jazz singers shared space with Parsi tabloid editors; where refugees from Sialkot ended up being lifelong friends with those from Multan; where club memberships didn't have to be bought and liquor could be consumed only if accompanied by a foreigner. Bombay Velvet is a story about a lost city, drowned in a sea of reclaimed real estate, made venal by gangsters who opened a side business in terror, and corroded by the greed of easy money. Based on Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables, which chronicles, among many things, the rise of Mumbai's land mafia, Bombay Velvet is fabulously glamorous and unutterably sad.

It's also a tribute to the city of dreams from one of its many dream merchants. Kashyap, like many immigrant directors before him, has been both made and remade by the city, which he now apparently wants to flee (please read Gayatri Jayaraman's lovely profile of his in India Today.) The beauty of Bombay Velvet is, as Draper says in Mad Men, that it's not the wheel, it's the carousel -"It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

Indeed, like most magical cities, everyone has their own personal recollections. Mine is of the early '70s, when Talk of the Town was something my parents talked of, with the gorgeous Usha Iyer (now Uthup) singing there. There was something so impossibly decadent about the idea of an Indian woman swinging to Western songs to the child that I was.

It's that sliver of the past that Bombay Velvet uncovers - the stories of my grandfather working for Blitz, with its bold type and scandalous last page, old copies of which I uncovered many years later in old forgotten family trunks. The rattling of typewriters and the smell of the printing press, the tales of eating at Bombelli's and Berry's, the cigar smoke and the whisky fumes, the Cadillacs and the art deco homes. Bombay Velvet recasts and reimagines that city, with its gleaming racecourses and grimy red light streets, its black tie and white gowns, its James Cagney movies and opium dens.

There's a lovely scene in the movie where Rosie Noronha, lately of Portuguese occupied Goa and now of a Churchgate hair cutting salon, tells Johnny Balraj, earlier of the streets and now manager of Bombay Velvet, that she wants to leave Bombay. "Do you know what's outside Bombay," asks Balraj. "India. Who wants to live in India?" That really is the spirit of Bombay Velvet, of an island unto itself, where movie stars, businessmen, politicians and mill owners lived in a bubble, unheeding of the masses who would soon be breathing down their necks, tearing down their genteel bungalows, building on their backyards, converting their nightclubs into generic restaurants, or worse stores, and spitting on their sidewalks. "You know we had the car, but no petrol. We had the villa but there was nothing to eat in the kitchen," says Karan Johar's character, Kaizad Khambatta, who the director plays with just the right touch of menace and longing.

That encapsulates the other reality of Bombay, how its old elite gave way to a new generation of achievers, how family money made way for capital earned by the Dhirubhai Ambanis of the world. Ranbir Kapoor's Balraj could have been a contender, he could have been a business tycoon, he could have had a Cuffe Parade tower named after him. In a way the movie echoes Mani Ratnam's Guru, which chronicles the rise of precisely this new kind of money, made with seat-of-the-pants hard world. As Balraj says: "Appan ki keemat appan denge (I will quote my own price, no one can buy me)".

In Mumbai Fables, Gyan Prakash quotes a MARG editorial by Mulk Raj Anand from 1965, where he implored the city to pick up the courage to dream up a worthy metropolis. Dreaming was no idle activity. He said, for in "dreams begins responsibility". But, as he writes in his book, the dream soured, and "Bombay was to be nothing more than an industrial metropolis, a cog in the wheel of the industrialising and urbanising nation." For those gazing at the ruins of a once grand city, at least there is a Bombay Velvet to hold on to. Jaata kahan hai deewane went the song from CID in 1956 which Bombay Velvet has rewired. The answer may well be to dream of Bombay's once grand past.