Visit the convenience store Break Time I at 1920 Houston River Road in Westlake more than once and chances are you’ll be greeted by name when you walk through the door. Alauddin (Ah-Lah-oo-deen) learns and remembers names quickly, but he’s still working on stringing together English words in the same way as the customers he serves.

Store Manager Kazi Labibur Rahman said Alauddin likes to “brighten up the day for customers. Some people appreciate his outgoing personality and some, not as much.”

“Communication has been the biggest challenge for me since I started work here,” said Alauddin who speaks Hindi and Bengali. “It’s not that I don’t want to do a better job of communicating. It’s just difficult sometimes.” (It could also come in handy when one of his customers continues to ask why the store can’t keep Munchos in stock.)

Thirty-seven year old Alauddin was born in Calcutta. Before he started the job at Break Time three years ago, he worked on a ship’s crew as the chief cook. The crew liked his sticky beef, beef biryani, chicken tandoori and lentils the best, he said.

His dream job would be to open his own restaurant. That’s not pie in the sky. Taste of India restaurants are popping up in gas station convenience stores in Texas, Pennsylvania and Mississippi, according to the article, “The American Dream in the Back of a Sunco,’’ by Trisha Gopal.

Work on the ship took him to ports in Newark, San Francisco, the Netherlands, China, Belgium, Dubai, Malaysia and Hong Kong, but he couldn’t decide where he would live if he could live anywhere, saying only that the people in Southwest Louisiana seem warmer and more friendly than New Yorkers, well, except for the ones who consider him too friendly.