WHAT GOES around comes around: this is what tradition says. But I know it from experience too. Those who deliberately inflict pain on others invariably receive pain in return. But this is only the beginning of the matter. Sometimes, blind in their troublemaking, such people continue to be blind in their suffering and so, when things turn around they set about making trouble again, like toasters with only two settings. This is why I think it is foolish to forgive them, because even plates and pressure cookers know more than them and are good to you if you are good to them. At the same time, to nurture a lasting bitterness or rage against them is merely to bring oneself down to their level; one must learn to practise detachment. I think it’s best to be very cold with such people, very calm, as if nothing they do can have any effect on you, even if they once drove you so hopping mad you had to take pills. That was the lesson taught me by my late father, who set up this restaurant in Prabhadevi, although in his time – and it was a long, long time, stretching from the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi to the third year of the third millennium – it was an Udupi establishment selling dosa, idli, vada, milkshakes and grilled sandwiches. My father in turn learned this straight from Mahatma Gandhi, born an ordinary Gujarati in Porbandar, just like our Umeshbhai Shah from the sixth floor of Silver Apartments, who too has been celibate for more than 20 years, although totally against his will. But here I am, running ahead of my story before I’ve begun, like an overeager waiter on his first day of work. Anyway, these men are not human beings but savages. It always heats up my head to think about such people.

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