Well, when you have 50 bucks in your pocket, and you want to eat nice healthy, tasty but ghar ka khanna food where would you go? These days restaurants serve you some really horrid, pathetic food, filled with fluff around the peripherals of your plate but the food that gets swallowed in, phew I pity my stomach! And no, it doesn’t depend on which restaurant, like most would say; even some of the best five stars serve you food which just only seems to titillate your eyes. Where are those days, when things were so cheap and so plenty? My mom used to tell me about half a truck filled with mangoes and oranges only for a family of seven and these days 500 bucks is a minimum for a dozen of mangoes. Everything’s gotten hell loads expensive and even more commercial with standards being compromised. With all this is my head and my stomach twisting and growling for yummy tasty food, one on my roomy gave us a taste of the food around the corner. A Dhaba called “Khana Khazana”.
50 bucks, that’s all we shelled out for 3 stomachs. Totally unbelievable, isn’t it? Well coming from a place like Mumbai, where you definitely get the best, unforgetting and yummiest chaats and street food and mind you that’s getting costlier by the day one can hope for nothing but some cheap unhealthy food in 50 bucks. But here you go, a plate with sufficient rice, thick black dhal perfected with enough tomatoes and onions and whole scoop of fresh curds, a good quantity of freshly baigan ka baartha garnished with only coriander leaves and savory of lime, and fresh soft delicious parathas, phew, all for 50 bucks. Yes, one can get tasty healthy food, but may have to go through those odds of ptomaine poisoning.
Ghar ka khanna type is the preparation in this Dhaba. But I like this Dhaba not only for the food it serves but the people who serve it. Unlike most restaurateurs, these guys (only 3 which include two men and one woman, all of them looking frail yet with a smile and the eagerness in their eyes to help and serve) work hard to make you satisfied and delighted. And that’s what I loved about them. They seem like a lower middle class family trying to make a living, but they don’t compromise on their standards. Simple but tasty food, they serve. One can see the efforts they put in and people notice it as well. That’s why, there a lot of crowd at this place and their food goes in hot cakes.
Yeah, it’s the effort that people see. You can be categorized by your efforts. Be it a friend or an employer or employee. It’s the genuineness that people remember. But there are a lot of them who try to put on a “good guy mask”. But you cannot fool people. People are smart and astute enough to see you through and through. Like the other day, I was very sick and felt handicapped on the bed. Unable to move from bed because I felt dizzy and got tired very quickly. But in all that I could see the difference between those who genuinely cared and those who didn’t. But in all the dark, there are sparks or rays of lights which fill in a dark room and I would like to dwell on them.
