A restaurant on rail tracks caters to Kolkata's poor

Kolkata: One chapatti for 50 paisa, a plate of rice for 1 rupee, a bowlful of curry for 1 rupee... so reads the menu card of a "restaurant" on railway tracks that has been running here for the last 51 years. In times of high inflation, it is a godsend for the poor.

Popularly known as "Gariber Hotel" or food joint for the destitute, it is run today by 40-year-old Fatima Bibi at the southern division of Sealdah Station in north Kolkata.

She sits with her bags full of leftover food, using up the space around a couple of unused tracks, even as trains whiz past on other platforms nearby.

She took over the business from her mother Nur Banu at the age of 11.

Fatima said: "I work as a part-time maid at various households and a few hotels. I collect the extra food, the leftovers or even slightly stale food at the end of the day from these places. The next morning I sell it to my customers."

Her eatery on the tracks opens at 8am and shuts down at noon. And it has a faithful clientele of beggars, pickpockets, platform dwellers, porters and drug addicts, who troop in for an inexpensive bite.

"I have over 200 regular customers apart from the flying ones. The number of customers is increasing with such rapidity that I have employed my two daughters and two sons as bearers," Fatima said.

Fatima and her clients sit under the open sky.

"We hardly earn Rs25 a day. Surely, we can't afford to spend more than Rs5 a day on lunch and dinner. Here we can eat to the fullest for Rs3, that's what matters. Whether the food is leftover or slightly rotting, we don't care," said Chanchal, a beggar at the station.

Bribes

Some customers have just a bowlful of boiled rice water available for 50 paisa.

However, Fatima manages to make about Rs800 a day from her "hotel". But not a day passes without Fatima giving bribes to the railway police.

"Every day I have to pay the police personnel Rs100 to allow me run my business peacefully," said Fatima.