Me and my coffee, with others and theirs

I have one daily ritual. 

Every day, after lunch, I head downstairs from my office for a breath of air. I like this little toasty walk in the afternoon sun. It is one of three ways I demarcate my day into quarters. 

Downstairs, I buy myself a cup of filter coffee - a south Indian cortado if you will - one of the few things that you can still buy in India for Rs. 15. 

The place that affords me this daily joy is a darshini across the street. 

A darshini is a south Indian fast-food joint that serves some of the slowest, all-vegetarian food in the world.* Dosas, idlis, and vadas, of a dozen varieties - all of which are the product of batter made of lentils and grains, over days of soaking, grinding, and fermenting. Quick, clean, fresh, inexpensive. 

Vada, filter coffee, masala dosa: the triumvirate of any darshini

The city I call home houses 5000 darshinis. But the 5000 monthly visitors of any single darshini** can never be sure if we fully even exist in the eyes of the joint. 

The darshini is built like a three-walled garage - and decorated like one too. Bare, with a few stray tables, counters and the kitchen on the far end. You and a hundred others enter through where the fourth wall might have been. You walk straight to the cashier, pay for your order, and then go pick up your food. You’re free to sit where you want to, or more likely, stand where you can. A darshini’s signature hospitality move is to be indifferent to your presence.

Unless you’re a regular, in which case the cashier might spare you the baleful look when you don’t have change and you stall the line for 2 minutes -  the service time for about 12 idlis.

“1 coffee, less.” I say, mimicking darshini-speak. (No one here has the time - it appears - to say “sugarless”.)  The cashier’s fingers move in a rapid blur over the machine as he rings up my order. I take my receipt and scramble over to the coffee counter.

When you’re in a darshini, you have no time to waste. 

I hand my receipt to the man in charge of coffee. He beams a toothy, wide grin and gets down to it. He picks up a steel cup no bigger than a shot glass and fills up a fourth of it with filter coffee decoction. He then grabs what I would call a saucepan. (To him, it’s a ladle.) Angling it aerodynamically, he swoops it down and dunks it into a vat of boiling milk, scoops up the right amount of milk, and in a singular smooth motion that almost seems like a rehearsed dance move, positions the giant ladle three feet above the cup. He then tilts his hand and pours from the saucepan into the itty-bitty cup in his other hand. I watch in almost rapture as a triangular steaming sheet of milk falls from mid-air into the cup. 

A frothy, foamy cup of filter coffee is produced. Deft, efficient, graceful. 

I smile - mostly to myself - pleased that I get front row seats to this performance, all in the price of the coffee itself. I had my day as a barista in an American cafe, but this really feels like a minor feat, mastered only by coffee and chai sellers of this country.  

Picking up my beverage, I beeline to the exit. I make my way through the hustle and bustle careful not to get in anyone else’s way, but I am more attuned to my coffee. I can’t have it scalding my fingers from swooshing around, or, god forbid, spilling over and going to waste on the floor.

Outside, I pick my spot on the sidewalk, leave behind darshini-time and slide myself into malavika-time. 

Cradled by the flavour of the coffee grounds jostling for space amid the chicory, the touch of the hot steel cup, the sound of other clanging pots and pans, and the smell of home, I retreat into a kind of blissful nowhere inside my soul.

Slow, peaceful, easy, I soak it all in.

Around me, I see fellow travellers allowing themselves a pitstop in their days.  

There is something sweet about having a window into another person’s moment with their beverage or snack. A woman with her hair ruffled by the wind and her worries inscribed all over her face, sinks her teeth into a golden brown vada and the tension in her muscles instantly melts away. A bearded looking senior man who seems accustomed to being important takes in his first mouthful of tender coconut flesh and momentarily, almost loses himself. Groups of men in uniforms, disrupted only by haphazardly slung ID cards on their necks, chattering away raucously are at once silenced by the arrival of their dosas.

I can almost hear the crunch, the slurp, the first bite. Instantly, the air around feels less stiff. The cumulative serenity in the atmosphere is elevated. 

Each time I watch someone in their moment of settling into a snack or beverage, I feel like I’ve witnessed something pure, honest, even vulnerable. An individual giving herself permission to take a break. Which might even be why it feels so unusual to spot a darshini customer interested in the crowd around them. 

Everyone around me inside and outside the darshini seems to be in a private haven of their own making. One that immunises them from - and perhaps curiously thus beckons - another’s gaze.  

On the outside chance someone catches my eye as I people-watch through my slow-coffee, I smile. A mutual moment of shared peace.

Mostly, I luxuriate in our shared sense of being unwatched - the slice of unlikely freedom in a work day and social life of constant performance. 

How lovely and rare to have a moment in our days to just be, like this. 

How lovely that darshinis have invested in making us feel like we don’t matter, just so we can have our moment to be, like this.

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* Another story awaits writing on why darshinis only serve vegetarian fare.

** I’m ball-parking here, since darshinis are built to make in volume what they cannot in pricing.

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A big thank you to

Sairam Sundaresan

and

CansaFis Foote

for feedback on earlier drafts of this piece.