THE PAST PERFECT

he thing about Indian cities is that they never stop eating themselves alive.

- ARANYAA CHOWDHURY

A bungalow one week is rubble the next. A cinema hall you loved as a child has already been gutted for luxury apartments by the time you return as an adult. Progress, we're told. But somewhere in the last few years, progress started to look suspiciously like sameness: Glass, steel, and soulless air conditioning. Which is why the sudden rise of cafes and restaurants inside old houses feels so startling. Across the country, heritage buildings - Indo-Portuguese bungalows in Mumbai, redbrick villas in Kolkata, 120-year-old tharavadus in Kerala - are being hauled out of retirement and handed second lives as restaurants. They were once family homes, music studios, or even community libraries. Now, they serve cortados, wood-fired pizza, and cocktails with names that sound like they belong in poetry anthologies. It's a trend that's sweeping cities in the way only nostalgia-fueled ideas can: Fast, fervent, and tinged with the irresistible feeling that you're not just eating you're keeping history alive.