June 18, 2008
No meals for the needy unless some kind soul pays for their food
MUMBAI - THE golden Honda pulled over to the kerb alongside the restaurant. A window rolled down and a 100-rupee (S$3.20) note popped out, courtesy of a woman who would identify herself only as Mrs Abbas. Then, as quietly as it arrived, the car sped away.
Inside the Mahim Darbar restaurant, seven men sprang to their feet: gaunt, beleaguered men with pockmarked faces. This was the moment they had been waiting for. Mrs Abbas had bought them lunch.
Mahim Darbar is just one of Mumbai's 'hunger cafes' where donors can drive up to feed the hungry.
The cafes have stood for decades on a stretch of road in the Mahim neighbourhood.
Drifters squat in neat rows in front of each establishment, waiting patiently. Vats full of food simmer behind the doors. What separates the men from the food is the cost of 25 US cents (35 Singapore cents) per plate - a gulf harder to bridge than one might assume. But every so often, a car pulls up and makes a donation, and the men dine.
The restaurant owners describe their mission as charity, but their establishments are profit-making, if only meagrely so. Only in India, perhaps, where no business niche long goes unexploited, would a group of restaurateurs rely on the starving for their livelihoods.
Although parading the hungry can seem cruel, it may not be unwise.
To bring these men indoors with the notion of safeguarding their dignity would risk their starvation, according to the restaurateurs. They believe the men must be exhibited like this, sunken and sad-eyed. They must gaze at passers-by with that obedient, mournful, reverential stare that well-born Indians have learnt to expect. They must be advertisements for their own cause.
'If they sit inside, that would be a misconception for the people who are giving money - that those people are eating,' said Mr Shaib Ansari, the 23-year-old proprietor of the Mahim Darbar restaurant, which was opened by his uncle more than four decades ago.
'We don't let anyone sit inside until someone pays for them to eat.'
The restaurant sees some men (and it sees only men) once. These are the ones who fall on lean times but quickly get back on their feet.
Others come for a few months, men who have lost their jobs in the volatile labour market that is replacing the old job-for-life socialist ways.
Then there are the regulars. In this restaurant, it is no privilege being a regular. It is a category populated mainly by the sick and the unstable - or, as the owner puts it, the 'mentally retired'.
Mr Raju Subachan, 30, wearing a red rag around his head, belongs to the second category, the unemployed.
He came two months ago from Allahabad in the north, and found work as a waiter but then lost his job.
He made it clear, sitting in the doorway, that he was not a free-food junkie. During a month of joblessness, he had come only three or four times. On this day, he had already eaten once, at noon, and was waiting for a second meal, which he anticipated would keep his stomach from feeling empty until morning.
He sat alone, plunging his fingers into the yellow mush on his plate. He ate quietly and quickly.
When you eat like this, with your dependence exhibited to the world, a meal no longer feels like something to linger over.
NEW YORK TIMES
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