The Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers, on Dalal Street in the Fort district of Mumbai, is a twenty-nine-story building shaped like a slightly twisted rectangle. It houses the Bombay Stock Exchange, which is the oldest stock exchange in Asia and which, on a Wednesday morning in June, was trading at a level near its all-time high.
On the second floor of the building, behind a steel door with a hand-lettered sign reading CANTEEN, is the Modi Tiffin Service. It has been run by the same family since 1957.
Hasmukh Modi, the current proprietor, is sixty-eight. His grandfather, Champaklal, opened the canteen at the original BSE building on Dalal Street the year after the family arrived in Bombay from Surat. His father, Pravin, ran it from 1981 to 2009. Hasmukh has run it since.
"My son will run it after me," Hasmukh said. "He says he will not. But he will."
The canteen opens at seven in the morning. The market opens at nine-fifteen. The first hour, between seven and eight, is the canteen's busiest. By eight-thirty most of the regular customers have eaten and gone upstairs.
On the Wednesday I visited, the canteen began serving at six-fifty. The first customer through the door was a man named Kirit Shah, a broker at a small proprietary trading firm. He is fifty-six. He has eaten breakfast at the Modi canteen, he said, on every trading day since 1991.
"Three idlis," he said, without ordering. The man behind the counter, a cousin of Hasmukh's named Bipin, was already plating them.
The idlis at the Modi canteen are made fresh every morning in a kitchen at the back. The batter is fermented overnight. The steaming is done in tiered metal trays over a kerosene burner. Each idli is about three inches across and is served with a small steel bowl of sambar and a smaller steel bowl of coconut chutney.
A plate of three idlis with sambar and chutney costs forty rupees, about forty-eight cents.
"The price has gone up," Hasmukh said. "In 1957, my grandfather charged two annas. In 1991, when Kirit started, it was three rupees. Now forty. It will go up again."
The canteen serves other things. Medu vada. Upma. Poha. A masala dosa that takes eight minutes to make and which the morning regulars rarely order, because they do not have eight minutes.
The coffee is South Indian filter coffee, served in stainless steel tumblers and small steel cups called dabarahs. The proper way to drink it, Bipin demonstrated, is to pour the coffee back and forth between the tumbler and the dabarah to cool it, and then to drink without letting the lip touch the steel.
“The coffee is South Indian filter coffee, served in stainless steel tumblers and small steel cups called dabarahs.”
"For the temperature," he said. "And for the form."
The canteen's customers are mostly brokers, traders, and back-office staff from the exchange and the surrounding financial firms. They are mostly men. They are mostly between forty and sixty-five.
"The young ones," Hasmukh said, gesturing at the door, "they go to the new coffee shops. The Starbucks. The CCD. They drink cappuccino. They do not come here."
He did not say this with bitterness. He said it the way a person reports the weather. The young ones came, then they did not come. The old ones still came.
Kirit Shah ate his three idlis in eleven minutes, drank a filter coffee in three more, and stood up. He laid a fifty-rupee note on the table. Bipin, without looking, brought him ten rupees in change.
"Same tomorrow," Kirit said.
"Same tomorrow," Bipin said.
Kirit went up to the trading floor. The trading floor, it should be noted, no longer functions as a trading floor in the old sense. The BSE shifted to fully electronic trading in 1995. The ring where brokers once shouted orders is now a museum exhibit on the first floor. The actual trading happens on screens, in offices, in apartments, in cars stuck in traffic on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link.
But the brokers still come to the building. They come because their firms have offices here. They come because their friends are here. They come, some of them, because the Modi canteen is here.
"The market is not the screens," Kirit told me, before he went upstairs. "The market is the people. The screens are the noise."
The canteen has fourteen tables, each with four steel chairs. The tables are bolted to the floor. The walls are painted a pale green that has not been repainted, Hasmukh estimates, since 1998. A ceiling fan turns slowly. On one wall is a framed black-and-white photograph of Champaklal Modi, standing in the original canteen in 1962.
By eight-thirty the rush was over. About forty-three customers had been served. The kitchen was preparing for the smaller mid-morning trade, which would peak around eleven, when the traders came down for a second coffee.
Hasmukh sat down at one of the tables and ate his own breakfast. Two idlis, no sambar, a small cup of coffee.
"My doctor says no sambar," he said. "For the salt."
I asked him whether the canteen had changed much, in the sixty-nine years since his grandfather opened it.
He considered the question.
"The kerosene burner is the same one," he said. "My grandfather bought it in 1957. We have replaced the wick many times. But the burner is the same."
He took a small sip of coffee.
"Other things have changed," he said. "The price has changed. The customers have changed. My grandfather is gone. My father is gone. I will go. But the burner is the same. And the idlis. The idlis are the same."
He smiled, a small private smile, and finished his coffee.
Outside on Dalal Street the morning traffic was building. Inside the canteen, the ceiling fan turned. A man at the next table ordered upma. Bipin called the order back to the kitchen in Gujarati. The kitchen called back yes.
