by Pravasan Pillay

Like a lot of Chatsworth’s service industry workers I ate many of my meals at Imperial Curry House. The takeaway was popular with us because it suited our odd working hours. It opened at noon each day of the week and only closed at two in the morning.
Cooks and waiters would usually start arriving at Imperial around eleven-thirty each night after having finished their shifts in the kitchens and dining rooms of Durban’s hotels and restaurants. The takeaway’s menu consisted of a variety of meat and vegetable curries, served with rice, roti or puri; breyani; tripe – Imperial was one of the few spots in Chatsworth that still served offal; bunny chows; sweetmeats; soji; and snacks such as bhajis, puri pathas and samoosas. The dish we almost always ordered though was dhal and rice. Rags, Imperial’s owner, was known for the lentil curry and had been cooking it for late night customers for over twenty years. The dhal was made with cheap ingredients and sold at an affordable price. Customers paid fifty cents and received a polystyrene bowl filled with steaming rice, covered by several generous ladles of the curry.
Each night, after work, we would line up noisily inside Imperial. Rags always stood at the head of the line, behind the counter with his blackened pots of dhal and rice. An old ice cream container – which served as a cash box – also rested on the countertop.
Rags was in his mid-sixties and apart from a cleaner and a prep cook, who both worked the day shift, he ran Imperial on his own. He was short, bald, muscular and had a severe, pockmarked face. He always wore blue factory overalls rather than an apron and usually had on a red Liverpool F. C. peak cap. Like most cooks I knew, his arms were covered in burn scars and tattoos. He was a quiet man who rarely interacted with customers apart from asking them to repeat an order if he hadn’t heard it the first time.
Once you got your bowl of dhal and rice from Rags, you dropped your fifty cents into the ice cream container and went into the small dining area located at the back of Imperial. There you could hang up your work uniform and your bag and eat, sitting at one of the tightly packed benches and trestle tables lined with old newspapers.
Imperial wasn’t licensed but it still sold nips of cane spirit under the counter. Almost every other worker would down a few shots during their meal. When everyone was finished all that remained in the bowls were curry leaves, mustard seeds and the occasional cassia bark.
The first time I ate at Imperial was in 1987. I had finished my first shift working as a busboy at the Maharani on the Durban beachfront. My father, who worked as a waiter at the nearby Blue Waters Hotel and who had arranged the job for me, finished his shift at the same time. We rode back together into Chatsworth on the packed eleven o’clock night bus. My father dressed in a black Adidas tracksuit, his waiter’s uniform in a suit bag; and me, in my now messy, new kitchen coat.
The only thing my father said to me the entire trip was, “Do your graft, and two-three years you can be a waiter.”
I remember feeling completely exhausted. The job, which was my first real one since I had finished high school the year before, was far more difficult than I had thought it would be. I had barely had a chance to rest the entire evening, running between the kitchen and the dining room, carrying dishes, smelly trash cans and heavy pots and pans. I had also burned my hand on a pan about two hours into my shift.
One of the cooks handed me a large tub of Vaseline and a few minutes later I was told to get back to work. Despite the hard work and injured hand, I enjoyed the company of the other busboys, the cooks, and the waiters. Everyone had an anecdote, joke or tip to share with me. I knew quickly that this was a place that I wanted to work in.
It felt strange riding into Chatsworth so late on a weeknight. I had never done it before. The streets were dark and still. Inside the bus, men talked loudly and played thunee in the dull light. Some drank. My father was one of them. He sipped brandy from a nip he kept stashed in his hip pocket. On his lap was a copy of The Daily News racing form. When we reached Road 501, the men got off the bus. The majority of them headed off towards the shopping centre. I looked at the centre and saw the lights on at Imperial. All the lights from the other shops
were switched off, and the fluorescent Coca Cola sign with “Imperial Curry House” on it floated in the darkness.
After a moment’s hesitation, my father walked towards the Imperial.
I followed him.
I ate my first bowl of Rags’ dhal and rice with a lot of difficulty. Imperial didn’t provide cutlery so everyone had to eat the piping hot food using their hands. Since my right hand was burned and bandaged, I had to awkwardly scoop up balls of rice and dhal with my left hand.
It was delicious, the best dhal I had ever eaten in my life. I ignored the loud talking of the men around me, the stink of their sweat, and the pain in my hand, chewing slowly, enjoying the savoury taste.
The dhal was different from the kind my mother or aunts cooked. Rags’ dhal was lighter, more a broth, and bright yellow in colour due to the manjal. It was milder and fresher – the main flavours were the lentils, mustard seeds and dhania. I could have eaten bowls of it.
Every serving was topped with half a teaspoon of Rama margarine, which made the rice softer, glossier and easier to digest. The takeaway offered vinegar chillies and a selection of mango, carrot, lime or vegetable pickles, but like most of the other men I ate the food without any sides or salad.
I was the last to finish amongst the men on my trestle table. My father sat beside me tapping his fingers impatiently on the table as I scraped the bottom of the polystyrene bowl.
When I was finally done and stood at the wash basin, one of the men, a tall, red-bearded Muslim cook who knew my father, asked,
“What you think of the chow?”
“It’s genuine,” I replied, licking my fingers.
The man smiled through his thick beard.

