Manuel the waiter

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We stopped at Chittorgarh for two nights, just to see the magnificent old hilltop fort. It is only a small town, and there is not much else to do there, and not many restaurants to choose from. As usual we opted for a Lonely Planet recommendation. This was a basement restaurant, with harsh fluorescent-strip lighting, formica table tops, a colour scheme dominated by dark brown, and a dog-eared plastic menu card in bizarre English. The buzzing flies outnumbered the human customers by about 50 to 1. We have seen quite a few restaurants like this in India. Most of the dishes consisted of a spicy dark brown sludge, with small amorphous black lumps that always seem to call for further investigation to ensure that they were not fragments of flies or cockroaches. Nevertheless the food turned out to be very tasty as well as (it goes without saying) very cheap. But the main reason that we returned to this restaurant several times was Manuel.

Manuel was not his real name of course, unless it would be by quite an extraordinary coincidence. We just called him Manuel between ourselves, though not to his face, of course. We often attribute fictitious names to people that we meet or observe on our travels. It is more convenient than saying "remember that stange scary bloke on the train with the piercing fixed stare?" to say "remember Hannibal Lector?" So we called this waiter Manuel, for reasons that may be obvious to some of you, but totally baffling to others.

The thing about Manuel was that he was the kind of waiter that you cannot help but like. In a country where the service in restaurants may be usually characterised as "casual", "non-existent", "annoying", or "over-attentive", this is no small matter. Manuel was friendly and eager to please, without being intrusive. But in addition to this, there was something endearing about him. He was slightly built, with unruly greasy black hair, and a small uninspiring hitleresque moustache. He continually walked around the restaurant, where he appeared to be the only waiter, with a curious tentative gait that was reminiscent of slapstick comedians in silent movies. His smile was also tentative but totally enchanting when it lit up his otherwise naturally mournful face. His English was eccentric but effective, and his whole demeanour was slightly quirky, you might say off-the-wall. He had the habit of whispering "Yes!" whenever he brought something to the table, or even when he merely passed the table, which was quite often, as he patrolled around the place with his funny walk. And then there was his uniform. It looked as though the restaurant, when it had started up very long ago, must have had some delusions of grandeur, because they had provided Manuel with a rather fancy white uniform that would (then) not have been out of place in the tearoom of the Ritz. However, they must have been too mean to provide Manuel with a spare uniform, so that he had been obliged to wear this one every day since then, with the result that it was no longer white, but rather blended in, chameleon-like, with the dark-brown decor of the restaurant.

So all this may serve to explain why we took an instant liking to Manuel, and returned to the restaurant several times during our 3 days in Chittorgarh. On our last day we had an excellent breakfast there, before catching the bus to Udaipur. Manuel was his normal quirky self. As we left he gave us a cheery wave. We had not told him that we would never return, never see his funny walk or filthy uniform again.
I said to Tracey, "Perhaps we should have said goodbye."
"No need," she replied, "He knows that foreigners never stay long in Chittorgarh."

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