Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee.

Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home.

After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India.

Coffee returned to my life another decade later when I married because Maggie is fond of coffee – not filtered, however, the instant variety of it. Nescafe was followed by Bru because the blend of chicory in the latter added a peculiar earthy flavour to the coffee. Instant coffee is too bitter if it’s black. So Maggie whitens our coffee with Everyday dairy whitener. Nowadays we are discovering the various flavours of Tata coffee, especially Classic, Premium, and Gold.

We never have it in the morning, however. The morning sip is always plain red tea with a dash of lemon. Coffee is reserved for the evening brew.

Coffee, like life, changes its flavour with time. Maybe because there aren’t many good memories that linger in my life from childhood, I have never missed black coffee in my adulthood. Maybe, this is how life is: rituals evolve, flavours shift, likes change.

Back then, in my childhood, we produced our own coffee powder. Yes, we had quite many coffee bushes around our ancestral home. A few of them still remain and my brother looks after them. He sells the dried beans. Maybe, he too doesn’t want his childhood flavours to linger.

Yesterday, I started reading Arundhati Roy’s book on her mother, Mother Mary Comes to Me. I ordered the copy quite reluctantly because I knew her childhood wasn’t a happy one either. She and I were born in the same period, she being just a year and a half younger than me. Most children who grew up in that period in Kerala wouldn’t have had happy childhoods. That’s my understanding.

After much hesitation, I ordered “Mother Mary’s” biography by her daughter. Merely because Arundhati Roy is irresistible. I am in the initial pages of the book now and the deep agony in the lines, the agony of a little girl who grew up in Kerala of the 1960s, reminds me of my bitter mornings sweetened by lumps of jaggery.

Right in the first chapter, Arundhati Roy informs us how she left her mother soon after school, at the age of 16. “I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible.”

I left my home and all its clockwork rituals after school, at the age of 15. Black filtered coffee was one of the rituals. Was mother another? I won’t tell. Certain things are hard to tell. So, I shall continue to have my red tea and experience all the turbulent emotions that “Mother Mary” is going to create in me in the days to come. As daughter Roy says in the book, we need our tormentors too. 

PS. This post wasn’t intended at all. Blogchatter’s blog hop prompt for this week provoked it in spite of myself.