Hotel Janardhan: By Two Nostalgia

There is a familiarity in feeling nostalgic with a fellow Bangalorean. In cracking open a quart of your once favourite whiskey and pouring it into food grade plastic cups behind a curtain at Temps. In conversing between intermittent silences and Wills Flake tokes while September Sunday rays dance in shadows on the floor through that gap in the door. In rolling in uncontrollable laughter over a ridiculous anecdote with scatological references from that time when you had to go, you just had to. In remembering blue skies and green foliage while lying flat on your back on a badly asphalted road, a few feet from a crashed up motorcycle. Your best friend’s motorcycle. In meeting someone new, actually not really new, a friend of a friend who you probably once met at Fuel or Noon Wines or Koshy’s, who’s seen Bangalore from the inside of every type of automobile there is, Truck to Tonga, Auto to Ambulance, Hyundai to Hearse. In connecting on the same lame shit over the same “No, da, Macha!” vernacular at the same time every weekend. In the same faces and the same jokes and the same fucking coffee, sweet and chicoried and disgusting.  

So, do you have one paavum Bangalorean friend who’s dying to get all nostalgic and does not like waiting in line for idli-dosa that he never stood in line for back in the day? Just-u direct nostalgia with extra sambar and by-two coffee you want means head down to Hotel Janardhan and bask in otail still stuck in 1975.

Come off.