A sumptuous experience to relive my gay twenties and thirties through Vikram Phukan’s innovative and moving Postcards from Colaba — which seeks to bring alive a slice of Bombay’s lived queer history. Combining live theatre, audio files on messaging apps, and a one-kilometre traffic-dodge through our beloved, heaving metropolis, this plucky, gritty cast and crew are all heart and passion, refusing to let anything dim their radiance.

Beginning at Cooperage Garden’s gorgeous circular, canopied wooden bandstand, past Oval Maidan, the Royal Institute of Science, NGMA, Regal Cinema, the Yacht Club, the former Gokul, and ending at The Walls near the Gateway of India — which led us to our ultimate dance mecca, Voodoos — this play is a precious hark-back to what remains an indelible memory for us 1990s Bombay gay men.

At moments I felt like a testy old Reverend Jesse Jackson at Barack Obama’s swearing-in, weeping and simultaneously resentfully bitching about Obama on a hot mic. I felt like shouting, “No, that’s not how it was, bitches!” — but those Titanics of my gay exploits have already sunk in the un-videoed, un-selfied and un-photographed late-1990s, and it’s time for me, a shrivelled and weathered Rose, to cast the Heart of the Ocean of my memories back into the swirling waters off Apollo Bunder. Alistar Bennis and Vibhanshu brought alive the scenes at Cooperage Garden and Regal Cinema with a disarming and pulsing energy. Trinetra Tiwari was excellent as Rangoli, a transwoman whose chaster Hindi was a welcome respite from the unavoidable elitism of the clipped English of other sections of the play. Shreya Sandilya was simply outstanding as Firdaus Kangra’s mother, in her piece at the steps of the Royal Institute of Art, making her way to a bus stop and coolly having the electric box double as a water filter. A gentleman sleeping on the seat of the stop and who woke up and sat up mid-piece, only made it more surreal and peculiar, and so, so… Bombay! Sahir brought a touching vulnerability to playing Riyad Wadia…hanging from the metal fencing of the Oval like Dev Anand, and then having to bear me blunder through reading aloud the scrawl on a postcard. Having known Roy, Riyad’s brother, as well as R. Raj Rao the poet of the work on which the short film is based, it was really special. I remember the first time we screened BomGay at the GayBombay filmfest, we were worried. about what the projector-wala would think! Sahir’s story about making dulce de leche was also amazing, and I merrily accepted the sweets he gave out (as well as a carton of frooti at Regal), forgetting that I had a blood test scheduled for the next morning, which I had to then cancel!

But you should have seen me in 1998 — dancing to the Vengaboys in a blue blazer and white T-shirt on my first Voodoos visit (and dying of sweat because I thought that’s what one wore to a dance club)… or watching the Cuban gay film Strawberries and Chocolate at Regal during the Mumbai Film Festival in 1993, and then running to Churchgate, taking a train, and coming out to my Communications Skills professor, Kajli Sharma, now herself a theatre diva, as gay.

Or strolling along The Walls with trans women, cross-dressers, druggies, dealers, sex workers, and gays after Shapoor, the world-weary Parsi owner of Voodoos, resolutely pulled us by the elbows to the door because we continued to dance even after the music stopped. Kushal, Chirag, Nikhil, Sujaan, the swirling Surd, all became familiar faces every alternate Saturday. That year I went 26 times in 52 weeks, because I could only afford one visit every fortnight. Shapoor got us to leave Voodoos with a gentle shove and a cheery “thank you, thank you”, as cabbies in kaali-peelis waited outside, grinning at the spectacle of drunk, high and giggling queens staggering out and hopeful of a long midnight fare home. We sauntered to The Walls laughing.

Sometimes we sat with our feet dangling over the water, then swung back and watched closeted gay men drive endlessly around the block in Premier Padminis, trying to pick someone up yet terrified to be seen on the promenade. Occasionally, a gaggle of hormonal young men would negotiate their business with a koti and do the deed under the colonnaded walkways amid tramps and users, all under the benevolent chhatra-chhaya of the Taj Mahal Hotel’s heritage wing.

Sometimes we’d forget to pee before closing time at Voodoos and merrily slip into the Taj to relieve ourselves in its beautiful restrooms — then sit a while on the lobby’s chairs and sofas before making our way out again. We were never stopped; the front-desk staff went about their work, and ten years before 26/11 there lingered a touching air of innocence.

Back on the promenade, guys would be shooed away by pandus with batons alighting from a run-down dark-blue van, and like a flock of graceful geese, they would circle around and return from the other end. Arab tourists in hijabs and ghutrah-dishdasha ambled on a stroll. The Gateway wasn’t so harshly or cruelly barricaded back then, and one could walk all around it. I once made love to in the pouring monsoonal rain under an banyan tree in the buttery moonlight above Rajabai Tower, before making it, soaked, to the first train at 4.15 a.m. from Churchgate station to alight at Bandra. And once, I kissed a date deeply in the empty luggage compartment of a local between Churchgate and Marine Lines while bringing him home.

Those memories are remarkable for how devoid of fear we were — almost like mythical characters entering an enchanted forest. Not to sugar-coat anything: blackmail, police extortion, and all manner of abuse were rife. We’d heard vague reports about Kiran Bedi’s refusal to allow condoms to be distributed to male prisoners in Tihar Jail, but the ABVA petition probably hadn’t even been filed yet, and we’d have laughed our faces off if someone had suggested that Section 377, which effectively criminalised same-sex activity, would be struck down in our lifetimes. We simply accepted the ecosystem as it was, grateful to have even these meagre options to live gay lives.

We made our way through it gingerly, together — meeting on MIRC chat or Yahoo Messenger, setting up rendezvous via bulky new mobiles, pagers, or fixed lines, logging into the pista-coloured walls of the gay.com chatroom after the modem shrieked in god-awful pings to let the whole building know what hanky-panky we were up to — or so we thought. We’d be on eGroups.com’s Gay Bombay and Khush List mailing lists. I would read Rex Wockner’s dispatches about gay news in the US, which appeared regularly. We wrote long, thoughtful emails on the list and came to know each other’s minds intimately, long before we met in real life.

And now, just a fortnight ago, at Gay Bombay’s 27th anniversary party, I met two of those beautiful boys who, among the sailors, goras, and gay lads, would be dancing the night away with me as the twentieth century came to a close — Ajay and Yusuf. Now in our forties and fifties, we hugged, and I asked if they had a photo of Sandy — Shantanu Dasgupta — my first crush at Voodoos, a total chocolate-eyed heartbreaker with whom I bashfully agreed to go back to the Sahil Hotel in Bombay Central.

We steamed up the bathroom mirror. On 14 February 1999, he gave me a Valentine’s Day card that trilled an electronic melody when opened. They said they’d check their old hard drives — perhaps a photo might appear. Back then, we weren’t camera-happy; we thought we’d live forever. I never imagined he’d leave the world in his late twenties. I suppose Sandy will live on only in my heart. Stories upon stories — pre-social media, pre-smartphones, pre-CCTVs everywhere.

This was meant to be a review of Postcards from Colaba, but I lost myself in my own lost world because of it… maybe that makes it a review (a re-view) in the truest sense! Thank you, dear queer comrades-in-arms, for making me relive those moments.