Ram dipped the marinated fish fillet in the whisked egg and put crumbs over it. There were ten more pieces to go and he had to get them ready before Bhawani Mohan got up from his afternoon nap. The kitchen walls had become dark with layers of soot and the calendar showed a date from three years ago. The food, however, was untouched by the ambience, ensuring a steady flow of customers into the eatery. They never got to see the kitchen anyway. They were served food from across the counter in steel plates or had it packed in paper bags, as they wished. Ram seldom got to taste the food he had become an expert in preparing, not that the flowing aroma never threatened to erode the barriers of self control, but the walls of resistance were made of stronger needs – the need to keep this job till he found something better and save enough money to build a small home.
Once done, he put a cover on the ready-to-make fish fries and washed his hands at the tap. The deserted look of the streets indicated it was still afternoon and there was some time left before the customers would come pouring in for tea and snacks. Ram sat down on the empty bench and turned the pages of the newspaper his employer had left lying about. Because he could barely make out the alphabets, the only thing in it that drew his interest was pictures of skimpily clad actresses
The sleep that Ram fought off every dawn, when he had to wake up to make tea and get the dough ready for puris and parathas came back to him more determined in the afternoons than a vendor who had been partially paid. He had to struggle with the overpowering feeling of drowsiness. This was the time Rani bicycled passed the eatery. Ram realised he would soon have to surrender in the battle against sleep if he sat upon the bench any longer. He started pacing the street, his mind far away.
Half a mile ahead, the street turned along the side of a fishing pond, which was divided into smaller tanks by thin strips of grassy earth. Rani, the fisherman's daughter, came riding over the green, to arrive at the street and on which she rode past the eatery in the afternoon. Each morning and evening, Ram yearned to be present only at that time of the day, shoving aside the intervening hours, wondering whether his presence could ever be more than an unnoticed dot in her daily schedule.