The Kayani restaurant has its set rhythms. It opens at six-thirty for people wanting their first cup of tea. Then the taxi drivers come in for their breakfast of “doll,” which is the Parsi way of saying dal, eaten with pav bread.
“The afternoon is colorless,” as Rustom puts it.
In the evening, people come for their beer. There is a huge cloth market nearby, and the cloth traders come in around seven. They talk mostly among themselves and live in the suburbs; they have a couple of beers here because they can’t drink at home. At ten o’clock, Rustom pulls down the shutters.
“For a bar, we shut far too early,” he says.
Most of the customers are of a certain age. In the mornings, from six onward, the tables are taken by the longtime regulars, mostly Parsis and Catholics. One group of four or five old Parsi men has a favorite table at the Iranian. They get very impatient if they have to sit anywhere else. If there is just one person occupying that table, they will sit at the table next to or across from it and stare at him silently. Or they will stand around it and crowd the usurper.
“It’s a fetish,” says Rustom.
Once lodged at their table, they will discuss issues of the day with vehemence. But the first thing they turn to is the Deaths column in the Jam-e-Jamshed, the community organ, the chronicler of the steady diminishment of their community.
Another old Parsi gent who was once an owner of a large factory would come every afternoon at the local bakery shot at three o’clock. As soon as the waiters saw him sit down, they would put three cups of tea in front of him.
He wanted, for his own reasons, all three cups of tea simultaneously, with three pieces of brun maska, a hard bread coated with salted butter. The brun maska, he would dunk in just one of the cups. As soon as he got there, he always made it a point to put a 50-paise coin on the table, for the tip.
Most of the Iranian’s clients, who are more affluent than he is, do not tip. But this gentleman had been cheated out of his house by his sons; all day long he sat in the fire temple down the road and lived on the alms the devout gave him.
So, observes Rustom, this man dependent on alms knew the value of both giving and receiving. He had two shirts, wearing one while he washed the other daily and ironed with care by putting it under his thin mattress overnight, without fail.
It was faded and threadbare, a couple sizes too big for him either donated by someone or signifying the healthy days he had once lived, yet he had a regal air about him.
An air of someone who had run things for a living, someone who had employed people, someone who was used to giving orders or money.
Someone who had handed out money and yet in his old age here he was, forced to extend his hands to others. People who did not know who he was or had been, people who shunned him as crazy, eccentric. You could almost see the disgust in his eyes. Not directed at anyone, except himself.
One who couldn’t live anymore in indignity, yet couldn’t die either. Life has a way of extracting its pound of flesh. Not just from the living but also from those in that twilight zone, lingering. Neither here, but not yet crossed over.
I put a hand on his shoulder and he turns back to look at me beyond those thick bottled glasses.
I have bought a shirt for him from the street vendors outside, estimating his size.
As I hand it over to him, he takes a look at it and gives it back to me, looking up disdainfully.
“What for….?” he says.
