Dhaba
The Wonder House

"And He is here! The Most Excellent Law is here also. My pilgrimage is well begun. And what work! What work!" – from Kim, Rudyard Kipling








Ch. 1

It took the greater portion of Sanja's father's lifetime to find this place at the very end of the road, where the land – actually just a great hump of sand – by the time it reached the end of Captiva Island, finally ended abruptly and only a very swiftly flowing straight of thirty foot water separated its brother island, North Captiva.  There had been a moment in time, before Hurricane Charlie had separated the two sand masses, that Sanja's father, Atman (named after the holy) wanted, indeed, to finally land his Dhaba truck at the Mangoe's Grocery on North Captiva. "I would like them to pilgrimage to Wonder House, the same way that we have made such beautiful sacrifices to come

here." Sanja had not been born yet at this time, but the story had been passed down something like a recipe for Chaat or Jhalmuri, and it was his mother who had the rational sense, it had been told many times, that they cannot expect vacationing tourists to drive to the 'end of the road' just for their simple fare.  In fact, she declared, "you know that we must offer hamburgers, and we must offer something of hot dogs, you see this, right?" Sanja's grandmother had been the one to pass down all of the original recipes to the Moory's family. Atman was strangely an only child and had received,

unwillingly, all of the techniques of the kitchen as a child, a position usually reserved for the daughters, the wives, and the mothers.  He did not like such heavy responsibility when he was young, as all of his other childhood friends were busy getting into wild mischief and holding out dreams of one day becoming the next cricket champion.  But he did not resent his fortune as he became older; in fact, he intuitively began to apply his spiritual intuitions to the great crafts and trade of cooking authentic food.  "I cannot offer the hamburger or the hotdog. You know this," he would quickly scorn his beloved wife. "They will come if they find that the food comes from the hand of a yogi."  Sanja's sister, Cecilla, had been born by this time, and remembered this as the summer of discontent, all that

time trying to find the right location for the Dhaba food truck "at the end of the road on a clump of sand in the middle of nowhere." The island was ripe for it, Atman felt, born, as it was, as the largest key lime orchard in the world. Such will! Such fortitude! This would be the story of the Wonder House, he knew, and so they painted that first truck lime green and yellow and it stood out like ripe fruit against the mesmerizing near green blue of the shallow straights and rolling white-shelled beaches of Captiva.