The city that never sleeps

“This city never sleeps….”

“Great, then we’ll see you tonight”. Finally after almost a month two of my friends were meeting us over dinner. We planned to keep things simple and decided to go to some non-fancy place (since it was a working day). As luck would have had it, some of us got late and we had to post-pone our dinner time.. We stretched it to almost 2300 hrs.! (But considering you live in today’s age, 2300 hrs. doesn’t seem that farfetched anymore!)

My friend had just recently purchased a car and we decided to drive down all the way to Tardeo from the suburbs. Now on at a normal time of the day this would have taken us about 2 hours, but since it was nearing mid-night, we reached Sardar’s Pav-Bhaji, Tardeo within no time. What amazed me and made me write this blog today is that even at that odd hour, this place was teeming with gluttons! And the waiter told us it would take about 15 min to get a table! By then our hunger did not give us a choice and we waited…soon enough victory was in sight and we made our way through a lot of stuffy mouths, smiling, welcoming faces to our seat…

Trust me one would not really venture into this place all alone, if not in a group. it takes effort to ignore the hygiene, and since we were those who prefer to sanitize our hands instead of washing them.. it took us more than ignorance to have dinner there..(we were definitely very, very hungry!!). after making ourselves (un)comfortable, we hit a masterstroke! We actually asked the waiter, “Bhaiyya khane mein kya hai?” (“What’s on the menu tonight?”); to which he answered matter-of-factly “Pav Bhaji” (mind you it was very tasty).  None of us even looked once at our watches. Now it was time for some desserts and we headed to Haji Ali juice center, gulped some of their delicious crème and were busy talking, generally enjoying the open sea breeze; only to realize it was 2 o’clock in the morning when the guy told us it’s the “last order for the day”! The city was up and about even at that time… there were about 50 odd families enjoying the crème and juices besides us!

Mumbai, Bombay, Bambai; call it what you want; the spirit of this city is always alive. As we bade each other good-bye, I was singing in my mind “Am Alive…”