“I read your story at 5 in the morning,” urban historian Deepak Rao declares. I’m impressed. Because this isn’t online, it’s in the stash of dailies dropped at his door. He doesn’t think that it’s a remarkably early hour for the printed word to pile at his feet. Neither, it seems, does his paperwallah — whose family probably introduced home delivery of newspapers in the city.  

I’m keen to meet 69-year-old Bhupendra Upadhyay. Seized by the spirit of enterprise, his father Ram Kishore in 1939-40 had boldly gone knocking on doors of art deco homes freshly built to face train tracks along Queens Road, Churchgate. Residents just moved in welcomed the novel service offered. Until then people picked publications from AH Wheeler or kerbside vendor kiosks.