New Delhi, April 20 -- New things happen every day in a restaurant, part of the unfolding scroll of time. But when one thinks about it, does anything ever really happen for the first time? Aren't we all actors in roles that human beings have been playing for thousands of years? Thus it was that, when I heard a long conversation taking place at staff lunch one afternoon between Chef Vishnu and the young washerboy Mansingh, suddenly the door seemed to open up into the distant past, and I saw in their place two shadowy Chinese figures: the royal chef Bei Lu and the washerboy Fang Yun-si of the Song Dynasty. It is in the voices of those ancient souls that I present this story of apprenticeship and ambition, of education and emulation, in the China Dragon kitchen....