Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Tucked away between two IT parks and surrounded by massive boulders, in a recess, just off a newly constructed road, there are four rickety wooden tables. Behind one stand a short, dark, thick lipped lady and her tall, lean husband. On their table, there are half full cigarette packets, loose cigarettes, shiny, colourful packets of chewing tobacco and two thermos flasks full of hot insipid tea. In the morning, they’ll have two buckets with vegetable curry and coconut chutney and a metal tray with pale , crisp, flaky puris. Behind them is a large wok (that’s the closest i can get to describing it in English) on a gingerly balanced metal framed-soot covered stove. Their helper, a short, fat, dark North-Indian with henna dyed hair alternates between their metal cart where he rolls out the puris and the fire where he deep fries them. What I love about the guy is his hair, henna has a wonderful characteristic, where it first blackens then turns white hair a bright orange. His wild unkempt hair is black at the tips, then orange and finally has a good four inches of white. I’m not sure which cart he actually works at because I’ve seen him working at a number of them. He had a tea and cigarette table of his own, once, but that was before the workers blasted the rock and earth away to construct the new road. He had two kids working for him, crowding around the table attending to the customers, I’m guessing they were his sons from his paternal air as he sat back on the rocks, smoked a beedi and cursed them in a hybrid tongue.
The road earlier ran across a kilometre stretch of IT parks before it made a sharp left down to the lake, in front of the building I work, on its way down to the lake. But it was a narrow road unsuited to the large volumes of traffic that pour in and out of the parks, so the municipal corporation decided to widen it, splitting lanes around my building, standing a serene concrete, steel and glass wedge between the opposing lanes. The tables once stood closer, but the construction forced them back on to the rocks, occasional corporation drives left their carts smashed and their gas cylinders confiscated, but they always returned. Now they have burrowed a hole from themselves, a fortress, surrounded by ten feet and twenty tons of rock.
In this hole there are three other tables, the one to the extreme left is (wo)manned by ‘Aunty’, a barefoot goliath in a plastic chair. She sits in a plastic chair, next to her stove where she fries her own puris, rolled out and handed to her by one of the old man’s sons. From her chair, she oversees the son rolling while his father curses him across carts, the skinny girl in jeans with flowers embroidered on them and simultaneously converses with the customers. She’s the celebrity there, everyone from the construction workers to the security guards to the software engineers wants to talk to her, they enquire after her health, they make small talk anything to get a minute of her time. She’s my favourite, I love watching her while I sip my tea and she in return seldom fails to entertain. Her favourites are the old man and the other puri seller. She fights with the woman and arbitrates on behalf of the sons when the old guy shouts at them for spending too much or getting into trouble with the cops. She sits her moulded plastic throne, her bare and swollen feet stretched before her, thick silver anklets digging into flesh. When there’s no frying to be done, she’ll pick up a plate, load it with food and tuck in, chatting happily in between mouthfuls of food.
The food there in that grotty little alcove is cheap, greasy, filthy and tastes fantastic, if you can stomach it that is. There’s a fixed menu of puris and bondas (fried lumps of flour) in the morning and rotis in the afternoon. In the evening though the place comes alive, when the road crowds with people leaving office, waiting to catch their cabs and buses . The crowd around the stalls is a good two hundred strong and they’re all sipping tea and everything is deep fried and hot and salty and did I mention filty?