Clandestine Cigarettes: CCI enfin!

So in between all the wedding chaos, I decided to take a little break and travel across the seven seas to South Mumbai.

It was to be a charming evening of tea, laughter, girly gossip and of course, a walk through Indian Cricket History! Yes, I was finally going to walk the corridors of CCI - The Cricket Club of India!

The rendezvous was with Rima Rohan Shah - the personification of South Mumbai sophistication and the owner of the very chic label Raisa. Picture this - a petite young lady with perfect nails and hair that's always in shape walks down CCI Chambers, daintily crosses the street and walks over to the CCI Entry gate. That's Rima for you. She's all sparkle and shimmer and grace and glow. She's also one of my dearest friends...

So this CCI date of ours had been on the cards for about three years - pretty much since her wedding! We finally decided to make it happen and what an evening it was!

As I walked through the gates, I had this tremendous urge to be that annoying awestruck tourist who took selfies of absolutely every move! I wanted to start with one at the gates just because I was finally in that elusive world!

Rimz (as I fondly know her) took me straight to the "walls of fame", as she called it.And I was astounded! It was a picture gallery of every player who ever captained the Indian side, every team that ever played for India, trophies won and famous on-field shots by our star cricketers! And there they all were... Documented through the years - Maharajah of Porbandar, Lala Amarnath, Mohinder Amarnath, Vijay Merchant, Polly Umrigar, Tiger Pataudi, ...right down to Sunny Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar and our very own MSD (Dhoni of course!).

Get this - there's also a Polly Umrigar Sportsman's bar and a Vinoo Mankad suite.

And is it any surprise that an entire wall is dedicated to the historic 1983 World Cup victory? Photographs of Kapil Dev popping champagne after the victory, a picture of just the cup, another of the entire team celebrating and yet another of the team posing on the CCI grounds!

That's our victorious 1983 team! (And that's also a very bad selfie..I know!)

That's our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in full Cricket gear

For a cricket non-enthusiast like me to be enchanted like this speaks volumes about the magic of the place. I really wish I had my cricket crazy family with me there. They would have stuck themselves to the walls in the pose of The Vitruvian Man, never to let go. Especially my brother.

Rimz walked me around the place and showed me the library, the grocery store, the health club, the swimming pool, the Card Room (where the retired amuse themselves with Rummy and the like), the bakery, the Chinese restaurant, The Children's play area etc. It's a whole world inside. It's so self sufficient, it's almost like entering The Truman Show!

Anyway, after gasping and gushing and taking a dozen selfies (some disastrous), we decided to proceed to the tea-and-snacks part of the evening. Sitting on the grounds of Brabourne Stadium, we sipped on some lovely tea, reminisced about the days when we lived on a shoestring pocket money budget and laughed about our antics through college. We were later joined by Rima's husband Rohan who laughed harder than us at our stories of NIFT.