 | Preparing for the launch of my first website (http://henrikeger.com/), I googled the web to see if it was already listed. To my surprise, I found a fragment of my own writing quoted in an article by prolific and popular Indian journalist Behram Contractor [on June 4, 1980], about Samovar, the restaurant at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, then Bombay (republished on Aug. 8, 2007): “Ah, Samovar [. . .] where the whole world meets the whole world [. . .] this lovely haunt of the artists and the poets [. . .] where V.S. Naipaul drops in for lunch and where Pearl Padamsee sits at the most prominent table in the place and writes her film reviews [. . .] “I have no words to write about Samovar. So I leave it to Henrik Eger, a visitor from Germany, who must have one day wandered into Samovar and left this poem behind: “A Russian Samovar in India, A German guest at noon, A Muslim friend with Hindu eyes, And I, engulfed by food, By music and by plants." |
Behram Contractor (1930-2001) also known as Busybee: “In the history of Indian journalism, there will never be another humorist like Busybee; he was the Art Buchwald of India, the P.G. Wodehouse of our times and more, a writer with a brilliant sense of timing for satire and humour, but with a soft and sensitive pen. And with a flow of words that could have readers rolling in their living rooms, offices and suburban trains on their way home; or moist-eyed with emotion and sepia-tinged nostalgia. That was Busybee."
Originally published as “A Russian Samovar in India, an unusual discovery: Fragments of the past resurfaced,"
Mumbai, India, HenrikEger.com, August 14, 2007
Originally published as “A Russian Samovar in India, an unusual discovery: Fragments of the past resurfaced,"
Mumbai, India, HenrikEger.com, August 14, 2007
