In Memoriam: A Diner at Night

Have you ever found the makings of a memory that juts into your consciousness uninvited? What is it trying to say?

The jar has opened. It’s not Pandora’s, however. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

My hometown, Udaipur (India), is known for many things: historical lakes, palatial grandeur of the Rajputana lifestyle, rich cultural heritage, peaking mountains, rolling hills, the snaking Ayad river, and celebrity destination weddings.

To those visiting the city, these softly-branded attraction points with a hidden trademark under Udaipur’s banner of hospitality matter a lot. And I do believe there’s some reverence for these within the beating hearts of the city’s residents as well. But I don’t stand on either side of this band. This city’s glory, glamour, and history are second nature to me. The attraction is but a gentle tug on the heartstrings.

The places that do draw me are nowhere to be found today. The city’s renovations have erased the Udaipur I remember. The only imprints now left are in some forgotten photographs that someone might have clicked . . . and in my fading memory.

Lately, however, I do find one particular place haunting my eyes—whether they’re open or closed. On the street dubbed “Chhota Chetak Road” (lit: Small Chetak Road) lies the Kanak Dining Hall, an unassuming eatery with very little in the name of façade. The exterior blocky gateway doesn’t do it justice, either, nor do the shops dealing in hardware, sanitary works, and auto repair around it.

It is still open, it still serves its patrons, but it’s no longer how I remember it.

And yet . . . I find it closer to home than the three-bedroom apartment I call home.

A Window to the Past

John Williams’ iconic flute composition from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban fits well with this séance of old days. It’s only in this past that I can recognize my present.

Today, if you were to visit Kanak Dining Hall, you’ll find a modest interior with tables and chairs clustered about the first-floor landing. A little climb and a small door let you into the hall proper, with enough room to walk about and find your seat.

The menu is nothing to sing highly of. That is not to say the food isn’t good. The preparations on the list are simple, sober, and priced only to catch up with modern times. This one-card menu, however, gives you clairvoyance into the patrons that flock to grace the now-wallpapered and expanded diner; patrons who are far removed from the overpriced dining halls, restaurants sautéing Italian delicacies, and joints that serve an assortment of sandwiches with a premium tag attached to their name.

There was a time when we, that is to say my parents and I, belonged to this class: double income, single child, hard at work throughout the day, and finding some solace in an evening escapade that was just as humble as the apartment we used to live in. The Kanak Dining Hall of then—with its stone slab courtyard, cemented staircase, chipped tiles and floorings, and painted walls the texture of coarse sandpaper—was our retreat to enjoy the finer things in life.

Strangely, the more I rack my brain, the less I recall how the hall looked. In the fog of my mind’s eye, the walls are sometimes a toxic shade of chewed bubblegum pink, sometimes a sickly pistachio green, but always illuminated by a couple of mercury-vapour lamps. Their white wash is something I despise to this day. And yet, when my eyes close, I see a little boy seated on a wooden slatted bench while his parents discuss the happenings that disturbed their worlds.

Even if you were to push me at gunpoint, I’d never be able to fish any details of the words that flew in their exchanges. I do remember being bored; hence, my ignorance. I’d often poke the paint on the table with my eyes to find crevices, bolts, nuts, and cracks. These deformations on wood or paint—either a dull walnut, a pastel cream, or that same shade of green as the walls; my mind cannot decide—were fertile valleys upon which I’d imprint microscopic characters engaged in animated fights like the cartoons I used to watch. And so, I toiled away the hours while my mother tried to score morsels of a chapati dipped in any seasonal vegetable that was available into my mouth.

Time flew, as it does. Kanak was only one of the spots that we’d bested within the city, but it weathered the changing seasons, always emerging just as old, beaten, tired, and tested. The courtyard, in my mind, is still draped half in darkness. The more I venture to pry open its secrets, the darker it gets. This unyielding darkness only allows the cemented staircase that leads to the first-floor landing. I wish my brain’s crevices and cracks were like the long-gone tables in the hall.

Graveyard of Memories

Remarkable is a word that I seldom use. It’s anyway moot to reserve it for the diner that sits in my memory lanes—a dark and dingy place that doesn’t obscure any secret. Nor does it have any permanence in the floating wisps of memories.

