Peter Colaco’s book Bangalore: A Century of Tales From City and Cantonment with illustrations by Paul Fernandes makes for a delightful read, and introduces  you to an old, forgotten Bangalore. This books is a tale of “two cities,” the British Cantonment area and the city that consits of Jayanagar, Malleshwaram and other “pettais.”  By reading the book you get a sense of how the British Residency and the Mysore rajahs co-existed and created a mellow and gentle city known for its gardens, monkey-top homes, bakeries, good food and music.

Peter and Paul know Bangalore like the back of their hands. They grew up here, went to school and earned their living in the advertisement industry. Peter’s grandfather worked in the court of the Mysore king, while Paul’s father was a well-known physician in the cantonment area. The book is a mix of family history combined with popular stories and urban legends of Bangalore in the 20thc.

The original city of Bangalore according to Peter was a “lazy little place, an English speaking Goa, minus the sea,” and I guess that is a good way to describe the old “pensioner’s paradise” where folks led a charmed and slow existence. This book paints a picture of a whole different town, far removed from the hyper-connected one that we navigate today studded with flyovers, metro lines and ringed by National Highways. This was a city where folks biked around from one part of the cantonment to another, hung out with their peers in “jam sessions” or listened to the juke box at Koshys or cruised down Brigade Road. Their favorite place to “hang out” was The Only Place or Dewars.

The book is studded with personal anecdotes and history about the various buildings, names of road and the British residents of Bangalore. You meet quaint characters like Cycle Lamp Charlie who conned folks into parting with some money and the vibrant Anglo-Indian community, who lived mostly in the cantonment area. The Anglo-Indians came to breakfast at Thom’s Cafe “dressed in their Sunday best,” to eat Rice Dumplings with Coconut Sauce and Doll Curry or as Peter puts it is the good old South Indian breakfast staple of idli, chutney and sambar, and curry doghnuts (ulundu-vad), also known as “Hole-in-the-vada.”

The book makes for an easy read and you can finish it in one sitting, or take your time and read it in a couple of days. Paul’s wonderful illustrations paint a visual image of what Bangalore must have been like in the 1950s and 1960s. The only thing that mars this book is it could have done with a sharp-eyed editor and copywriter, who could have easily fixed some of the unintended errors that have crept into the book.

The book is published by MyTec and is for some reason not available on Flipkart.