Cup that Cheers
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).