Contemplations over coffee

Roving Reflections

It was 6 am. My wife served me piping hot filter coffee in a steel tumbler. I sipped it slowly enough to extend the pleasure as I turned the newspaper’s pages. Later, in the kitchen, I was doing my bit – I washed the utensils and then, after emptying the remains of the filtered coffee powder inside the cotton kora cloth, I washed it vigorously in soap. The kora is a special weave from the Coimbatore region that has the perfect sieve for coffee powder filtration. In South Indian homes, it is used to obtain the highest-quality filtered brew.

My wife, aghast, chided me – “You are washing it in detergent! How could you? You know, forget making coffee, your mother never allowed me to even wash the coffee cloth for two years. It should be rinsed in plain water and sun-dried so that the aroma of coffee is not violated.”

My mother was renowned for making the best coffee. She learnt by instinct to procure the best blend of raw coffee seeds. She mastered the skill of roasting the beans on an iron rotary drum gifted by her mother to obtain a rich colour, neither brown nor too dark. She knew when to stop as the fragrance of the roasting coffee would permeate the house and waft into the street where passersby would linger a few seconds to inhale. A sturdy, hand-operated Birmingham steel grinder (which still adorns my house) was used each time she made freshly grounded powder. It was an art.

Many moons ago, riding my Enfield motorcycle at night to my village Gorur, I was caught in a monsoon downpour. At home, I changed into warm clothes and went looking for my mother. Seeing the back door open, I walked a few steps through the drizzle to the cattle shed where I saw a dim light through the mud-tiled roof. I saw her milking the cow. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She scurried back into the house catching her breath, saying, “The best coffee is from the freshest milk.” I savoured that steaming coffee as my senses warmed up to the monsoon, mountains, mist, and forest green. It was ecstasy.

My wife’s admonishment reminded me of R K Narayan’s glowing passage, an ode to coffee,in his autobiography My Days – “that in traditional South Indian homes the ultimate sign of acceptance of a daughter-in-law in the family is when the matriarch allows her to make coffee for the family. Till then she would be considered an apprentice or understudy.”

He says coffee is not an addiction or even a habit, like smoking or alcohol. It is a stabilising force in human existence. With Omar Khayyam we can say, “Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring. The winter garment of Repentance fling...”

Coffee awakens and stimulates the senses as it opens the doors of perception, at times philosophically, even spiritually. To recall Wordsworth in The World is Too Much with Us: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away...” From instant coffee to instant noodles to instant idlis to instant Nirvana – the last good dispensed by jet-setting Godmen.

But is such perception and contemplation, the sheer pleasure of taking a pause, becoming an indulgence not everyone can afford? In the 17th to 19th centuries, the aristocracy made back-breaking work a virtue for the working class. Now, we have corporate honchos who maximise their profits on the back of this misplaced sense of virtue among their employees. Bertrand Russell advocated, in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, a reduction of work hours to four so that the unemployed can find jobs and work and leisure be equitably distributed. Leisure enables everyone to dream, to contemplate, to be one with nature, to wonder, and to create.

Rabindranath Tagore gets wistful in a poem – “I shall gladly suffer the pride of culture to die out in my house, if only in some happy future I am born a herd-boy in the Brinda forest... who grazes his cattle sitting under the banyan tree... who loves to splash and plunge in the Jamuna’s cool deep stream.”

Imagine extending this privilege of leisure to our politicians, bigots, generals, bureaucrats and fire-breathing television anchors. Imagine a world with more poets, artists, musicians, and dancers. It’s a bit like that coffee-induced sense of calm.