The bustling "New Lucky Restaurant" in Ahmadabad is famous for its milky tea, its buttery rolls, and the graves between the tables. Krishan Kutti Nair has helped run the restaurant built over a centuries-old Muslim cemetery for close to four decades, but he doesn't know who is buried in the cafe floor. Customers seem to like the graves, which resemble small cement coffins, and that's enough for him.
"The graveyard is good luck," Nair said one recent afternoon after the lunch rush. "Our business is better because of the graveyard." The graves are painted green, stand about shin high, and every day the manager decorates each of them with a single dried flower. They're scattered randomly across the restaurant - one up front next to the cash register, three in the middle next to a table for two, four along the wall near the kitchen. The restaurant started as a small tea stand just outside the cemetery. Little by little, the walls of the tea house were expanded until they completely enveloped the graveyard. The tombstones are still in place inside the restaurant. Patrons have to walk past tombstones to reach their tables.
Krishan Kutti Nair doesn’t know who the graves in his restaurant belong to, but local historians suspect they are the resting places of relatives of a 16th-century Sufi saint whose tomb lies nearby. Regardless of their inhabitants, one thing is for sure, Nair doesn’t plan on removing them anytime soon, despite people’s advice to make more room for customers. Every morning he wipes them with a damp cloth and decorates them with fresh flowers, as he considers them his good luck charms.
From my opinion, restaurant that have graveyard in it is quite creepy but somehow it is good because it can remind society of death.
POSTED BY Pocahontas ON Thursday 10 September 2015 @ 01:50