The Kohinoor Restaurant welcomes you with a large blue and white sign board overhead the entrance and which is visible to its patrons, new and old alike, along the M.G Road from quite a distance. The first time I went there I knew that this was one of the oldest addresses in Pune. It houses two floors, one for ladies and families and the ground floor, which is ever so lively. It has a big space with low ceilings, four sturdy pillars, big open glassless windows, which makes sure that the fans are not required and seats about one hundred people at a time. The waiters in deep yellow shirts and the cleaning boys in colonial blue move around swiftly in perfect synchrony. Even the waiters won’t ask you what you want have. They present the menu to you and you have to do the talking. They don’t speak much only quickly pass on the orders to the kitchen and rattle the total to the fat chubby smiling spectacled man behind the counter.
I come from the hills and well, I am naturally soft spoken (because of the clam and cold weather I suppose), so one time when I had seated myself comfortably in one of the cushioned benches of the restaurant, after ordering a cup of tea, a group of Marathi men, in their early twenties came and shared the seat with me. They sounded excited and were engrossed in their lively conversation. One man, seated in front of me shouted an order for tea known as ‘cutting chai’, a very popular form of tea drinking. An exhibition of both brotherhood and economy where a cup or a glass of tea is shared by two or more people (if it is enough!!!).
So teas came and one was shared by two people. However, I was not amused because I had ordered for a cup of tea before they came and they were served before me. It wasn’t a touchy thing but just that things like this are not really funny. So I voiced my displeasure, in Hindi.
The man in front of me looked at me and asked, ‘you speak Hindi?”
“Of course I can and pretty well too”. I replied in Hindi
“You ordered for a cup of tea?”, he asked me
“Yes I did”,
“Ok” he said, “…maybe you didn’t do it the right way”, he continued
I looked at him not sure whether I understood him right. Then he yelled at the waiter in Marathi and looked at me and said, “…these people don’t understand kind words. You have to shout at them”.