TEA, COFFEE and other TRIVIA

I was born into this family which is fanatic about its filter coffee ... It is not just in the family , but the entire clan, I am told.

When I was a little girl in Pune, our family would go on a monthly trip to 'city-post' for shopping.
We lived in a place which then was faraway from Pune city … An air force bus at 2.10 in the afternoon would take us to Yerwada, from where we would take an autorickshaw to this one south Indian shop in Rastapeth where my parents would buy the coffee seeds and 50 gms of chicory . The next day our home would be filled with the aroma of roasted coffee seeds , which were roasted in a hot iron roller. The coffee seeds were then ground and mixed with chicory and stored for making coffee for the entire month.

Every morning , the decoction was made using a filter. ( and thus I guess it was called filter coffee).
About half an hour later it was mixed with freshly boiled fresh milk. ‘Fresh’ repeating itself twice in the previous sentence is not a typo error.

For those were not the days of refrigerator or coffee making machines.
The milk man arrived at around 5.00 a.m with the tin can which had milk freshly milked from the udders of the cow or buffalo that you could feel the warmth of the milk even on a chill morning when he poured it into your vessel.

While the decoction drops trickled down from the first layer of the filter to the second layer, the milk was boiled and mixed with fresh decoction.

The coffee I guess had laxative properties . For without which , the day’s normal routine of the adults would not begin.

Filter coffee was the privilege of the adults. Coffee was forbidden for children. Among the scores of things that I grew up believing in, I was told that children grow up to be dark skinned if they drank coffee .
I did not want to lose out on whatever few melanin cells that my skin was endowed with and never really ventured out into coffee tasting for a long time.

My mornings always started with a porridge ( kanji) .

We once visited a distant relative who were settled in the other part of the city .
On the way back I heard my parents remarking on the inhospitable nature and frugal ways of the hostess.
My parents were apparently not very pleased with the hospitality that the hosts extended .
It was surprising because the lady was very sweet to me and gave me some chocolates and cool drinks.

The reason for her inhospitable ways … she served Nescafe … or Bru .. whatever that was … and from what I gather my parents seemed to have had a tough time gulping it down their throat …
'What kind of a woman would serve instant coffee when all other families from or clan who were settled in pune served filter coffee ???', my mother remarked.
I guess in their days … serving instant coffee when you could as well make filter coffee was like visiting a brothel in town when you had a chaste wife at home .

Much until I graduated, I lived with my parents and my mother never really acknowledged my adulthood. Neither did she wean me from porridge nor did she introduce me to filter coffee. When I went away from home to study in Mumbai , crude reality dawned on me when I realized that porridge was not served at the dining hall in the morning.

The choice was now between coffee and tea. I never really gravitated towards coffee … probably they served instant coffee … who knows … and moreover I developed a liking for tea.

Like it happens with all those who overdo the things that they have been deprived of for a long time … I took to tea like a fish takes to water.

Late night assignments, Friday night movies ,hanging around in campus were all peppered with countless cups of cutting chai at the Shetty’s.

Shetty’s was the joint which served food and chai just outside the campus on the Sion-trombay highway for truck drivers as well as campus loafers.

Shetty’s closed down their food service at around 11.00 in the night. However the chai service went on till the wee hours of the morning . Customers trickled in from all over including the campus for the late night bouts of cutting chai. At Shetty’s chai was always boiling … overboiling would be the right word .
It had a strong smell of ‘chai – gawat’ .. ( lemon grass in English ???… I am not sure) that grew in abundance in the backyard of shetty shop and ginger in it. But it gave you the kick to stay awake and chat up, if not for anything else , but to have the next dose of cutting chai.

I always believed that the compulsory ingredients for making a cup of tea are milk, sugar , water , tea leaves and ginger. For tea without ginger was unimaginable. After a Sunday afternoon nap , a hot cup of tea with crushed ginger is heavenly … you have to experience it to believe it .

I graduated from campus with a degree , a job and a strong and compulsive addiction for tea.
For a long time I continued to visit Shetty’s for a cutting chai.

In Pune, you could visit any of the ‘amrutatulya’ outlets for a cup of chai .
‘Amrutatulya’ has onion bhaji or ‘kanda poha’ for an accompaniment alongwith the chai , which makes their cutting chai taste even better.

