These days, Inderjit Singh aka Guru sits at his little restaurant only when he feels like it. Most times, he doesn't feel like it. Age, diabetes, sadness, trembling hands, intimations of mortality, these take their toll. Cooking doesn't seem quite as much fun. So he leaves it to the very clever women in his life — his daughter, his wife — to run Guru da Dhaba. He is there but only in spirit.

As for his sturdy rajma, somehow it survives, even in his absence. When I wrote about it in my blog, it became easily the most shared, tweeted and commented upon food story I had ever written.