Sagar cafe

Tucked away in a little street between the MSIL building and Airtel’s office on Cunningham road, like an old shirt with a missing last button, sits SAGAR Cafe – veg, A non-descript hotel that invented the term non-descript, making one think twice while laying claim that Bangalore is but a huge bustling mega polis, soon with its very own intra city metro service. Well, getting back to SAGAR Cafe - veg, it is perhaps the only hotel other than maybe the Oberoi that has a toll gate like contraption in front of it. It was not built because the management wanted to check the deluge of customers, but because it is part of a private property, whose owners didn’t exactly score heavily on popularity polls conducted in the neighbourhood. SAGAR Cafe – veg lives and operates from behind this unfavourably barricaded lane. The one thing about the food was that it surely wasn’t the best in Bangalore, it surely wasnt hobnobbing with the MTRs or the Kadambams, but it was food that made you smile with contentment. The kind of clientele that came to SAGAR Cafe - veg were the 'attenders' of patients docked at Wockhardt hospital.
The auto drivers who were exhausted waiting for people to emerge from sigma mall.

College students who wanted to grab a quick bite and have a smoke without being spotted by anyone they knew. Then there were the people who lived and worked in small companies similarly tucked away like the hotel.

There was a beat up overworked beat constable and his cribbing counterpart who was aghast at how misbehaved his son was and how he refused to go to school.

There were geniuses from the telecom support industry who leaned against their badly stickered up 'pulsars' and boasted about their sim card sales targets and how they managed to hoodwink the system to achieve these ridiculous numbers.
Shastri - a bony executive type guy whose pants were way above the allowed waistline, scratched his head with a pen and boasted that he had with him address proofs of a couple of dead people, which he often used for paying customers. I gulped at nothing.

Then there was also the regular Johnnie who came into the big bad city in search of his fortune and SAGAR Cafe - veg beckoned his mid section.
Thrown into this melee were the numerous ward boys of Wockhardt hospital who gossiped and laid bare the 'character' of certain nurses who were getting only daytime 'opd' shifts because of their closeness with certain doctors.

Then there was me- an attender who was waiting for his meal of two idlis and one vada, which arrived before he could complete this sentence. He chose also to order light coffee, yes i prefer having my coffee light (laugh away you dark filter coffee puritans but i have been brought up that way).

Now for the striking features of SAGAR Cafe - veg.

I walk into the hotel and the smell of a thousand roses hit me somewhere between the nasal tract and my sinuses. I see the culprits are a handful of agarbathis called Shamala’s scent rose. I could have arranged to have Shamala looked at by a psychiatrist, Phew! I look around and among the different options of eating vs seating-


Option 1) There were 'standing tables' (3 of them) into the gaps of which one fitted oneself like a horse in a stable, thulped burped and left.


Option2. Was a two seater baby sofa where one sat while benevolent friends offered to order for you at the cash counter.

Option 3 Which i picked were for the people who loved to eat with the archetypal bent knees, it boasted of a side table and elbow space. I readied the accompanying round stools and plonked myself on it.

As a Bangalorean i did the usual 'two spoons routine'. My spoons worked in tandem as they ravaged the soft non resistant idli and airdropped it into some sambar and chutney unsplashingly, I then scooped up a huge mouthful of it.

My mind drifted to admiring the interiors of SAGAR Cafe - veg. The interior decorator of this place obviously was smoking up in the parking lot when he should have been attending 'how to design a hotel with a pyjama naada budget'. Well the only designer
part of this hotel was - painted streaks of colour on the wall that could have made any black and white zebra proud.

This aside the hotel boasted of no other decorative elements- in a way it was a breather from the visual noise one has to endure at a Darshini. I proceed to attack the Vada and hear the crisp but brief resistance it provides me before my spoon won. I cant but help stare at the central piece hanging in the doorway-a lemon hung above a bunch of dried chillies strung as they were like some device to ward off evil eyes. I think the lemon did a great job as im instantly deflected to blankly stare at a picture of the Maharajah of Mysore presenting something to the Architect of Modern Bangalore-Sir M Vishveshwarayya. But what were these two dignitaries doing beside a bottle of Horlicks on the refrigerator was beyond me.
Beyond even that thought was the worlds smallest wash basin precariously tucked away between the drinking water dispenser and the last table 'standing'.
I watched a boy learn the art of 'cleansing, in a confined space'.
I poked at the idli again as i looked at the window sill where early this morning stood 8 bottles of packaged drinking water. Now there was just 1. Whoa!
I took a noisy sip of coffee and headed straight to the 'spoon-boiler' area which i remember housed a giant bowl of sugar for people like me-who like their coffee like they like their payasam. I smiled when i tasted the coffee now.

Satisfied i headed back to my stool and with noisy slurrps of the coffee announced my satiation, a la bell tolling at pizza corner.

SAGAR Cafe - veg rocks!