I have a place where I look forward to the coffee. At home, I drink black coffee, usually from a French Press (Bodum as we call it in our family) and it tastes perfect. When elsewhere, I order black coffee too, with milk and sugar on the side, and play around with the ingredients to get a good, rich taste. Most people’s coffee is too weak—I’ve rarely encountered the problem of a cup being “too strong.” I’d probably only say it was “really good.” When the coffee is weak, it’s best to dilute it further by pouring in milk. Depending on the snack alongside, it’s probably a good idea to mess up the whole taste further with a spoonful of sugar. When the coffee taste is truly elusive, you may as well convert the drink to just a hot, sweet one by putting in two spoons of sugar.
The perfect early morning drink is lemon and ginger without a doubt, and the perfect breakfast drink a cup of mixed Darjeeling and Assam teas from a pot.
But come 11 am, and sometime barely 10 disguised as eleven, and you need your coffee. The perfect elevenses are a piece of cake, hopefully with some nuts in it such as carrot or banana cake, and a cup of good, black coffee.
My coffee preferences were being clarified to myself in my early twenties and I did not set anyone a lesson in flexibility in the decades that followed. At the same exact time I discovered that all middle class Indians loved “coffee” too, but that we were talking about different drinks. If visiting someone I’d be served “coffee” with aplomb, only to find that it was frothy milk only faintly flavoured, tinted light brown. At all parties and receptions, in cafeterias and coffee stands, there was a glistening steel “Expresso Machine.” It would emit steam and froth. The drink you were presented with was the same steamed milk, almost white, in this commercial case with a dusting of cocoa on top.
I can’t critique anyone…we all have our tastes and each is as bounded as another’s. Nor can one overlook the facts of constitutional physiology, linked subtly to psychology. There must be some who adore the taste of milk, as my brother, my niece, and my parents both did. To them the sight of a pot of milk bubbling and cooking, or in a shop, being raised a metre high to be poured with a picturesque waterfall into a cup, is exciting and joyful. For me, the very smell of hot milk is nauseating. My insides churn, and were I to drink some by mistake, I feel a horrible heaviness, as if I am sinking to the bottom of a sea.
Most of all, I would never venture into a critique because I dislike those ultra-clever South Asians who spin words about anything they like. It’s as if they are too clever for their own good and instead of worrying about violence or pollution or child abuse they can only think of the froth on their coffee. When my best friend Ruchira joined the Allied Services, she had a group of friends in the various services, including the IAS, IFS, and so on. I went out with them once. Everyone was in their early twenties. We sat in a coffee shop in Connaught Place. My shoulders were bowed in those days with the weight of postcolonial questions. They were commenting on the shades of their drinks in the various lights in the place and similar other things I have erased from my brain.
I rarely pick up a novel by a South Asian author, convinced that it will be only clever. So, far be it for me to write a blog and waste my own and my readers’ time with just some clever, perhaps witty words strung together on the subject of…coffee. I mean if I was serious, I would write about the colonialism, oppression and the Great Western Trickery that resulted in coffee becoming a popular drink as at present, the whole world over.
So I’m not being clever. What I am writing about today is a place I discovered for coffee called the ASG Eye Hospital. Yesterday was my sixth visit there. Each visit has been four to eight hours long, and has felt like a full day. They have a coffee counter and, since I never remember to bring food, I have become habituated to drinking coffee there. Yes, it is white, weak, frothy and with powdered cocoa on top. So what? It is hot and sweet and has seen me through the day.
I learnt two things. One, that the tea and coffee most of my countrymen swear by, the drink that is hot, sweet milk by other names, is partly beloved because it stands in for food. It distracts the senses: the milk makes one feel satiated, the sugar gives instant energy. It carries you through to your next meal.
Two, that though there are now places—hospitals, banks, offices—that are professionally run, they are still sadly unable to reach the core of their personnel when doing the requisite training. I would say that only something like theatre exercises could reach that core. The personnel running the ASG Eye Hospital were young and quick, in smart uniforms. But they needed theatre work. Then the person taking a blood sample in preparation for my eye surgery would not suddenly slump in his chair and turn to a colleague to chatter in Bhojpuri, all while drawing blood without looking at it. And the person with the cleaning materials swishing his mop around would notice the overflowing little garbage bins (cute, in different colours for separation of materials) and attend to them. And the young man floating around would not argue with me, “You see, there are files… Don’t worry, I’ll bring you to the doctor soon.”
They may learn to schedule appointments, or at least give windows. If they call at 11 am they would not automatically expect the person to wait until 3 before seeing the doctor.
And keep drinking coffee.
Imagination, Pain, Anger, and Love. 