The air gets thinner and the rich aroma
of coffee mixed with chicory caresses my senses as I wait at the
dusty little bus stop. A crowd of men patiently wait the next bus to
take them into the neighbouring towns, the traffic is but a few
jeeps ferrying to and fro from the mountains blanketed with coffee
plantations.
The faint sun glints off the stainless
steel utensils hung in the bazaar while a sweeper quietly sweeps the
road adding to the dust circling around the road. Sounds of hymns and
prayers arise from the temple nearby, a woman in a red saree hunches
over making a ritualistic design with rice powder welcoming
prosperity into her home.
A coffee grinder goes full throtle
grinding up coffee beans and chicory into the perfect elixir of the
south indian morning. The ground beans make it to the coffee filter a
must for every home in the region, the bigger the filter the bigger
the family. The coffee powder thus concocted is pressed, squeezed and
mixed with milk and sugar only to be built into a froth with a
practised art passed down through centuries. It is then poured into
multiple steel pint glasses set inside tumblers, so that one can practice the frothing whooshing
action for oneself before sipping the filter
coffee which is a foriegn pleasure. The legend that any tour guide in
the sleepy town of Chikmanglur will endorse, tells a story of Baba
Budan who smuggled the first beans of coffee from Arab merchants and
planted it amongst the tall teak trees laced with pepper vines.
Since then the coffee was embraced as
an integral part in the land of chai drinkers. The mountains which
nurse the coffee beans have an etheral feeling to them much like the heady
sweet coffee. The tall trees punctuated with coffee plants where an
occasional peacock flits through transports me to a prehistoric time
. The ride up to the coffee plantation
in the back of an old jeep acts as the perfect time machine.
The plantation with the quaint guest
house reeks of coffee as it gets roasted and dried and packed. A
gurgling stream which cut through the plantation imparts its earthy
taste to the coffee beans as they sway and dance among the
leaves.
All I can hear are the monkeys
chattering in the trees, the brook babbling and the birds chirping as
I sit sipping my cup as they tell me the story of coffee.
