n 1996 I was asked to be one of the judges of Bombay's Advertising Club awards. In the middle of one hundred imitations of cowboys in the sunset and the like, were the MTV spots that used the Indian environment in an original way; a cocky tea-boy weaving his way though Bombay's most crowded locales, hassling everybody he meets on the way; a terrifying head massage set to an old Hindi film song. Much later I met the person responsible for the TV spots that got my full marks, whatever they were worth; Cyrus Oshidar, Vice President and Creative Director of MTV, whose latest creations are a venomous, gravel-voiced MTV-hating old lift-man, and Gaseous Clay, a flatulent Boxer, the Hawaweight Champion of the world. Cyrus Oshidar lives in an old flat in Tardeo with his Parsi wife Simeen, an artist who paints on glass, their two daughters, and several paying guests from another era, who refuse to leave. I'm surprised, though I shouldn't be, that theirs has been a childhood romance.


When did the two of you meet?

S: His father has a photograph of us at a birthday party when we were five. In Calcutta. Our fathers were in the same bank-Grindlays. But we started going out when we were fourteen.

You weren't neighbours? You didn't live here then Cyrus?

C: I was away for fourteen years-from 1975 to 1989. First in boarding school in Ooty, then in London where my father was transferred. Being a good Anglophile, he insisted that my brother and I join a pucca public school. We ended up in Dulwich College. Strangely, my first test was an essay on My Religion. A week later, my teacher, a crusty old Oxbridge leftover, handed the corrected essays back, pointed to me, and said in his nasal voice, "How splendid it is that we have in our midst, a...Zoroastrian. How unfortunate it is, however, that he cannot spell it."
          Anyway, although I studied there, I'd come back here every year for three to five months. Simeen used to live at Sleater Road, you know how that floods in the monsoons? I remember once-swimming through the floods with all the garbage floating by; dead rats, cockroaches, condoms. I went to her house and her mother made me have a bath about six times with Dettol-I'm not joking. Concentrated Dettol! My body was burning. All for the love of this woman!

So it wasn't a clandestine romance?
S: No, no, not at all. Because our parents were friends.
C: Once my father caught me kissing the back of her neck in Marve and said.....