the café on Hauz Khas

It's gone now. Has been gone for maybe two years. In its place there is a salon with a very clean window and a name in English and Hindi that I always forget immediately after reading it. The café was small and run by a woman named Sunita who had very specific opinions about what music should be played at what volume at what time of day. Before noon: low, instrumental. After three: could go up. After six: she'd play ghazals, which she'd argue you can't actually talk over and was right. I used to go with Priya on Saturdays. We'd get the same table — the one by the window that was in the sun from 11 to 12:30 and then pleasantly not — and order the same things (she: black coffee, toast with jam; me: cutting chai, whatever Sunita felt like making for food that day) and sit for three hours and talk about everything. We still meet on Saturdays. We go to different places now, wherever is convenient, wherever doesn't have a two-hour wait. It's fine. The friendship is the same friendship. But I miss Sunita's ghazals. I miss having a place where my order was known and the volume of music changed with the hours. These things are harder to find than they should be.