Imperial Curry House closed its doors in October of 1992 after Rags was stabbed during a night serving. He was attacked by a nineteenyear- old prep cook, a newcomer who had just started out in the kitchen of The Balmoral Hotel. I hadn’t noticed the boy until the night of the stabbing, but friends told me that he was at Imperial most nights since that July.
Kamal, a steward friend of mine who worked at The Balmoral, told me that in the five months that the boy had been at the hotel, he had developed a reputation for being hot-tempered. On his third week on the job, he had gotten into a fist fight with another cook over a small loan he had supposedly not paid back. And shortly before the stabbing he had been given a warning by management, this time for throwing a pan at a senior cook.
“Faulty lightie. Any other person, Chef should have fired him, but the lightie’s a good cook. Chef wanted to train him up,” Kamal said.
I never found out why the boy stabbed Rags. There was a lot of speculation amongst my friends. Many of the men I spoke to said that the boy attacked because Rags had caught him trying to steal money from the container on the counter.
The other explanation that had done the rounds was that Rags had seen the boy harassing a lady customer outside Imperial earlier that day and had ordered him not to come back to the takeaway. When the boy showed up that night Rags got angry and tried to throw him out. That’s when the boy pulled the knife.
I heard a few other stories as well but these two seemed the most believable.
The night of the stabbing, and the last time I set foot in Imperial, I lined up like I always did for my bowl of dhal and rice. I had got there later than usual because I had lingered at the bus stop talking to a colleague who wasn’t coming to the takeaway that evening. The line at Imperial was about twenty men deep and stretched outside the takeaway when I took my place in it.
The workers were loud, talking about the night’s service and passing nips of cane and whiskey amongst themselves. There was also a lot of good-natured banter about English football and horse racing, which were the most popular topics of conversation at Imperial.
Then I heard the voices raised in anger come from the front of the line. It was difficult to hear what they were arguing about. As the voices grew louder, I picked up a few curse words. I didn’t think too much of
it at first. Fights were rare at Imperial but not unheard of – alcohol was usually the cause.
I heard a shout of pain, the clang of a pot crashing to the floor and of what I knew was dhal splashing everywhere. The line ahead of me immediately dissolved and the men surrounded the front counter. I was still at the back of the crowd struggling to get a look.
I heard the words drift through, “The lightie poked him. The poes poked him.”
I pushed through the crowd and at the front saw three men restraining the boy. One man was punching him in the face. Everything from the first raised voice to the stabbing had happened in the space of a minute and a half or so, and yet the boy’s face was already a mess. His nose was broken and bloodied, his lips split. Another man was kicking him now. The boy’s eyes were swollen and tearing. There was little fight left in him.
To the side, on the floor, propped up on someone’s lap, I saw Rags. A paring knife, either the boy’s or one belonging to Imperial, was stuck in the lower left-hand side of his back. He lay in his own blood, its redness heightened by the paleness of the yellow dhal that surrounded him.
Three days later, a few of us who were there that night tried to visit Rags at King Edward Hospital. His son, Devan, met us at the door of the general ward. He said that his father was asleep and wouldn’t be taking any visitors, though he quickly added that the old man was okay and that he would recover. The doctors had said that the stab wound was deep but that the knife had fortunately not done any serious damage. Rags would still need a lot of rest before he could be back on his feet.
Devan thanked us for defending his father and told us that the boy was also admitted in hospital – a different one, R.K. Khan in Chatsworth. He would be arrested once he was discharged.
Before we left, Devan informed us that he was, with Rags’ approval, closing down Imperial. He said that he had been trying to convince his father to retire for years and that this incident was the last straw. The premises would be rented out to the supermarket next door.
“He can’t die for a few bowls of cheap curry,” Devan had said, standing at the door of the ward, facing a semicircle of waiters and cooks. None of us could argue with that.

I remember riding home on the eleven o’clock bus the night after the stabbing. There was a lot of talk about whether Rags was going to send someone else to run the night serving.
“Who knows, the ballie might even come dish the chow himself, wearing his hospital gown, drips and all,” Ranga, a cook, had said.
The mood in the bus was low and the joke eased the tension a little. Everyone had a good laugh.
When the bus turned into Road 501, we all stared out the windows searching the shopping centre for the glowing Coca Cola sign. But there was nothing there. The shopping centre was dark and our stomachs
were cold.