For instance, I can vividly recall the first time I visited the ruins of Chittorgarh fort. I can distinctly smell the pungent urinals of my all-boys school in the past. I can clearly see the snaking trail of the Karnavati Express that we took from Ahmedabad to Mumbai. I can feel the slick of the humid wind catching my face as I enjoyed the company of seagulls on a steamer to the island of Bet Dwarka. I can wince at the prick of salty, wet sand on the Chowpatty beach as it seeps into an open cut on my right foot.

Contorting my brain for the memories of the diner, however, yields no concrete Velcro to latch on. All I have are ghosts that linger in the vicinity but phase out the moment I reach out.

And yet, there is something more concrete within those fading, colour-phasing walls, more concrete than the buses, trains, and planes I’ve travelled on over the years.

For many days, I’ve been lamenting the loss of reason as to why those singular scenes of the diner keep shifting in my head. I think I have an answer now, one I did not have to pry. It materialized as soon as I dragged my eyes from their business fictioning the table, and looked at my parents, frozen in conversations since memory temporal.

Because when I look at them, I see them as they are. They haven’t aged a bit in my eyes. They have smiles of love playing on their lips. Their hands, busy with food, have forgotten their purpose, for their child is looking at them. It’s then that I finally see what Kanak Dining Hall really is: a memorial of the days when I felt belonged . . . felt like I was part of a family.

I was mostly an outcast in my school days, a laughingstock among my classmates, an oddball bullied for being peculiar. Yes, there were times I had fun, times when I wasn’t under the crosshairs, times when, if I busied myself with the chipped cement blocks of the school building, I could melt away. My parents, meanwhile, toiled the whole day at their jobs. It was only in the evenings when we were together. United as a family.

The shifting walls, paintworks, and furniture of the dining hall do not matter here. Life phased in and out just as these incorporeal memories do. What stayed was family. The only root of my existence.

Years ago, I wrote a long poem that, I feel, makes more sense with the backdrop of a hazy memory that’s brought me to tears.

A year had passed, 
and four seasons, no less,
yet the tree had thrived 
under all that stress,
the branch which the leaf 
had once called its home
now garnered its attention 
to a little green gnome.

Saddened and ashamed, 
it felt alone, away from cuddle,
the leaf broke its flight 
and then fell in a puddle,
all the fervour of the youth 
had washed away from him
and now he was wrinkly 
and yellow, looking grim.

Yet when the morning came, 
the horizon lit with sun,
the tree bent forward 
to shelter its wayward son,
on seeing this the leaf 
leapt with tears of joy
in the eyes of its family, 
he was still their little boy.

There is a puddle of inexperience in these rhymes that I penned during my first ventures into poetry more than a decade ago. And yet, that tree is very much alive within me.

It’s only taken the shape of the Kanak Dining Hall for now. Tomorrow, it will be a highway motel. Next, a lodge in the high mountains. Perhaps, even the golden wash of the mall lights will phase in as a reminder.

A reminder of the family that I missed.

A reminder of the family I had.

A reminder of the family I have.

It’s no different than the Oceanview Motel in Remedy’s Control. Call it paranormal, but I find the motel to be a breach of safe haven in the space-time continuum, with billions of life strands tugging at its doors, windows, and blinds. The ripples of existence might not be felt here, but can anyone deny the crossroads of memory it sits upon?

Today, when I stop dreaming, the places we visit have no resemblance to our past haunts. The ghosts of our bodies find pleasure in the culinary delights of more upstate establishments that are more polished than my boots.

But memory lingers in the past. I still feel the connection to my family as I did before, yet it’s been stretched on the silk threads woven by the fates. Tug on it, though, as I do now, and the anchor is still firm.

Time to leave, only to return a few breaths later.

As I find myself on the threshold of the doorframe, exiting the dining hall before I climb down the stairs, I see a barely perceptible glint from the corners of my eyes. When I look in, the colours on the walls are shifting. The sickly green just turned biscuit pale. The furniture has been strengthened with iron frames. The food, I couldn’t lick the taste of, does appear homely and good, as my mother used to call it. And the stairs? Still cemented.

Some things don’t have to change. Kanak Dining Hall is still on the same old road—in the city, and in my memories.