Terrific Meal, Terrible News

In the Before Times, I had a habit... approximately every two weeks, I would descend upon a local Indian restaurant like a corporeal (in the most literal sense of the word) manifestation of gluttony, and chow down on their lunch buffet, indifferent to the weeping of the management as they saw their children's college fund diminishing with every plate. I kept to a pretty strict rotation so no one establishment would have to deal with my bottomless curry-maw... besides, some places set up a dosa grill, some places have particularly good homemade breads. Mine was the cruelty of Nature, not the cruelty of the malfeasor. Just kidding, I'd always order a drink to pad out the check and tip well so as to make up for my depredations at the steam table.

This evening, before reporting to work, I stopped by one of the regular places on my Indian restaurant itinerary, Swagat in Tarrytown, which is indeed a nice town in which to tarry. I had a hankering for a fish curry, and Swagat does a particularly good one. Swagat is well named, it's a Sanskrit word meaning 'welcome', and owner Mohammed Nibibrahim, a diminutive Bangladeshi man with an outsized personality, would always greet each visitor effusively. He'd typically call even regular customers 'boss', and thought it a splendid joke when I'd respond by calling him 'boss of all bosses', even if he didn't realize that it was a Mafia reference, which would have cracked him up even more.

Tonight, as I stepped in, his absence was notable. I asked the manager, "Is Mohammed here?" He responded, "You didn't hear the news?" For me, the date the world stopped was March 10th. It was Tuesday. I hadn't been to Swagat since February, that long ago time when things had meaning. Mohammed had succumbed to COVID-19 on March 24th. They had all contracted it, he was the only one who didn't recover. Mohammed had an ageless quality about him, with his dark hair and boundless energy, he could have been anywhere from his late fifties to his seventies. He was just shy of his seventieth birthday when the virus took him.

New York is in the midst of a cautious reopening, with limited indoor seating in most places, and outdoor tables for those establishments which have the space to put them up. As things get more normal, and I return to favored spots, I have a hope that beloved proprietors, managers, and waitstaff are waiting for me, that familiar, friendly voices are calling out a welcome. As I noted, 'Swagat' means welcome, and I will always anticipate a welcome when I go there, but it won't be that effusive, cheerful Nibibrahim welcome.