Notes from a coffee house

Coming from a family of tea guzzlers, my defection to the South Indian decoction coffee happened in 1958, when I entered Delhi University. Tootling around the campus, my long nose, blessed with excellent olfactory censors, picked the heavenly aroma coming from the university’s new coffee house.

Three decades later, I was ready for more defections; quitting seamanship for penmanship, and ditching north for south. Patrolling Bangalore one morning, I sleepwalked into the coffee house on M G Road. Three cups down the hatch and I knew that I was not going elsewhere. The coffee house also offered a rich audio-visual feast; a goldmine for lazy writers: coffee lovers of all shapes and sizes; the cummerbunded bearers; the manager, his eyes dead to the customers, banging the bell whenever the noise level rose; the smiling little girl holding a large cup staring out of the picture on his desk, and he, baring his teeth whenever tourists clicked the girl while he thought he was being photographed….customers dropping gems like these: “I say yes. She says no. I say no. She says yes. How can we have children?”

Colourful characters enriched my notebooks. Colonel Trilby was one of them. He often turned up in the coffee house wearing two watches; one his, and the other, some customer’s, recovering from surgery by him. He was a horologist. His demeanour and accent were pucca military; perhaps he wanted to be an armyman. He was mighty pleased when I bestowed the colonelship on him, and as a retired naval commander, I even ‘sirred’ him. Months later, I asked him which regiment did he command, and pat came the reply, “The 5th Gurkhas”, and he blinked like hell. “My bloody left foot!” a guy wearing a beret, seated back-to-back at the next table boomed, “he can’t even tell the difference between a point-303 bullet and a lipstick.”

I didn’t see the colonel for weeks, but when I did, he was donning a handsome Trilby with a peacock feather stuck on the band. “Where did you buy it, sir?” I asked, admiring the hat. After blinking for a few seconds, he said, “Ah, I was in Sussex.” “My bloody right foot!” his bete noire shouted from somewhere, “a Brit who couldn’t pay for the watch repairs gave it to him, and the feather came from a boy who sells peacock fans on the footpath.”

Tipping in the coffee house varied. Colonel Trilby had raised his from 25p for a cup in 1990 to 50p in 2005. I stuck to 20%, but an NRI raised the bar. He handed a tenner for just one cup and soon the bearers were beelining for him; their diadems on the white, red and gold turban quavered ecstatically whenever he walked in. The veterans grumbled.
And one day a retired physicist gleefully announced that the NRI had returned to wherever he came from. The oldies cheered. The bearers made a long face and served lukewarm coffee to the lot.

Ruckus and galatas were rare in the brew palace. One that I witnessed occurred one lazy afternoon. An Italian girl walked in and sat herself down near the entrance with her back to the M G Road. Suddenly a man in his sweet 70s, walking with his wife, noticed the foreigner. He dashed in and was about to sit at the table bang opposite the girl when his wife dragged him by the collar to the table at the other end. But the gritty fellow quickly broke away, walked up the last row where the tables were parallel to the wall which had huge mirrors on it. He selected a ‘chair with a view’ not far from the Italian, but the battleaxe beat her husband to it and ordered him to sit across her, facing the wall. A sleepy bearer came and rattled off the menu like a mantra. She noticed her hubby was having a ball, smiling at the girl through the mirror. “No coffee!” she dismissed the bearer, “we are leaving,” and reached for the young-old man’s collar.