Amidst the numbing hum of activity on Karachi’s Beaumont Road, a colonial-era structure called Manijeh Mansions — erroneously listed as “Mandeh Mansion” in various surveys of heritage buildings — stands on its last legs, guarded by banyan trees. Distinctly European in character, the two-storeyed residential block, built in yellow Gizri sandstone, is an outsider in a lane lined with multi-storeyed office buildings.

A dense creeper that looks like an organic part of the building’s fabric sprawls across its facade, serving as a protective mane. The only semblance of life at this uninhabited, crumbling site is the layer of foliage that surrounds it.

The building’s main entrance is an ornate, wrought-iron pedestrian gate-arch, flanked by two columns holding up a balcony. Intricate mouldings of garlands — known as “festoons”, according to the architect Yasmin Lari — adorn the remnants of the balcony and can be found beneath every balustrade.

The interior’s state of disrepair is visible through the gate, which remains closed to visitors. A heap of stones, of the sort originally used in the construction of the building, lies in the foyer, along with a pile of twigs and other discarded items. The staircase — similar in size and style to the one in the lobby of the not-too-faraway Bristol Hotel — has been stripped of its decorative aspects.

Little is known about a distinctly European, colonial-era stone building surrounded by newer homogenous office buildings on Karachi’s Beaumont Road, except that it’s in an advanced stage of crumbling neglect. Ali Bhutto sets out to investigate and uncover its bygone days…

From the shadows, a figure emerges. A labourer working inside the building walks up to the gate and leans against it with his hands — his tired, slanting eyes looking out at the chaos of the city. The functional entrance, he tells me, is around the corner, in a lane.

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK

The front of the upper storey displays a different type of masonry than the rest of the building: the stones are better chiselled and of a smoother finish, while the lower storey and sides are “rough-tooled” and therefore less costly, according to Lari. Both are, nevertheless, an example of “ashlar masonry”, she says, which means the stones were laid in courses, with great precision, by skilled artisans.

In many colonial-era structures — including the Flagstaff House, now the Quaid-i-Azam House Museum — more effort and expense went into making the front of the building look impressive, while the sides were given lesser importance, and the least amount of effort went into the rear, according to Lari.

The right upper portion of the facade is in a precarious state and parts of it appear to have already fallen apart — a painful truth covered up by a pilkhan tree (white fig, a species of the ficus genus). There is scaffolding along a portion of the building and, at one point, a concrete layer can be seen where balustrades once stood. The director general of the Antiquities and Archaeology Department of the government of Sindh, Abdul Fatah Shaikh, confirms to Eos that the building is a listed heritage site.

The windows along the upper storey facade contain latticework — or a jafri — with a small opening at the centre and a balustrade along the bottom, while the lattice in the larger, lower-storey windows is fitted with ribbed ventilators. This specific type of jafri, made of narrow wooden planks laid in a criss-cross pattern, can be seen in colonial-era bungalows across Sindh.

According to Lari, it served the function of keeping out the sun and bringing in the wind, and appears more frequently in Karachi, where there is a sea breeze, than in other places, such as Lahore.

LIVING MEMORIES

The arched windows, remnants of which can be seen along the sides of the building, once contained stained glass, recalls Ronnie Patel, who spent a lot of time at Manijeh Mansions while growing up, especially around the mid-1970s.

It is he who confirms to Eos the correct name of the building and that it is not a single-family residence, but a block of four apartments, one of which was occupied by his late uncle, Rustom Kaikobad — whom he refers to as “Rusi Mama” — and another by Rusi Wania.

He remembers the tall ceilings, tasteful interiors and big parties thrown by his uncle, who was the legal counsel of the American, Japanese, Korean and Thai consulates in Karachi.

There used to be a wooden gate on the right corner of the compound, recalls Patel, and a garden where a black Great Dane, named Cleopatra, could be found. Remnants of the garden can be seen today in the form of pilkhan and banyan trees — both a species of ficus — standing tall along the side of the building, their branches looking like raised arms, protecting the site from the relentless march of concrete.

Back then, the North Western Hotel (designed by the Jewish architect Moses Somake, according to Lari), Agha’s Tavern and Grill, and the Mavalwalla residence, all lay across the road from Manijeh Mansions, while the Parsi-run Lucas Girling Agency lay adjacent to it, according to Patel.

The Karachi Residents Directory for 1932 lists a Manijeh Mansions on Beaumont Road, with ‘Flat A’ being occupied by a British army captain, John St John Balguy. Living with the 33-year-old captain, according to MyHeritage and Ancestry databases, was his wife, Dorothy Alice Harding, two years his senior. Balguy had been stationed in India since at least 1929, if not earlier, as he was an adjutant to the auxiliary forces at the time, according to The London Gazette of August, 1929.

DATING MANIJEH

It is unknown as to when Manijeh Mansions was built, but the architect and urban planner Arif Hasan thinks it may have been in the early 1900s. Its erstwhile neighbour, the North Western Hotel, opened its doors in 1908 (Lari, The Dual City), overlooking the railway line that runs parallel to Beaumont Road till this day. It was known as a “railway hotel”, according to Hasan.

