A Small Change in the Life of a Waiter in a Restaurant

While living in Delhi for almost a year, I had to change places to live. After I started living in Lajpat Nagar, I chose to have my dinner in a small restaurant in my neighborhood daily. Although the place is not a huge eatery, it serves mouth-watering food, at least for a few things in their menu. A boy, maybe 14-15 years of age, diligently works at the place, and manages the huge crowd single-handedly. The office-goers are regular visitors of this place, even the locals who do not want to cook at home sometimes. So the crowd is always quite much and this little boy is always busy running from one table to the other.

When I first started going to the restaurant, the name of which, I still do not know, it took the chotu ages to deliver the food to my table. However, the food was delicious, so I could not complain of the delay at all. While I enjoyed the meal comprising kadhai paneer with naan, I heard people calling the chotu with names like bhaiya, hello, bhai, etc. He did not feel angry at even a single customer and served everyone with patience and a pleasant smile, and he impressed me for sure. I kept going to the restaurant for a while and then asked for his name one day. He said, “Krishna”, and ran away to serve other customers.

Although it was not a big deal for me to call him by his name, I saw him smiling even more whenever I called him Krishna Ji rather than Krishna bhaiya. Calling someone bhaiya sounds derogatory to me, so I always called him Krishna ji whenever I had to ask for something. I would call him and ask to place an order rather than being plain rude to him. He would stand at my table for a couple of extra seconds, smile, and then run to the kitchen to tell the cook what I wanted. My order would be on my table in not more than ten minutes.

I had to go for a week-long trip on two Self-Drive Cars in Delhi with my seven colleagues to Kasol. When I returned to the restaurant for a dinner on Sunday, I saw a tremendous change in everyone behavior. Everyone at the place had begun calling him Krishna ji instead of using random belittling names. Krishna came running to me and presented a large Cadbury chocolate to me, which he had bought a couple of days ago. He said, Thank you Sir, English me isse zyada nahi bol paunga”. (Thank you Sir, I cannot speak more English than this)

I could not resist hugging that innocent child and I could feel my eyes slightly welling up with tears. I could feel that he wanted to attain a respectable position in life, but was stuck with a meager job where people did not even call him by his name. He felt immense respect when he heard his name with a Ji as a respectable suffix. He thanked me for starting the custom of calling him by his real name, and I returned the thanks for honoring me.