The Last Customer
On the final night of an Old City Irani café, the owner keeps one table empty for a man who has never missed a Thursday.
The notice went up on a Monday. Javed’s nephew Imran had it printed at the xerox shop next door, in a font with curls on every capital letter, and he taped it to the glass of the cash counter just below the photograph of Javed’s grandfather, who stood in the doorway in 1955 with his moustache waxed into two stiff points.
CAFÉ BEHROZ WILL CLOSE ON THURSDAY. THANK YOU FOR 71 YEARS.
“Seventy-one is wrong,” Javed said. “He opened in February. In February it would be seventy-two.”
“In February it will be a mobile showroom, Mamu,” Imran said, not unkindly, and went outside to argue with the contractor about where the new glass front would go.
On Tuesday the regulars came and said what people say. The auto-drivers from the stand at the corner drank their chai standing up, as always, and told Javed that the new place would sell nothing they could afford. The two retired clerks who had played rummy at the back table since the time of black-and-white television asked if they could keep the deck. On Wednesday a girl from a newspaper came with a camera and asked Javed how he felt, and he told her the bun-maska was very fresh today and she should try one, which was not an answer, and she wrote it down anyway.
And then it was Thursday.
It had rained since three o’clock, the slanting October rain that the Old City takes personally. The lane outside ran like a small river towards Pathergatti, carrying jasmine strings and bus tickets and one rubber chappal that nobody came back for. The pigeons sat in a long grey row under the balcony of the building opposite and did not move.
Inside, Café Behroz smelled as it had smelled every day of Javed’s life. Milk had been reducing in the big aluminium vessel since six in the morning, slowly, until it had a skin like the inside of a seashell. The decoction pot sat on its own low flame, black as a well. There was cardamom, and the warm sugar of the Osmania biscuits stacked in their glass jars, and underneath everything the cool smell of marble tables wiped too many times with a wet cloth.
At ten minutes past five, Javed took a cup and saucer from the shelf, the white ones with the thin green rim, and set them on table four.
Table four was under the long mirror, the one with the crack that ran from the top corner down towards the middle, shaped, everyone agreed, like the Musi river. Mr Raghunath Rao had sat at that table every Thursday since 1987. He was a mathematics teacher then, at the government school in Shah Ali Banda, and Thursday was a half-day. He came at a quarter past five, ordered one chai and two Osmania biscuits, broke each biscuit exactly in half before dipping it, and paid with the right change. After he retired he brought a pencil and a small notebook and set himself problems, long columns of figures that seemed to please him. He did not talk much: the weather, the price of onions, sometimes cricket, which he said he followed only out of loyalty to an earlier version of himself.
Javed had once tried to count it. Thirty-nine years, fifty-two Thursdays a year, minus a few for weddings and one bad fever in 2009. Nearly two thousand cups of tea. He had poured every one himself.
At a quarter past five the door opened and it was not Mr Rao. It was a young couple with a dripping umbrella, who wanted to sit “somewhere with a view,” and Javed, who had never once in his life refused a customer a table, moved the brass sugar bowl to the centre of table four as if it were a reservation card, and put them by the window.
By six the café was full, as if everyone who had ever drunk tea there had chosen the same evening. A man who had moved to Dubai twenty years ago turned up with his teenage sons and made them eat khara biscuits while he took photographs of the ceiling fans. A woman in a burqa ordered six cups of chai to take home in a steel tiffin and said her father had proposed to her mother at the table by the door, though her mother said this was a lie and that he had proposed at a bus stop.
Imran ran between kitchen and tables with his sleeves rolled up. Twice he said, “Mamu, sit down for five minutes,” and twice Javed said he would, and did not.
At seven, Javed looked at the clock above the counter, which was eleven minutes fast and always had been, and did the subtraction in his head. The cup on table four was still upside down on its saucer. The sugar bowl stood guard.
At eight, a family tried to sit there, and Javed said, “That one is taken,” and Imran gave him a look.
“Who is it for?”
“Rao saab.”
“The maths teacher? Mamu, he is eighty-one. It’s raining like the end of the world. He’s not going to come.”
“He comes every Thursday.”
“He comes every Thursday when it is a normal Thursday.”
Javed did not answer. He added more leaves to the decoction and stood with his hands on the edge of the counter, watching the door.
It was only then, standing there, that he understood he did not know where Mr Rao lived. Thirty-nine years. He knew that the man took less sugar than most, that his left hand had begun to tremble about five years ago so that he held the cup with both hands now, that he had a daughter in Pune and a son somewhere nearer, that his wife had liked roses and had died in a February. He did not know the name of his street. He had never needed to. Thursday had always brought him.
By nine the rain had stopped and the lane was full of the sound of water leaving, dripping from the cables, sliding off the tin awning of the bangle shop in long silver threads. The crowd thinned. The Dubai man embraced Javed and wept briefly, then apologised and paid for everyone at his table. The rummy clerks shook hands as though they would not see each other tomorrow at the same paan shop.
