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Get up early morning, every day,/  looking for a cup of tea, / you being a North Indian/ whose livelihood comes from/ driving a rented taxi,/ or owning one if you are lucky!/ Having no house, no wife/ where else can you turn to/ six in the morning for a breakfast/ of biscuits, bread-butter and tea,/  if not to Bombay’s famous Irani?
But the Irani has his woes/ which are different from those/ of other restaurants, since he owes/ attention to the neglected wife/ whose complaint all her life/ has been the same, consistent/ protest. "It’s that damn restaurant/ which is your real wife, not I.”/ The grouse extends to his sons/ unwilling rascals refusing to work/ 10 to 12 hours a day as/ the old man has done, making life a very/ tedious, tiresome, lifelong affair,/ for which his sons can scarcely care.

 

 

 

The Irani was an immigrant/ who scarcely may have been to school/ but he is street-smart, not a fool,/ and has made a good amount of money./ He was industrious, a busy bee/ while the son has eyes on the bee’s honey,/ wants to go abroad, seek a different career/ unlike his father who year after year,/ went on serving biscuits, butter and bread,/ a sacrifice till he is very old and dead.
The son is not at all, a person who/ will shun the good life, the parties,/ the cinema, the social life which his/ father’s one-track mind held as taboo./ While the old man has known long hours/ of toil, of sweat, of prolonged suffering/ attending to his customers’ many woes/ the youngster has a car, a motorbike,/ an uppity nose, and believes in a fling/ with wine and what-not, wherever he goes/ so, in other words, the son is not meant/ to lead a dog’s life and undergo torment/ in his father’s old Irani restaurant.
No wonder then, that old Irani men/ know how much Bombay misses them,/ when they have chosen to disappoint/ by bringing down the shutters of joint/ after Irani joint, when their problem on the domestic and business front/ is not at all an easy matter to confront.
RASHID KHOSRAVI