Also, around this time, Thomas Beaumont — after whom the street is named — was president of the Karachi Municipal Corporation, according to a letter written by him in 1909 to a publication, called The Builder, requesting designs, plans and estimates for a new municipal office in Karachi.

Manijeh Mansions’ location on the peripheries of the then-exclusive Civil Lines Quarter provides some clues as to when it might date back to. This part of Civil Lines — essentially an extension — was developed later, according to Lari, and was not as posh as the neighbourhoods along Victoria Road and Elphinstone Street, which came up in the second half of the nineteenth-century.

Locals were not allowed to own property in Civil Lines until after the First World War and, even then, only the wealthiest of them could afford to do so (Lari, The Dual City). Referring to Civil Lines and the Cantonment, Lari tells Eos, “Prior to World War I, I could not find any buildings built by natives, not even by the favoured Parsis.”

It is uncertain as to whether the building is named after Manijeh Hommie Mehta, who was, in 1912, among the founders of the Karachi Zarthosti Banu Mandal, a philanthropic organisation created with the intent of providing education and support to underprivileged Parsi women.

An 1871 map of “Kurrachee Cantonment and Environs”, based on a survey conducted in the early 1860s (Lari, The Dual City), shows details such as buildings, compounds, driveways and housekeepers’ quarters, but contains no trace of a street or mud track where Beaumont Road is currently located.

In its place is a largely empty portion of land, sandwiched between Kutchery Road (now Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road) and the railway line. The map shows a west-facing bungalow and its accompanying quarters at the spot where the PIDC building currently stands. Opposite it, in the direction of the railway track, are a couple of minor structures denoted by tiny markings.

An 1874 map, signed by the Revenue Survey superintendent, Col GA Laughton, shows an unnamed street where Beaumont Road currently lies, lined with plots of land. The map shows a building at the very start of the street, where small eateries, such as Sailors Restaurant and Gwadar Foods, are currently located — across the road from Manijeh Mansions. The building is labelled, but the text is too small to be legible.

A Gazetteer of the Province of Sind by Albert Hughes (1876) makes mention of an “ice manufactory” in the Civil Lines area. An 1890 map, by James Strachan, places the ice factory at the very spot where the eateries currently lie on Beaumont Road.

According to a report by the Bombay Presidency Forest Department, the ice factory dated back to 1871, making it highly likely that the building in Laughton’s map was also the same factory. Prior to its existence, the city had an ice storage house, built in 1859, according to the old newspaper Allen’s Indian Mail.

In the 1871 map, a square building stands on the edge of the railway track, close to what is now the PIDC Bridge. A rough sketch depicts a telegraph line passing near the building, running parallel to the railway line. In Description of the Line and Works of the Scinde Railway (published in 1863), John Brunton, the chief resident engineer of the project, mentions that the railway line was laid in 1858, with the telegraph line alongside it.

A FORGOTTEN WORLD

Today, along the edge of the track, not far from the spot where the North Western Hotel was located, stands an antiquated sandstone building that may appear unusual, even bizarre to the untrained eye, but which once served as a railway signal box.

What looks like the upper portion of a blind arch, about 10 feet in width, rises from the bottom of the structure to a height of around three feet, and is set left of centre. “The arches were for levers,” Rajendra B Aklekar, author of A Short History of Indian Railways, tells Eos via email. “They do not need to be at the centre. They are closer to a railway crossover/switch, which must have been nearby,” he says.

Anwar, a current resident of the dysfunctional building and an employee of the Pakistan Railways, takes Eos to the ground floor room, where he lives, and from where the wooden floorboards of the upper storey operating room are visible. The room can only be accessed through a wooden external staircase that is on the verge of collapse. Cracks are visible in the interior and along the facade of the building.

While being driven down Kutchery Road en route to the cantonment area in the spring of 1876, the British orientalist Richard Burton saw nothing worthy of mention. He writes in Sindh Revisited, “We have now nothing to do beyond following ‘Kacheri (Cutchery) Road’, and a mile of exceedingly dusty and disagreeable highway will… land us at our destination — camp.”

A 1928 map by the Survey of India shows Beaumont Road, but at only half its current length, and flanked by buildings at some points, while empty at others.

READING STONES

The type of stone masonry used in Manijeh Mansions also gives us an idea as to what period the site dates back to.

According to Lari, the earliest buildings at the colonial-era Sind Club do not have the rough-tooled appearance of Manijeh’s ground floor and sides, adding, “It seems that this type of stone treatment was adopted later, after the 1880s.” It is unknown as to who designed the building, but Lari thinks it is similar to the work of Moses Somake, whose architecture began to appear in the city from the 1890s onwards.

A thick boundary wall, made of the same stone as the building, runs along the left side of the compound, overlooking a dark, leafy lane that has been there since as far back as Patel can remember.

From the side, the building resembles a colonial barrack, owing to prominent quoins placed along arches, windows and corners. A segmental arch holds up a balcony with enough space for a small seating arrangement.

The lane culminates in a dead end, where there is a gate to the compound. The chowkidar [gatekeeper] tells Eos that no one is allowed to enter the premises, and that many a visitor, including large groups of students interested in seeing the site, have been turned away.

“Please don’t mind,” he says repeatedly.

The writer is a Karachi-based journalist who has written for local and international publications. His work can be accessed at alibhutto.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 21st, 2024