Why You Kept the Insult and Lost the Compliment

At ten past midnight, after the last table has gone and the kitchen has been hosed down, Naaz sits at the corner two-top with a glass of chaas and opens the app. She does this every night. She knows she should not, as one knows one should not pick at a scab.

Her restaurant has forty covers, in a lane off Road No. 10 in Banjara Hills. It is four years old. It does her grandmother’s Hyderabadi food, without shortcuts, and it has two hundred and twelve five-star reviews, a great many of which use the word best. A retired judge wrote four paragraphs about the haleem. A woman wrote that she had cried at the first mouthful of khatti dal because it was her own late mother’s, exactly. Naaz has read these. She could not quote you a line.