A Shopkeeper’s Tale

In the Baroda summer, when the mercury hits 44 and above, and it is so freaking uncomfortable, indoors or outdoors, (as it is these days) I often wonder what must have triggered my father’s decision to make his home in this hot and dry small town, so far from his family, more than a 1000 kms away? Couldn’t he have found something better to do in Mahabaleshwar or Panchgani or even Sawantwadi, and we would have been closer to the family home at Bordawe village near Kankavli in the Malvan-Konkan area of southern Maharashtra, and not sweat out the summers, scrambled in a bowl of heat and dust in an unknown land, speaking an unknown language, and what’s more, a town that was then largely vegetarian, and fish- and coconut-free?

Well, a few decades before him, two cousin brothers from the family (my father’s uncles) had already come to Baroda and one of them had established the first and vast departmental store in this small town. The B Bros shop was an important landmark on the Raopura Main Road, till very recently. Perhaps, it was talk of the modern Gaekwadi Baroda state that may have been the attraction. There were marriage bonds between the Maratha states of Baroda and Sawantwadi, Kolhapur, Phaltan, Satara, and surely news about the prosperity of Baroda, about availability of quality school and higher education and modern facilities like hospitals, libraries, markets must not have been lost on the two cousins who moved with their families to Baroda to live in two separate wings of the same Arunodaya building in the Dandia Bazaar area, and start two very different businesses.

The B Bros store reflected the modern demands of the elite in Baroda. It stocked cigars and exotic soaps, stuff for pet doggies, eggs, bed and table linen, lace and expensive fabrics, biscuits and chocolates of all kinds, jams, marmalades, jellies and canned preserves of exotic European fruits. This was in addition to all the traditional demands of the same elite, especially from Brahmin and Maratha families – nine-yard cotton and silk sarees, pitambari dhotis, angavastra, and topi for men, pooja-related vessels, and kitchen utensils typically required for Marathi cooking that would not be available in Gujarati kansara shops.

During festivals, Aba-aji (my father’s aunt) would make several Marathi delicacies (chiroti, anarsa, bhajhanachi chakli, kadboli, etc.) for which the raw ingredients would be ordered from Sawantwadi or the Saraswat Konkani stores in Mumbai. The final products would be sold at the shop. For years, B Bros was the only store which stocked the colourful tiny tilgul sweets exchanged between Maharashtrians saying, tilgul gyaa ani god god bola as they greeted one another during the Makar Sankranti festival. My father once related to me how he met with a hugely endowed Nawab from a nearby thikana at the store while his order for the month was being packed. My father was amazed to see 30 soaps in the list and without realizing how rude he sounded, looking at the Nawab’s size he just blurted, who would need so many soaps in a month? My palace does, softly came the smiling reply, we are 30 persons in my family!

B Bros was managed under the hawk-eyed supervision of Aba-ajoba, Hanumant Bordawekar, until he was well into his ‘70s. He was assisted by a team of store-hands who aged with him. He had a devoted tongawala, Kalumiya, who would reach the store at 1 pm to take him home. If my school bus would reach the ‘BBros bus stop’ before that, one of the store-hands would help me get off the bus and into the shop where I would wait until Aba-ajoba would be ready to leave and give me a lift home in the tonga. It is a memory from my kindergarten days that I remember most vividly even today.

When Aba-ajoba called it a day, his son Sumankaka, and then, two grandsons, Kailas and Umakant took over the store. When the Russians and other expatriates made Baroda their home for more than a decade in the wake of the commissioning of Gujarat Refinery and IPCL in the mid-1960s, the store set up large freezers, bringing in frozen cold meats – sausages, ham and salami, and dressed chicken -- as well as tinned tuna and sardines, for their convenience. These were foods never heard of before in Baroda!

But B Bros was not the only store in its category. Diagonally opposite on the same road, was the Marathe Brothers store. This belonged to the Sabnis family, also originally from the same Malvan-Konkan belt as my father’s uncles. (Too much of a coincidence? But believe me, it is true. My mother, also a Sabnis, was distantly related to them as well.) This store was perhaps even larger than the B Bros store, and its signboard read, With special appointment to HRH the Gaekwar of Baroda. A minor Harrods here; you couldn’t get bigger than that!

A recent photo of Prof. Dr. Sharad Sabnis and Suresh Sabnis visiting the 95-year old Dattajirao Gaekwad, former captain of the Baroda Ranji team and India Test player at his Baroda home. Courtesy Rupa Sabnis Pinge, architect and author, daughter of Dr. Sharad Sabnis; posted on her fb page.

But the Sabnisis were essentially into education. The family patriarch, Shantaram Sabnis, was a long-standing member of the Lions Club that established the Baroda High School, at Bagikhana, then at Alkapuri and ONGC, the first and oldest English medium co-educational school in Baroda. His older brother Dwarkanath Sabnis bought the store from the Marathes and continued it in the same name. His daughter-in-law, Dr. Prof. Sabnis taught Anesthesiology at the Baroda Medical College through her career, and his son, Prof. Dr. Sharad Sabnis taught at the Faculty of Science, served as its Dean and finally, as the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the M S University. It was a large family, also staying in Dandia Bazaar. Now, the third generation youngsters have almost all moved abroad for study, work or via marriage. My parents were friends with Suresh Sabnis, who managed the shop, a kind and happy-go-lucky man. For a few years, I think in the ‘80s decade, the shop was the hub of informal Baroda Cricket Association meetings! It was that kind of a place …

Unfortunately, both these iconic shops of old Baroda, B Bros and Marathe Brothers, bit the dust within years of each other. The reasons were many and similar. At the infrastructure level, Raopura Main Road became a no parking zone and so both shops became difficult to access for the kind of clientele that shopped here. More and better stocked shops in far-flung suburbs made shopping nearer home a time and fuel saving option. Shopping malls became attractive as did online shopping with all its enticing bargains and deals. And then, most importantly, no one from the younger generation wanted to continue managing a shop-business where the returns were no longer worth the time and effort.

But both these shops and their owners, B Bros obviously more so, helped my family drop strong roots in a town to which we were essentially migrants. It was in the early 1950s that my father, recently married, migrated here with my mother and his siblings. He had got a job in the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and they had offered him Pune and Vadodara to choose from as his posting. My grandparents continued to live in the rambling mansion at Bordawe managing the family property for scores of uncles, aunts and cousins, all of whom had moved for better careers to Mumbai and Pune. Why my father chose to be so far away from his parents has always been a mystery to me and I will forever regret never having asked him this question. In the recent pandemic situation that we faced, if we did not have a roof over our heads, a good education, secure work, dependable friends and had thus dropped deep enough roots in this small town we had migrated to, maybe even we might have had to weave our way back to Bordawe fleeing for security into the rural interior from an unseen virus that had landed in planes in urban India.