My struggles with coffee

For most of my life I have been a tea person. Nothing fancy like chamomile or oolong or any of the other stuff that people drink with their little pinkies in the air. Just regular working-class chai, made with black tea powder, milk, and sugar. Here is how you do it. You first boil the water on low flame, add the tea powder (or leaves), and give the concoction some time to wake up. Then, you put in the sugar and optionally ginger, cardamom, or whatever else your sick heart desires. You set the flame to high and a couple of minutes later, add milk. Of course, there are some people who, unable to control their vulgar impulses, put everything together in one go. These people should be arrested and locked up for good, but I will post a petition on Change.org for that later.

About a year ago, something changed. I have always treated coffee with the politeness that is reserved for acquaintances. To me, coffee is the silver medalist of beverages. It is almost tea but not quite. Every house keeps a small ration, just in case they run out of tea and guests arrive who are not important enough to have the youngest of the family make a tea-run to the supermarket. I know this is not universally true. I am sure any red-blooded Tamilian reading this is already making plans to assassinate me and wondering how many bushels of coffee beans would hide the smell of a decomposing body.

But for large swathes of the civilized world, it is tea, and not coffee that rules the roast. So it was for me too until about a year ago, when I had occasion to travel to the UK. There I met an American who, every day during breakfast, gulped down an entire pot of black coffee. No sugar or cream or any of the other accessories that make coffee tolerable. I had never tasted unsweetened black coffee before, so I tried it. It was horrible. It tasted like the devil’s diarrhea. I could not understand how anyone could drink it willingly. Then I realized that this is one of those things called ‘acquired tastes’. You require perseverance and determination to like it.

So as a character building exercise, I started drinking a cup of black coffee every day. It wasn’t easy. I hated going to the coffee machine in the office because of the danger of having to participate in small talk. But as I found out, this danger was outweighed by the warm glow of admiration that I felt when people saw me press the espresso button on the machine. In my mind, I finally became a grown-up. I was no longer a child hankering after sweet things.

As the weeks passed, I started looking forward to this special time in the morning. The coffee still tasted like blended poop and cockroach juice but the silent encouragement of the adoring masses huddled around the coffee machine egged me on. I started to enjoy the caffeine buzz. I settled into a routine where I would have a shot of espresso and then head to the gym. My workouts were going great. I felt energetic throughout the day. Soon, I developed a higher tolerance for the stuff. One shot was no longer enough, so I ramped up the intake to two. And then three and then four. I was bouncing off the walls by 10 AM.

Over the next few months, the habit really took over my life. I started drinking at home. I was ordering bottles of Nescafe in bulk. I was up to five or six cups a day. If I could have taken it intravenously, I would have. As some of you may be aware, an unfortunate effect of caffeine is that it acts as a diuretic. I was using the bathroom to ‘drain the main vein’ every 20 minutes. I have always had a hard time falling asleep and the caffeine aggravated this problem. I would stay awake for one, sometime two nights in a row, furiously binge-watching Netflix. Two seasons of Fargo, two seasons of Narcos, and three seasons of The Inbetweeners went by in a blur. I stopped working out. I felt tired all the time. I developed dark circles under the eyes which I hid with make-up. Some of my colleagues started to notice. “You look pretty and yet exhausted. You should stop drinking so much coffee,” someone would say. I would respond by punching them in the stomach and draining the main vein over their limp body as they keeled over. After the first few times this happened, they stopped asking.

Then, one day, I hit rock bottom. I absent-mindedly left a mug on the living room table and wandered off to the bathroom. When I got back, I found Sia hunched over the mug. The visual was so stirring that my paternal instincts kicked in. I ran over, knocked the mug off the table, and hugged her and sobbed loudly. “Not my daughter! Not my daughter!” I cried. After a few seconds, Sia removed herself from the hug and pointing at my armpits, said, “Papa, bad smell is coming from there.” This made me cry even harder because the sentence was grammatically incorrect. That day was a turning point. I threw away all the coffee that I had, except for one small bottle which I now keep under lock and key.

I have since switched to a healthier lifestyle. I only have coffee during social occasions or when I really really want to have it. And even when I do have it, it is never more than one cup a day. I have also found a better alternative—whisky. A glass of scotch a day makes the doctor pray, as the saying goes. Whisky is really great. I no longer have problems sleeping. I don’t really like the taste but I think it will grow on me.