Mubarak Eid Mubarak

 We siblings and our children , all of us call him Mama 

My parents used to address him by his first name : Niranjan 

He is our family well wisher 

He used to work for Dilip Kumar / Mehboob Khan and family and used to stay inside the iconic Mehboob Studio in his younger days , even remembers the number , make and model of "Yusuf Saheb's" personal car back then !!!

Later he moved out of Mehboob Studio and started driving a taxi 

Bombay ( or had it become Mumbai by then 🤔 ?) was under a spell of riot , violence and curfew in 1992 

My father who was working on a couple of TCS projects abroad in the 1990s , had to go back to work after a holiday at home , and needed a taxi to go to the airport 

Taxi milna , at that time was a huge task and my father looked quite maulana-like with his graceful white beard 😊😊😊 !!!

So it was all the more difficult to find someone who would be ready to take so much risk for even a super-hiked up fare 

It was at that testing time that my family found Mama 

He took my father to the airport safely , and unbelievingly charging the regular fare 

After that he became our trusted navigator for all our travel requirements in and around Bombay ,  and soon became almost like a family member 

Now he has become frail and his health has deteriorated so he cannot climb four flights of stairs to the residence of my brother , an apartment in one of the older buildings that doesn't have a lift 

So whenever he wants to meet our family , he comes over to my place , a first floor apartment in an equally old building , also without lift 😄 ...  and then Mashaallah we have a family reunion 😄 !!!

So yesterday he came to wish us Eid Mubarak ... And baatoN-baatoN meiN he mentioned that two days back was his birthday ... 😊

So Usman and Mehmood ( my son and nephew ) ordered a cake 

And we had a surprise Birthday Party for Mama 😊

His childlike delight and joyous amazement can neither be expressed in a thousand words nor in any number of emoticons 🥳🎉🎊🤗😄😄😄

And that happiness of his , so pure and innocent , is the most treasured and priceless Eidi that we have gotten in a long time ... 🙏🌟🌙✨⭐🎁💕💕💕