Recently, during one of our Sunday cleaning sprees, the hallowed bookshelf came in for a special consideration. It was high time, in any case. And dusty jackets don't make for pleasant viewing in a bibliophile's home. So we went about it, giving giant fact books, hardbounds, paperbacks, pocket books and booklets a nice shake-up. It felt therapeutic. But we'll save the feel-good prose for another day.

Most of the time, these dusting trails throw up that one book that is a re-discovery to us; it becomes the 'wow' moment of the morning that makes the effort worth it. This time, it was a tiny, nondescript 64-pager called Flavours (1988, The Perennial Press) that caught the eye. Written by Diana C Proeschel, an American diplomat, and Saroj Merani, and English teacher at Elphinstone College, it offers a fabulous rewind of the F&B scene in the city from the 1980s. With a photograph of the now-shut Tanjore restaurant gracing the cover, and dotted with cartoons by the legendary Mario Miranda, it piqued our interest in a flash. We ended up the reading the book for the next 30 minutes. The dusting operation, naturally, had to be discontinued for this unplanned break, much to the surprise of our domestic help, our co-helper in this exercise. "Aap chhota break le lo," we requested.