Statue-tory warning: Fort's boy wonder is an Anomaly
So, when a statue does strike me as being, well, striking, I'm not only delighted, but also stand for minutes on end to admire such wonderful anomalies in stone. As I did recently when I was staying in the Fort area of Mumbai and chanced upon a figure reading a book on top of a cupola held up by a two-storeyed, many-pillared, intricately carved structure.
Even in the busy gol chakkar of P D'Mello Road and Mint Road, with his pedestal crisscrossed by lawless electric lines and tres anar-chic pigeons trying their damndest best to make him look up from his book, the figure — on closer inspection, a boy — is unperturbed, utterly immersed. His right hand holds the book as if it's a Kindle. His left hand to his side is balled up in a fist as if reacting to a particularly riveting, or even disturbing, passage.
Over a fortnight, I passed this arresting figure every day, standing in stone above the boisterous crowds, a boy having no care for the world fudging its way below him. Soon enough, I learnt that the structure is Muljee Jetha Fountain, and the statue on top is of Dharamsee Muljee, son of Ruttonsee Muljee, a cotton merchant.
Young Dharamsee had died at the age of 15 in 1889 and his father, commemorating his son's love for reading, commissioned the fountain. Designed by Frederick William Stevens, also designer of the nearby Victoria Terminus a.k.a. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, it was unveiled in 1894.
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