‘Coffee tastes more delicious than a thousand kisses’

A Tamil weekly ran a long series of interviews with celebrities. No one got bored even though politicians, industrialists, doctors, engineers, artists, architects and lawyers talked about a single subject with singular rapture. Coffee!

A film director confessed that he attributed all his hits to his thoughtful wife, who sends flasks of homemade filter coffee through the day.  A musician disclosed that she couldn’t sing without the moral support of the elixir beside her. A businessman complained that to be a billionaire meant little when he could not get Madras coffee in Beijing or Brussels. A cricketer said he may forget to take his sports gear on tour, but not his stainless steel filter and coffee powder – both from his native hamlet.  A physicist explained how he liked his coffee, “Hot as hell, black as the devil.”

Though they may want to claim coffee as an indigenous treasure, South Indians have to admit that legend roots it in Ethiopia, where a goatherd discovered his animals cavorting madly after lunching on a wild bush. History describes how quickly that plant cast its spell across the world. Etymology identifies its impact even as the name is traced to Arabic qahwah (suppressing hunger), and quvva (energising power). Bans imposed by ancient mullahs and priests, or modern doctors and dieticians, served only to publicise the “drug”.

We learn that the wonder brew came to South India in the 17th century when Baba Budan, a Haj pilgrim, hid a few coffee beans in his beard, and smuggled them into Chikmagalur, Karnataka.  In no time at all, coffee making became a hallowed South Indian tradition, an art plus science, where inhaling is enchantment, tasting intoxication. A famous Tamil story has two men in heaven launching a protest for rebirth. Amrit may be okay for Aryan gods, but true-blood Dravida needs Kumbakonam degree coffee! 

Every single day South Indian homes witness a morning ritual transforming kitchen into sacramental space. Oblations are prepared with primal elements (water, fire) and holy ingredients (coffee powder, milk, sugar). Techniques and apparatuses have changed drastically, but the goal is the same: to produce a perfect cup of coffee. For the most fastidious taste. “This coffee is fabulous,” my grandma would tell her host, and continue, “All you have to do is add a drop of milk, a pinch of sugar, and reheat for exactly 20 seconds.”

Well, she was an expert. The process began with bargaining for the right peaberry brand – no chicory thank you. Then grandma roasted the green beans over live coals in the verandah, as bits of bean fluff rose up and settled on her hair, forming a quaint sunlit aureole. The roasted beans were stored in an airtight container from which handfuls were ground at need by a manual grinder. This textured powder was dropped into the top cylinder of the brass filter, and boiling water, poured in to  trickle through multiple holes, got decanted into the bottom cylinder.  This thick liquid was removed to prepare a “second” and lighter decoction with the same (now-soaked) powder. Family status determined who got the best coffee with “first” decoction, tempered with fresh cow’s milk, extracted from a live cow before grandma’s watchful eyes. Those down the ladder got the second brew with less refined buffalo milk!  

Today electronic gadgets have ousted old filters. Sachets have replaced cows. However, thanks to my brother’s recent gift of an Italian “moka” coffee maker I have discovered a more manual process. Here boiling water gushes up from a lower chamber through filtering holes and coffee powder, to make a flavourful brew in the upper can. Still, what I make is as close to grandma’s coffee as canned juice is to fresh.   

As I sip this compromise-coffee, an olfactory memory takes me thirty years back to a Tamil musician’s backyard in Melattur village, Thanjavur.  Neem leaves rustle above, cowbells tinkle in the byre beside us. Suddenly I hear a hand-turned coffee grinder rumbling, and milk spurting into a can.  Soon, two brass tumblers arrive with brown gold ambrosia, so hot that you need a handkerchief to hold the container. Another flashback shows me imbibing the strongest and most aromatic coffee I’d ever tasted, in continual shots from tiny cups, as I interview a Magsaysay awardee in remote Heggodu, Karnataka. Made with beans gleaned from the plantation greening around us.

A song from a comic opera pops into my head. A girl sings, “Ah, How sweet coffee tastes! More delicious than a thousand kisses!” And she insists that her marriage contract guarantee her three cups of coffee per day. I wonder: did Johann Sebastian Bach who composed this “Coffee Cantata” get lucky enough to be born a South Indian – perhaps a coffee-crazed Carnatic musician – in his subsequent avatar?

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist