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A street like this never sleeps. The bars hum till three in the morning and after that it is the turn of the all-night cafés. They are waiting for the drunks and the late revellers who will stagger in for a coffee, a burger or a shish taouk.

Around 3am, those cafés switch the food below the counters with stuff that was put away because it had gone stale. Even the shish taouk is taken off and replaced with an older, skinnier one that had been tucked away inside a mammoth walk-in fridge.

All the stale food is commonly known around this part of town as the 3 o’clock junk. A drunk wolfing down a shish taouk that was spinning on it’s stand two days back and has just started to smell, won’t know the difference anyway.

Lesson-1 : Post-3am, never eat anything in a café on The Main, unless you want to get into an intimate relationship with a lady named Salmonella.

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Every metropolis has one street like this one, deep in its downtown core. If you happen to be flying in low, you will recognize it very easily. It is invariably the brightest string of lights. It isn’t the biggest street in Montreal, mind you. That honor would go to Sherbrooke Street or Sainte Catherine Street. But it is the liveliest, no question about it.

Welcome to Blvd St. Laurent in downtown Montreal – pronounced ‘Boolvah Sang Lawrang’ in French-speaking Quebec.

You needn’t bother with the pronunciation – no one calls it Blvd St. Laurent anyway. A street like this one will always have a more identifiable moniker, like ‘The Strip’ in Las Vegas. Everybody calls Bengaluru’s MG Road ‘Main Street’ and Kolkata’s Mother Teresa Sarani is unrecognizable because you and I know it as ‘Park Street’.

Likewise, Blvd St. Laurent is known to Montrealers as The Main and it is a boolvah. The French Quebecois fuck with your mind constantly. They put consonants at the end of words and mandate you not to pronounce them.

The only redeeming feature about the Quebecois is their women – the Quebecois girls that The Main is always teeming with. Audaciously forward and precocious, they can lead you right up to the edge until all that remains is your choice – whether to end the evening in her bed or just turn around and go home. I have lost track of the number of times when I ……. just turned around and went home.

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Everything is available on this stretch of glitter – for a price. Whether you’re looking for a gun or a gal, some weed or ecstasy, a haircut or a hamburger or sex in the guise of a full-body massage, this length of asphalt has all these and more.

Every waiter and bartender along this street is a drug trafficker if you need to get high. And a pimp, in case you are horny. These gents have none of the furtive looks and the whispered directions to the alley out back, spoken in a hiss through the corner of the mouth. You come to expect that in my country of birth, India.

Not here. This is the west. Here, everything is hanging out there in the open. You want to fuck, do some coke or buy some weed – you do all these things proudly. Folks here have eyelids that are unbattable. The police precinct that covers this street is reported to be ‘on the pad’. You are better protected from a mugger or purse-snatcher on this street than anywhere else in the city.

The Main is a hybrid, between Kolkata’s Park Street and Free School Street. Except for the graffiti and the murals. Nothing in Kolkata matches the wall art you find on The Main. The talent is simply awesome, at once gaudy and then beautiful. Business owners with building walls facing out, gladly pay for the scaffolding and the paint and let amateur painters go to town on them.

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At the corner of The Main and Des Pins, was a Lebanese shish touk joint called Falafel, run by an Armenian named Ben, where I manned the counter for a whole year back in 2002. I said ‘was’ because I don’t see it there anymore. Restaurants have a short life span on The Main.

Falafel was like a half-way house for new immigrants with degrees who hadn’t yet found a position in their field of work and who – like me – had run out of cash. You slogged a bruising 8-hour shift, rubbing shoulders with more PhDs and medical doctors from all over the third world than you would find even in Johns Hopkins.

No, that is an exaggeration but there was more enlightened conversation and wit in there at Falafel than the College Street Coffee House in Kolkata.

