Humblest Apology

Almost seven years eyes and ears open they couldn’t be stretched further. Listening to talk big and small. Soaking up all that was on offer from any quarter. Reading up a little as required; enquiring what was uncertain. This particular Tamil waiter had only been pacing the floor at KV a couple of years. Nice, regular fellow; quiet type with shy smiles and nods perhaps partly because of the limited English, though he was not especially forthcoming with his own kind either. Got his orders a bit confused occasionally. Early thirties; if he was caught right in a photograph the guess might be into his fifties. This afternoon the man brushed against a young Tamil wife who had been waiting by her table after lunch while her husband was at the washstand. Possibly the poor man had trod on the woman’s toes; some minor kind of inadvertence. Oh! Sorry! Blanched a bit. (It was possible on dark skin.) And followed with a gesture that had only been seen on B grade 60s TV re-runs featuring an elaborately bedecked Effendi holding audience: the gracious high respect that fluttered from the midriff in four or five touches until it had reached up to the bowed chin and slid away from the forehead.... Wow wee! No kind of courtier put-on. Truly, sincerely sorry; deeply apologetic. Times past in other lands a chap brushing against the wrong man’s wife in the marketplace no matter how slight there might have been hell to pay. (In this particular instance water off a duck’s back.)