An afternoon at a Matunga hotul that tells the story of a table boy’s turned fortunes, a dead Rottweiler and pampered parrot.Would you expect to see a tribute to a dead pet amidst the thunderous swirl of traffic at King’s Circle? Would you expect a sentimental sob over a Rottweiller? And, really, would you ever link all this to that cantankerous breed of Mumbaikar known as the Irani ‘hotul’wallah?Embedded into the stone guard of a pavement tree where leafy Adenwalla Road plunges into the maelstrom of the multi-point crossing of Matunga, a little plaque reads: ‘COKINO/ My Rottweiller/ Born 15.12. 2000/Died 30.4. 2001/ At 10.30 am/We All Loved You’. Opposite is the airy Koolar & Co., a café co-owned by Ormaan (in picture) and brother Ali Irani. From his perch behind the counter, Ormaan can directly gaze on the memorial he has erected for the little pup that succumbed to a stomach infection, before he could develop either the bark or the bite of his ruthless breed.Looking up from my post-yoga bun-maska, I spot the plaque. Intrigued, I go up to Irani who has just finished hollering at a minion. His visage turns from ‘brun’ to ‘naram pav’ as I mention ‘Cokino’. “The name is a corruption of ‘cocaine’. He alone could give me the ‘kick’ I needed after my father died. But the poor thing succumbed to a stomach infection. I wept more for him.”Ali has more Rottweillers in his apartment that sits above the store. There’s also a parrot. The hapless minion had failed to get the right oranges, “popat ke liye”. The swarthy light-haired Irani, who looks as if maska wouldn’t melt in his mouth for fear of being billed for it, says, “I cry when I see a little chick emerging from the shell.”The speciality of this ‘Restaurant & Store’ may be the wrestler omelette but my host turns out to be as soft as its lesser-known poached egg with honey. Why not salt and pepper? Because, he explains, this dish is served to honoured guests, and doing so would be ‘like rubbing salt and mirchi into wounds’.Most of his pets roam free at their family farm near Sanjan, he says. “But when they become aged, I move them to the flat so that I can personally attend to their arthritis.”Our corner Irani has devised a sanitising procedure for “my popat”. “I clean out his feeding bowl with toothpaste. I thought, if it can kill all the foulsmelling bacteria in our mouth, it can keep him safe too,” he says. The café that sits on the inauspicious vagh mukhi corner of Ambedkar and Adenwala Roads is conventional in its bentwood chairs, brun-maska and biscoot jars but not-soconventional in its posters: Baithe baithe kursi garam karte ho/Mountain Dew peekar cool kyun nahin hotey ho?, Marilyn with her billowing skirt, and front page headlines of the Kennedy assassination. But, in its modest embrace, it holds the history of an alien, hardworking migrant community, and indeed the whole Bombay story of enterprise.Koolar, originally called King George IV, was set up in 1932 by Mandok Koolarzadeh. Many thought the name was connected with the ice-cold drinks he sold. Irani speaks reverentially of his father, who came like so many dirt poor boys from Iran’s Yazdtaft. “Anyone making the difficult overland move to India would be begged, ‘Take my son with you, so he can earn’,” says Irani.When did Koolarzadeh arrive? Irani isn’t sure, but says it was “before the sinking of the Titanic”. He came at 13, and worked for three annas a month. His brother earned a princely three rupees a month as a labourer in the docks. Another brother pocketed Rs 5. They scrimped to send money home to their widowed mother. “My father lived on pav and bananas. But he managed to become the owner of a chain of seven teashop-cum-provision stores,” says Irani.His greater pride swells from that long-ago moment when the Koolarzadeh brothers had made enough money to start the first girl’s school in their village, complete with a temple gong sent from Bombay. Koolarzadeh himself learnt English and grammar sitting in a godown with a kindly Gujarati gentleman.“Our provision store used to have everything,” says Irani. “Koolar mein sab kuch milta, khali murghi ka doodh nahin milega.” But when baby formula came to Bombay, they were among the first to stock it, his father bringing it like most imported goods straight from the docks. “And if someone needed that - or Vicks Formula 44 - in the middle of the night, he’d open the shop for them.”Cigarettes were among their most profitable items, “but when father read that they caused cancer, he took a decision in five minutes to stop. ‘God will open another window,’ he said.”Irani picked up the generosity from his father. “Father used to distribute bread among beggars, and, as a child, I’d pipe up, ‘Sab ko maska laga ke do. Sukha pav kaisa khayega?’”Mumbai’s bread gets buttered in many surprising ways.