One Afternoon in South Bombay
They met again at their favourite Parsee café from all those years ago. The Raj-era Renaissance-style red brick townhouse was still there, as was the old, dusty chalkboard behind the reception that displayed the day’s specials — hand-written in looping cursive letters with pale ivory chalk. The faded, sepia-toned portraits of the Yazdani Zoroastrian family who started the café hanging from the mahogany-panelled walls, the bentwood chairs, the wrought iron tables with smooth, round marble table-tops covered in chequered linen, the embroidered napkins, the bone-china serveware and the steel cutlery, the staff in their cummerbunds and turbans — everything was the same, everything in their own rightful place, out of another time, except for the dense fog of unfamiliarity that now sat quietly between them.
