Some Guests Visit a Café. Some Grow Up With It.
STORIES
Dhanesh Sharma
6/18/20261 min read
Restaurant near Auroville, Puducherry
There are moments that remind you how quietly time passes.
One such moment arrived over a game of chess.
Abhay is eight years old. A kombucha-sipping, chess-playing football enthusiast with enough energy to throw in a few ninja moves between turns. Somewhere between attacking my queen and discussing football, he expressed his disappointment that Chelsea star Cole Palmer had not been selected to represent England at the FIFA World Cup 2026.
But what stayed with me wasn't the game.
It was the passage of time.
Abhay has been coming to Terrassen since he was a baby. Long before chess openings and football debates, long before kombucha became his drink of choice, he would visit us with his family at our old home in Hyderabad.
This was his first visit to our new home near Auroville after almost two years.
And sitting across the board from him, I couldn't help but notice how much had changed.
I remember a little boy with a milk bottle.
Today, he talks thoughtfully about football, world affairs, and everything in between. He has begun taking his first serious steps in chess, and if our game is any indication, I suspect that in a few years he'll be handing me a gracious defeat and knocking my socks off in the process.
Restaurants are often measured in ratings, reviews, or menus. But sometimes their real story is told in moments like these.
Watching families return.
Seeing children become teenagers.
Listening to conversations evolve from cartoons to dreams.
And realizing that while places change, relationships somehow stay.
Terrassen may have moved from Hyderabad to near Auroville, but some stories have travelled with us.
Abhay's is one of them.
Some guests visit a café.
Some grow up with it.
And for that, we are grateful.
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