Eating in a around-the-corner, trying-to-keep-the-cash-store-ringing; Here is a place where you, assuming that this place cannot burn a hole in your pocket, can sit and eat, mumbling silently about the "okay okay" quality of food. However here is also a place that "your two downs", monetarily, also come to eat. They come, they eat, their eyes breathe aspiration and also a sense of impending dip of green. While I ordered a mini meal for myself, at measly Rs. 25, which is not much for a post graduate who came out into the world when the latter was going down. Literally!
Next to me, came and sat a group of four. Two mothers, one instinctively elder in a protective way, one probably her junior-in-command and their two school going daughters. As the waiter sold them the mini meal, obviously casting a corner-eye to my plate, they decided to order 4 suchlikes. They did not ask for the price and looked at the price list which boasted of the same dishes in Tamizh and in English with an extra "h". In nanoseconds, the elder one calculated, that's a big note for lunch and her eyes sank and took a look at her purse carefully placed inside her blouse.
Then the waiter arrived with the four meals neatly compartmentalised into - a biriyani, sambar rice, curd rice, single roti, kurma, beans and a sweet.