Ben himself had been a respected metallurgist in Yerevan before he came to Canada and started out as a dishwasher in Falafel while he looked around for a job. Then 9/11 happened and the slump hit Montreal hard, this city being the Canadian hub of the aerospace industry. Jobs vanished overnight and Ben quickly realized he was going to be there at Falafel for a long while.

The slump however proved to be a blessing for Ben. The owner of Falafel, an old Tunisian guy, had made some risky investments in the stock market that left him deeply in debt, following the stock market crash that followed 9/11. Falafel went into receivership and Ben took out a bank loan, bought the owner out for a song and took over the joint.

The other day I was out on a jaunt in this part of town, taking photos of the murals that cover every inch of every building wall on The Main and gathering masala for this blog post. I wanted to breathe the air before I wrote. To my dismay I found that the joint where Falafel stood had been boarded up, sold to a high-end eyeware retail outlet called Harry Toulch. Instantly I felt a pang of nostalgia.

I remembered the last time I was there, in 2014.

I had ordered a shish taouk and was sipping a coffee, staring at the crowd milling at the counter, one that I had manned for a year once. Ben came and sat with me for a while sharing the usual gossip about what the rest of guys were up to, who had got a job in his field and where, that sort of thing. Ben soon had to zip back behind the counter.

That’s when I spotted a disheveled guy with a backpack at the entrance. He was leaning against the handrail and scoping the joint with furtive eyes. I knew him well – that was Nick, the fence. He was thinner and paler than the last time I had seen him, more than a decade back when I was employed there.

Nick’s eyes fell on me and he slouched over, ‘Hey man, where you bin?’ He looked me over with watery eyes that danced around incessantly, the mark of a regular drug user. You had to watch it with Nick.

“Need a Mac, an SLR, man? I got a Nikon1000, brand noo. How about an Iphone?” He unzipped his backpack halfway and I was looking at a pile of cellphones, laptops and cameras in there. For guys like Nick, there is only one way things usually go – in a back alley with knife in the gut.

I shook my head and tried out my street tone,” Ah doan have no dough, Nick. Maybe some other tam?”

“Suit yoreself. dude, but I could give you a great deal. Pick any SLR for twennie. Here, take this Iphone, 64 gigs, brand noo, man. Only thuree dahlars.” He quickly realized I wasn’t buying and he zipped up and went back to standing by the doorway, so he could make a quick exit in case a cop happened by. Nick was the son of a low-level associate in the Rizutto outfight and therefore no one messed with him. Even Ben had better sense than to ask him not to loiter at the entrance.

Falafel was a part of my life in 2002 but during my 2014 visit it felt like another universe, even more difficult it is now after more than two decades, to imagine I had actually spent eight hours a day there. For a brief moment of one year, I was washing dishes, manning counters, mopping the floor, cleaning toilets and I was being cursed at viciously by junkies, prostitutes, teenage drug addicts, fences and Mafioso.

No, let me make a correction there. The mafioso were well mannered and polite and they invariably asked for the bill even though I was under strict instructions not to charge them and they already knew that.

For a year I was in the middle of the madness known as The Main. Every moment of that one year, I was like ‘is this really happening to me?

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There were some fleeting moments too, that are etched in my heart – moments when I crossed paths with living, breathing, vulnerable folks during that graveyard shift. One such moment that I decided to chronicle is in the blog post titled Turning the corner. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

The other lovely moments were those murals I mentioned earlier, if you have been paying attention. I have appended below some photos of the murals of the Main.

In the south, The Main ends up at Chinatown, a most interesting place that I have reserved for another blog piece when I have the time.

In the north, The Main reaches into Little Italy, an area that I am not very familiar with, even though I have been there a few times and found that it could be quite inviting, if you happen to dig Italian food.

Otherwise, Little Italy seems too wrapped up in itself and it’s own.

Besides, I never did develop an affinity for Italians – after the Almighty Lord stopped making any more Lorens, Cardinales and Lollobrigidas.

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The murals of The Main

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