Cup that Cheers….(In a lighter vein)
By Vengrai Parthasarathy
Tea is not the only drink that cheers. The wafting aroma of
coffee, as you loll in the bed in the wee hours of the morning, is a
wake-up call. It sets the blood flowing and prepares even a grouch to
face the world—cheerfully.
”Coffee is to wake up, coffee is to work with, coffee is to
live with, coffee is life”, says Tim Parsons. The very mention of
‘coffee’ tickles the nostrils. The enigmatic aroma of ‘filter coffee’
of Bangalore suffuses the body and one goes into a trance, as it were.
Bangalore may be famous for the blossoming IT Industry, for the Public
Sector undertakings, for its salubrious climate and for its maddening
traffic snarls. But I remember it for a different reason. It is only
in this city that I had heard ‘coffee’ and ‘fractions’ being uttered
in the same breath.
Coffee is not coffee everywhere. If Madras can become Chennai and
Bangalore becomes Bengaluru, will coffee be far behind? In the Railway
platforms in Tamil Nadu one can hear shouts of ‘Kapi, Kapi” which
tastes of some sweetened, brown dish-water. Not authentic coffee, no
sir. In the olden days it used to be said that people would go to
Arakonam railway station for the sake of a cup or two of special
‘degree’ coffee in the railway refreshment room. Authentic coffee, in
a class of its own. But that was then.
Till someone said that ‘half and half’ is a dairy product, I
thought it was a euphemism for the off-spring of an inter-racial or
inter-communal marriage. In USA it is known as a blend of milk and
cream and invariably used for making a perfect cup of coffee, brown
coffee as we know it or café au lait as the French call it. Of course
they also use this French expression to describe the light tan
complexion of pretty girls.
It is time to demystify the coffee-fraction nexus. The
half-and half or fifty-fifty principle went by the Plebian name of
one-by-two in Bangalore. It is well-known that in this city coffee
and happiness are measured in coffee cups.
One-by-two works, rather worked, like this. After a tiring day in
office you and your friend are in a mood for a palate-tuner. So, you
go to the well-known restaurant known colloquially by its initials,
and order ‘One Dosa and coffee’ and add a special injunction, viz.,
one-by-two. Even a half-baked waiter could see that you and your
friend want to go ‘economy class’. He is back in a jiffy (that is to
say in twenty minutes) with the Dosa and coffee equally apportioned in
two plates/cups. There you are, ready to sip liquid manna from heaven.
In time one-by-two doctrine got extended to other items like
Dosa. Now you see the connection? I was. of course, talking of ‘Once
upon a time’ as they say in fairy tales. A few years back when I had
gone to Bengaluru I was in for a surprise. At a restaurant the two
of us ordered a one-by-two appetizer coffee. The waiter, a latter day
bloomer, had not even heard of this expression. He arched his
eye-brows in the form of a question mark. His mental gears were
working furiously, trying to comprehend what we were talking about.
We knew that we had to let it go, instead of explaining the
coffee-fraction Relativity Theory to him. Philosophy has taught us to
take the rough with the smooth, the good with the bad, the full with
the half. So we ordered some items from the menu card .The time had
come, we realized ruefully, for a requiem, for an obituary to a famed
fraction.
But then as they say, when God closes one window, he opens
another. The ubiquitous Pizza is here, there and everywhere. It has
come with a bang through the back door and is served in pre-cut,
triangular segments slowly edging out the ‘butter masala dosa’ of
yore. And one is supposed to take Coke with it, not Coffee. Can you
beat that?
How is the Pizza served? Yes, it is One-by Six. There you go, the
fraction again. But, One-by-Two is no more.(RIP).