When the most disciplined among us is waking up pre-dawn for a meditation session before the crows caw, Bacchalal Bind is still at work, tying up the previous night’s loose ends. Having done the dishes, cleaned the tabletops, mopped the floor of the kitchen and service area of Nho Saigon, a Vietnamese restaurant in Bandra Kurla Complex, where he has worked for six months, he readies to leave in time to catch the train to Kalwa, where he lives with his wife. He passes on the baton each morning to his colleague who does the next shift, also a “moriwala”. The term, which comes from the Marathi word for culvert or drain, is used across Mumbai’s hospitality establishments to denote a group of people who work backroom in restaurants and bars, cleaning up after the last customer has ambled out at 1 am. Bind, 37, who starts work every evening at 6 pm earns a salary of Rs 10,000. It’s not an amount that can get a couple by in unforgiving Mumbai. His eight-year-old son lives with his mother in Barki village, 37 km away from Varanasi, because education is cheaper there. Rs 4,000 from his salary sent across each month helps run his mother’s home.

Bind says what makes the job worthy of keeping despite the graveyard shift and having to change multiple means of transport, is the additional Rs 3,500—goes up to Rs 6,000 in a good month—that comes his way when the restaurant’s service charge kitty is distributed.