Babasaheb Mhatre

Babasaheb Mhatre is a senior figure in Bombay’s lunch-runners’ trade who becomes a surrogate father and formative mentor to the orphaned Gibreel Farishta. His authority is theatrical and brusque, but beneath the insults lies practical kindness: he takes Gibreel into his home, shapes his sense of the supernatural, and arranges the opportunity that moves him from carrying lunch tins toward a film career.

Identity and Character

A member of the Bombay Tiffin Carriers’ Association, Babasaheb is its General Secretary and one of the metropolis’s influential organizers. He occupies a blue office behind a green door above a labyrinthine bazaar. Though he rarely leaves the room, he is described as an important presence throughout Bombay, meeting people who matter and exercising influence beyond his immediate workplace.

His manner conceals his gentleness. He consoles Gibreel not with open expressions of sympathy but with loudness, insults, and decisive instructions. That contrast defines his care: he does not ask the bereaved youth to explain himself, but acts to ensure he will not face the streets alone.

Taking Gibreel into His Home

The day after Gibreel’s father dies, Babasaheb summons the young man to his office and tells him that he will live with him. Gibreel’s hesitant questions do not change the decision; Babasaheb has already told his wife, and treats the matter as settled. The intervention gives Gibreel a home after the loss of both parents and a place within the Mhatres’ childless household.

Babasaheb’s wife is intensely affectionate toward her husband, feeding and caring for him as though he were at once a child, a lover, and a lord. Babasaheb wants the boy to share the household’s emotional burden, yet his wife insists that Gibreel is grown and should be treated as a man. Their exchange reveals a household organized around exuberant, sometimes comic affection, into which Gibreel is welcomed without being infantilized. Babasaheb’s care is real even when he cannot express it softly.

Spiritual Influence

Babasaheb gives Gibreel an early framework for thinking about death and what might follow it. He speaks of rebirth, telling him that his parents could be preparing to return to life elsewhere unless they had attained final grace. The story’s account of Gibreel’s beliefs traces his interest in reincarnation to this mentorship.

Babasaheb also recounts his own experiments as an amateur psychic, in which he tried to contact spirits through a glass. When he asked whether God existed, the glass became still; when he asked about the Devil, it shook, rose into the air, and shattered. Babasaheb presents the episode as a warning against meddling in what cannot be understood. For Gibreel, the tale deepens an already developing conviction that a supernatural world exists beyond ordinary sight. The visible world can seem to him like only a portion of a larger reality, an impression that remains even after the strange visual effect passes.

The Dismissal That Opens a Door

On Gibreel’s twenty-first birthday, Babasaheb calls him back to the blue office and fires him, refusing to hear an appeal. The apparent rejection is immediately overturned: Babasaheb has arranged an audition with the film magnate D. W. Rama, a friend of his. He describes it as an appearance-only audition and says that Gibreel can begin with a small part, leaving what follows up to him.

The dismissal is therefore a calculated release from a trade Babasaheb believes Gibreel should not spend his life in. He bluntly points to Gibreel’s looks and tells him to pursue movie acting instead of carrying tiffins. In the same commanding style with which he first gave the orphan a home, Babasaheb now pushes him toward a different future. His decisive significance lies in this combination of material intervention and influence: he shelters Gibreel, gives him a language for supernatural possibility, and helps set his public life in motion.