At ten, Imran came back from the street with the contractor’s number written on his palm in ballpoint.
“They’ll come at seven tomorrow for the counter,” he said. “Take the mirror home, Mamu. At least the mirror.”
Javed began to stack the chairs the way his father had taught him, two legs up on the table, two on the floor. He did every table except table four. Imran swept around it and did not say anything this time.
At a quarter to eleven, Javed turned off the big flame under the milk. The skin on it wrinkled as it cooled. He turned off the fans, one by one, and the room grew quiet enough to hear the fridge humming and a radio somewhere upstairs in the building playing an old ghazal, faint as a memory.
At eleven, the hour the shutter had come down every night for seventy-one years, Javed stood in front of the switch for the outside light and did not press it.
“Mamu,” said Imran gently.
“Five more minutes.”
At twenty past eleven an auto-rickshaw came splashing down the lane with its engine coughing, and stopped outside, and a thin old man in a damp safari suit climbed out very slowly, holding a flat parcel against his chest with both arms as though it were a child.
Soaked to the knees, his spectacles fogged, he stood in the doorway blinking at the stacked chairs and the dim light and the one table still set, under the mirror with the river in it.
“I am late,” Mr Raghunath Rao said. “I have never been late.”
“You are not late,” said Javed. “I have kept your table.”
Mr Rao sat down, the parcel on the chair beside him, one palm laid flat on it. Javed went back to the counter and lit the small flame under the milk. He poured the decoction first, dark and strong, then the milk over it from a height, the way his grandfather had done it, so that it frothed pale gold at the rim. He brought two Osmania biscuits on a side plate. Then, after a moment’s thought, he went back and poured a second cup, and brought it, and sat down across the table.
In thirty-nine years he had never once sat at a table in his own café.
Mr Rao looked at the second cup, and then at Javed, and nodded as if a long equation had come out right.
“There was a power cut in Abids,” he said. “The framing shop. The man said it would be ready at four. Then it was six. Then the generator would not start. Then it was raining.” He broke the first biscuit exactly in half. “I told him, you do not understand, I have an appointment on Thursdays.”
He pushed the parcel across the marble towards Javed.
Under the newspaper and the carry bag was a wooden frame, new and still smelling of varnish. Inside the frame was a photograph, colour gone soft and orange the way photographs from those years go. It showed the inside of Café Behroz. The same ceiling fans. The same mirror, with the crack only a short line at the top then, barely a stream. And behind the counter, holding a kettle at the height of his shoulder and pouring, a young man with thick black hair and a serious face, and beside him an older man in a white cap, laughing at something outside the picture.
Javed looked at it for a long time.
“My first Thursday,” said Mr Rao. “I had just bought a camera. A Yashica, second-hand, from a man in Sultan Bazaar. I took one photograph of everything. Your father saw me and laughed. He said, take one of my son, he never smiles, maybe the camera will teach him.” He dipped the biscuit. “I got it developed the next week. Then I was too shy to give it. Then it was a month, then a year. You know how these things go.” He shrugged. “Thirty-nine years is a long time to be shy.”
Javed found he could not say anything at all, so he drank his tea. It was very good, he thought, though he had never had it sitting down before and did not know if that made a difference.
Imran, at the counter, had stopped pretending to count the cash.
When the cups were empty Mr Rao reached into his pocket and put the exact change on the table, coin by coin. Javed pushed it back. Mr Rao pushed it forward again.
“A customer pays,” he said. “That is the arrangement.”
“There is no café after tonight.”
“Then next Thursday,” said Mr Rao, “you will come to my house, and you will be the customer, and I will not let you pay either.” He took out his little notebook and his pencil and wrote slowly, his hand shaking, and tore out the page. “Malakpet. Behind the Ganesh temple, the yellow house with the broken gate. My daughter-in-law makes terrible tea. Really terrible. She boils it with the milk and the sugar all together, like a punishment. You will have to come and teach her.”
He held out the slip of paper.
Javed took it, and folded it once, and put it in his shirt pocket behind his reading glasses.
The shutter came down at ten minutes to midnight. Imran pulled it, because Javed asked him to, and the sound it made was the same sound it had always made, a long rattling iron sigh that ended in a clang. They stood together in the wet lane. Imran carried the mirror wrapped in two bedsheets. Javed carried the photograph.
Down at the end of the lane, the four minarets of the Charminar stood lit against the cleared sky, the way they were lit every night, as if nothing at all were ending.
The next Thursday, at fourteen minutes past five, a man in a freshly ironed shirt stood at the broken gate of a yellow house behind a Ganesh temple in Malakpet. He held a packet of Osmania biscuits in one hand and a small steel dabba of his own decoction in the other, in case of emergencies.
He had never in his life been anybody’s guest at tea time. He was not sure how it was done. He checked his watch, and waited one more minute, so as not to be early, and rang the bell.