Coffee to Kahwa: a Love Story…

Someone once asked us, why is life like a coffee?
Drink it too fast, and it burns your tongue. Leave it standing for too long, and it’s tasteless.
It’s not about finishing the cup, it’s about enjoying the coffee, savouring the aroma, the taste, the flavours bursting open on your palate, mixing with your saliva and making love to your tongue.
You might get angry and want to smash the cup on the floor, somedays. It’ll just leave a mess and a stain.
You can click a photo of it, you can post it on your social handle, you can write about it, but coffee is for drinking. And like I said, leave it too long, and before you know it, bam. Room temperature blandness.
Just like life, there’s so many flavours of it. So many people, with their very own cuppas. Some drinking a slow early morning Irish, some a Frappé, and maybe someone’s got a watery, instant crappucino on their hands.
Oh well. C’est la vie. If you’re lucky, they’ve given you some sugar and cream sachets. If not, well. Drink up.

The book fair is one of those quintessential Kolkata events. The city dresses up, high on the post Saraswati Puja and pre-Valentines day mood, and lovers walk hand in hand across (unfortunately well-lit) alleyways into their favourite stalls, browsing through the hearts and minds of their favourite poets and authors. Bauls sing their hearts out on the sidewalks and on impromptu stages, the aroma of fried fish and momos wafts into your nostrils… carried aloft on the balmy twenty-five degree breeze. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch a glimpse of the spirit of Kolkata here, in this very fair- a bespectacled young lady in her late twenties, a packet of Marlboros peeping out of her sidebag, while she loses herself in a book amidst the shelves of the Sahitya Academy stall.
Outside, another beautiful spring breeze rustles through the evening leaves, bringing with it an unfamiliar aroma. Of almonds, of black pepper, bay leaves and tea.

If you have a good nose or a good friend or both, you’ll follow the smell through the now-darkening alleyways and reach the tiny, unremarkable stall of Parvez Ahmad Ghanie. He’s from Kashmir. He sells Kahwa.

A fragrant, sweetly golden liquid that drips out, hot and laced with almond chips, from the spout of an ornate copper samovar. One whiff of it and you’re transported straight back to the Himalayan foothills. Rocks. Mountain flowers. Butterflies. An invisible stream, gurgling nearby. And the taste? Oh it tastes like the mountains too. Harsh and strong at first, erasing all traces of anything else you had on your mouth or your mind before you sipped this divine liquid. And then it comes. A soft, all pervading sweetness that spreads through your mouth, magically following the trail of your lips as they spread wider and wider, into a satisfied, child-like smile.

Kahwa. I fell in love.