It was not until my first flight on an official visit from Calcutta to Mumbai that I was horrified to discover that Indian airlines grossly abused the art of tea making.

The air-hostess came along with two pots in her hand and asked me 'tea or coffee'.
'Tea' ... I replied.

She then thrust into my cup some hot water from across the faces of two other people occupying the aisle seats . I wondered what she was upto.

I looked at my co-passengers but help was not forthcoming , for they had chosen not to have either . Seasoned flyers I guess. After a little bit of fiddling around, I discovered those three packets wrapped in a tissue paper along with a plastic spoon.

Ah… such audacity…I thought to myself. After paying thousands of rupees for the airfare , here I am... dumped with hot water and asked to make my own tea, with three packets and a plastic spoon . Whereas at shetty’s for Rs. 1.25 all you had to do was to wave at the 10 year old helper boy and he knew instinctively that the order was for a cutting chai… speak about value for money…
Anyway… it was my company that paid the air-fare.

That was when I think I tasted what was equivalent of sewage water. Not that I have actually tasted sewage water , but I do not know of any other superlative to explain what I tasted .

My second flight was with Alliance air to Silchar in Assam for some official work. It was a forty-five minute short flight and I did not attempt tea in the flight.
Alliance air flew low over tea gardens across Assam that stretched miles and miles over the horizon. When I got down from the flight at Silchar airport, which is by and far the smallest and unsophisticated airport that I have seen, the weather was perfect for a cuppa . It was a dreamy drizzle with clouds floating past the ground level across the tea gardens. Crickets and frogs were croaking away to glory.

The institution that I was visiting had sent a vehicle and I was driven through miles and miles of tea gardens before I reached the guest house. They were apparently very pleased to have me there. I was being treated like a son-in-law visiting his in-laws place .

I wanted to take a long stroll along the tea gardens and have a hot cup of tea.
However I had a long day ahead and was not in a mood to ask for favours ... for If I did , I knew a dozen people would be summoned to take care of my wishes. In any case , all I wanted was to be left alone. They were overdoing their hosptality and that was kind of getting me a little annoyed.

And so it was not until the next day when I was about to leave that I asked my appointed driver if he could drive me into a tea garden for a hot cup of tea.

He took me to a tea garden. That was when I had an up and close view of the source of my addiction .
Among a lot of other things I learnt , that the top two leaves were the most aromatic and tender.
Typically they got imported to ‘phoren’ countries and what we got in our local market was the tea dust or the coarse lower leaves , I was told.

It was drizzling on and off and the weather had a moist air about it.
An old man , who ran a small shelter in the tea garden adjoining the tea factory got us our cups of tea …

This tea did not have any ginger … and the milk was sparse… but it was divine.
And that was when I warmed up to the real aroma of Assam tea .

Tea has a subtle aroma for which one needs to develop a taste and smell to appreciate … I was told it is the top two leaves ,which have this aroma in abundance .
I asked if I could take some home. He packed for me two huge packets, wrapped in an assamese newspaper . He did not weigh or measure it . But I guess it must have been atleast 2 kgs of tea . He refused to take money , so I had to thrust a Rs . 100 note onto him.

Drinking tea has never been the same again … with these tea leaves … I would never boil the tea leaves them in hot water … but brew them for 5 mts after the water had boiled . I learnt that tea leaves are not to be boiled but brewed … just like James Bond’s Martini … shaken but not stirred .

Gradually the quantity of milk from my tea got lesser and lesser … ginger seemed like an rude intruder coming in the way of the heavenly aroma of Assam tea … and so it was with sugar …I could do with less ...and speaking about ginger it was unnecessary.

My stock of Chai from the tea garden in Silchar started to deplete… but the memories remained.
Occassionally I would indulge a little by buying an expensive tin of ‘Assam Tea ’ from the upmarket departmental stores in the city. But the tinned tea was not quite the same.

I drifted back to normal Tea , with milk, sugar and ginger.
But by now I had cultivated a taste for real tea…

One of these years, after the annual alumni dinner , our group stormed into Shetty’s for another cutting chai…Strangely , the such sought after cutting chai at Shetty’s now felt repulsive...

It was too overboiled … too sugary … mmm… I did not complain … but gulped it down as though it was castor oil …

For if you have cultivated a taste for the wine and champagnes straight from the vineyards in France …would you not say that about your local toddy …