Anita Nair

The first time I was in Spain, I acquired among the other things a certain phrase. The night before had been a rather inebriated one and beginnings of a headache nudged my temples. I needed a coffee, but exactly so as I thought would help. At breakfast, when I asked for a cup of coffee with a spot of milk, the waitress who took the order stared at me with a bemused expression. Then she said, "Ah, cafe cortado!" Later I asked the interpreter what it meant and she said, "Coffee with a cloud of milk." Spoken in a monotone, it was just a phrase but the poetry in that term was magical. Almost as magical as a cup of cafe cortado. And to think I might never have been a coffee drinker.

We were a tea-drinking family. We woke ourselves up with an enormous cup of tea; drank a medium-sized cup at eleven in the morning and a smallish one at four in the evening. When guests came calling, my mother took out her tea service and it was tea, good strong, reddish brown and aromatic that graced the occasion. The coffee service gathered dust and dreams in the china cabinet.

It wasn't that we disliked coffee. In fact, we drank only coffee when we went to restaurants. What we didn't enjoy was the Malayali way of brewing coffee. This was to boil water, sugar and coffee and then when it had been ruined enough, ruin it even further with lots of milk. Coffee that tasted like sweetened dishwater. Naturally we preferred tea.

Then my brother stumbled upon a verse about coffee and we had an inkling and a real formula for what coffee ought to be really like. Two rebellious teenagers, we demanded that our mother make us coffee that was dark as the devil, hot as hell, pure as the angel and sweet as love. My mother rolled her eyes at this plebian yearning for kattan-kapi or black coffee and then perhaps thanked heavens that she had got off easily and so complied. What if we had craved for marjijuana or brown sugar? Or toddy?

With all the coffee consumed, I have become a coffee bigot of sorts with very decided tastes about how I like my coffee: Of the instant coffees, I prefer ones with chicory and made fifty-fifty which is half cup of water to half cup of skimmed milk. However when it comes to real coffee, where beans are roasted and ground, I like it black. But no matter whether it comes out of a bottle or a filter paper, a vending machine or a coffee pot, I like it scalding hot. This is my main grouse against espressos served in most Indian restaurants. A thimbleful of coffee jostling against the bottom of regular sized coffee cup cools it by the time it reaches your table and then you are left with this luke-warm bitter concoction that coats your tongue and refuses so let go of your palate for the rest of the day.

I saw a coffee plantation for the first time when I was twenty. Tea bushes by themselves are a pretty sight. Green and gold; he earth and sun, all radiating a lushness that takes the breath away. The coffee plant in comparison is a plain Jane, stolid and rather dull. And as I stood there amidst the rows of planted coffee what hit me was the thought that how something so ordinary could be the harbinger of something so extraordinary. The red berries slowly ripening on the slopes of a hill; the plucked beans that lie like tourists on a beach, ardent sun worshippers gathering the heat of the day into their pores; the browning, the roasting, the grinding till all the cosmic forces locked within a bean collide and exposed in a wondrous aroma. Snaking up your nose in a quick whiff and then expanding, overwhelming, taking control of your senses so all your smell and feel and taste is coffee. And then the first sip and I begin to think that as long as there is coffee to drink, no matter what plagues this earth, life can't be too bad.