Shankar Chettiar

Shankar Chettiar left his village at seventeen with a single tin trunk and an address written on the back of an old bus ticket, sent north by a family that could no longer feed nine mouths off two acres of dry land, and arrived in the city with exactly enough money for the bus fare and nothing besides. A distant relative found him a place sweeping floors at Sri Krishna Bhavan, then a small eatery with eight tables and a single tired ceiling fan, and within a year Shankar had worked his way from the floor to the counter to the tables themselves, learning the trade the only way it was taught in those days, by watching the older waiters and being shouted at when he got it wrong.

Twenty-nine years later he is the head waiter of that same establishment, now expanded to fourteen tables and two ceiling fans, and his choreography — six tumblers of coffee balanced without a tremor on one forearm, the folded napkin over the shoulder, the two-word orders called back to the kitchen in a code the newer cooks take months to fully learn — is spoken of by regular customers with the sort of admiration usually reserved for classical dancers.

He sends money home every month to a household of nine, three of whom — nephews and nieces born after he last visited — he has genuinely never met in person, knowing them only through photographs enclosed in his sister's occasional letters, and he keeps these photographs in the same wallet as his ration card, taking them out sometimes on a slow afternoon to update himself on how much a face he has never seen has grown.

He married late, at thirty-four, a woman named Kaveri introduced through a cousin, and their own two children have grown up largely in the two rooms above a relative's shop nearby, seeing their father mostly at odd hours between the lunch and dinner rush, though Shankar has never once, in twenty-nine years, missed a single one of their birthdays, arranging his shift around it with a determination the restaurant's owner has long since simply accepted as non-negotiable.

The restaurant's regulars are a matter of some pride to him — he remembers, without needing to ask, that the gentleman at table six takes his coffee strong and without sugar though he orders it plain every single time out of some old habit of modesty, and that the family at table eleven always wants extra sambar quietly set aside before the Sunday rush empties the vessel — and he serves each of them with an unhurried, unfailing patience that has become, over the decades, something close to the restaurant's actual reputation.

In 1994 a small fire started in the kitchen during the lunch rush, an oil pan catching alight rather suddenly, and it was Shankar who kept the dining hall calm, walking table to table asking customers to finish their tea and step out in an orderly fashion while two of the cooks doused the flame, an episode the restaurant still refers to, with some pride, as ‘the year Chettiar saved the Bhavan,’ a title Shankar accepts with a small, dismissive wave of the hand whenever it is raised.

In the narrow corridor between the dining hall and the kitchen he is, by the account of every boy who has worked under him, an entirely different man — quick, sharp-tongued, and thoroughly unsparing with any boy who chips a tumbler or is slow bringing out an order, a reputation that has occasionally frightened new recruits into quitting within the week and has, just as often, turned the ones who stayed into waiters as exacting as himself.

He sleeps four hours most nights, rises before dawn to help with the restaurant's opening preparations, and has, by his own count and everyone else's, never once called in sick in twenty-nine years, a fact the owner mentions to new staff as though reciting scripture, and which Shankar himself treats as no particular achievement, merely the ordinary condition of a man with nine mouths depending on his forearm staying steady.

The two ceiling fans of Sri Krishna Bhavan have both been replaced at least twice in his time there, the menu board repainted more times than he can count, and three different owners have come and gone through the family that runs it, and through all of it Shankar Chettiar has remained exactly where the door opens onto the dining hall, greeting each customer as though the twenty-nine years behind him were simply the natural, unremarkable accumulation of one ordinary evening after another.