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Shikha Sharma
My husband is a reasonable, measured person.
He plans things. He thinks before he speaks. He has opinions about sleep schedules and their relationship to productivity. He reads menus carefully. He is not impulsive. He does not, under normal circumstances, order things at random or say yes to situations before fully assessing them.
At a dhaba at 1am he is a completely different person.
I discovered this early in our relationship, on a road trip where we stopped at a dhaba outside Pune somewhere around 12:45am because my husband said he was hungry and also, now that we were stopped, the place looked interesting. He got out of the car with the energy of someone arriving at a destination rather than an accidental stop. He looked at the menu board with genuine excitement. He ordered four things. Not four items for both of us. Four things for himself, because he wanted to try all of them and the logic of sharing did not apply at this hour in this place.
He also started talking.
Not the regular kind of talking. The other kind. The kind where things come out that don't usually come out. He told me something about his childhood that he had never mentioned before, in the middle of eating something off a paper plate at a dhaba table at 1am, completely casually, like it was obvious information that had simply been waiting for the right context to surface.
The right context, apparently, was this one.
We sat there for two hours. We ordered more things. He had a chai. I had a chai. We put Sunfeast Marie Light on the table from the packet I had in my bag because I always have something in my bag for late nights, and we talked in the way we almost never talk at home, which is without agenda, without the shape of a conversation that is going somewhere, just talking because we were there and awake and the night was open.
I drove the rest of the way. He fell asleep within fifteen minutes of getting back in the car. The different person went back to wherever he came from.
I have been trying to understand what happens at dhabas ever since.
The Specific Conditions
It is not just any late night that produces this. I have investigated.
Late nights at home do not produce it. We stay up late sometimes, watching something or talking, and it is good but it is the regular version of good. The conditions are too familiar. The home is too known.
Late nights at restaurants also do not produce it. Restaurants have too much structure. There is a menu and a waiter and a table that is too nice to fully relax in and an ambient noise level that requires you to be a certain kind of person.
It has to be a dhaba. Or something like a dhaba. The specific combination of outdoor or semi-outdoor, plastic chairs, bright lights, the smell of something being made nearby, trucks parked at the edge, strangers at other tables who are also there at this hour for their own reasons. The slightly improbable quality of being somewhere you did not plan to be at an hour you did not plan to be awake.
That specific combination does something.
My friend Priya says the same thing about her husband. At home he is careful about what he says and how he says it. At a dhaba at 1am he told her about a professional failure he had been carrying for three years that he had not told anyone about. She found out at a plastic table somewhere off the highway. She said he looked lighter after he said it.
She thinks it is the permission structure. At a dhaba at 1am nobody is performing. Nobody looks good. The lighting is bad and the chairs are uncomfortable and you are both slightly dishevelled and you have ordered things you would not normally order because the normal rules do not apply here. And in that space, where the performance is off, things come out.
What Gets Ordered
The ordering at dhabas is its own data point.
My husband orders things at dhabas that he would not order anywhere else. Not because the food is better necessarily but because the context makes different things available. He orders the heaviest thing on the menu. He orders the thing he has been curious about but would normally talk himself out of. He says yes to the recommendation without reading the full description.
This is not the man who reads menus carefully.
At a dhaba the menu is often written on a board in chalk or laminated in a way that suggests it has not been updated in some time, and he approaches it not as a document to be analysed but as a set of possibilities to be enthusiastically explored. He has eaten things at dhabas that he would have dismissed in any other context and enjoyed all of them.
I think the ordering style is a symptom. When the careful self is off, the ordering follows. He is not performing health or sophistication or reasonable caloric intake. He is just hungry and interested and not thinking about it very much.
What Gets Said
This is the part I find most interesting.
Conversations at dhabas at 1am have a different grammar than regular conversations. They meander. They go sideways. They arrive at things without having been aimed at those things. You start talking about the road you drove and end up talking about something from seven years ago that neither of you has brought up in a long time.
My husband has told me things at dhabas that I do not think he would have told me in a planned conversation. Not secrets exactly. Just the kind of things that need a specific openness to surface, and that openness is not always available in the regular geography of a relationship.
I think it is the lateness, partly. At 1am the editing function is slower. The thing you would normally assess before saying comes out before the assessment is complete.
And partly it is the context. A dhaba at 1am is not a serious place. It does not require you to be serious. And sometimes the unserious place is where the serious thing finally gets said because the pressure to handle it properly is lower.
The Drive Back
He always falls asleep on the drive back.
Every single time. Within minutes of getting back in the car, the different person finishes and the regular person returns and the regular person is tired and falls asleep with the seat reclined and I drive and listen to something quietly and think about the conversation we just had.
I do not mind. I like the drive back. It is mine.
And I like knowing that somewhere, between the plastic chairs and the bad lighting and the thing he ordered that he would not normally order, there is a version of my husband that comes out when the conditions are right.
I keep snacks in my bag for a reason.
The dhaba is always worth the stop.
