Buying gifts for my Gujarati friends in Ahmedabad on my return from Bengaluru has always been an interesting challenge. What does one get for them that is not readily available there, something that is quintessentially South Indian? Then it struck me! Yes, of course! A steel davara -tumbler pair for each one of them would be perfect, as they loved coffee!
For the unversed, a davara-tumbler pair is the conventional South Indian utensil that serves as a cup and saucer to sip the piping hot golden ambrosia called coffee!
Ah! Coffee! The word packs a punch just like the beverage does! Nostalgic memories of coffee beans roasted in the coffee roaster till they turned an oily brown-black and ground in the Lovelock machine and then sealed in an airtight tin came to my mind...This was just the beginning of the filter coffee ritual, which was as elaborate and intrinsic to South Indian culture as the tea ceremony is to Japan!
Mornings were synonymous with the coffee powder being heaped in the upper perforated portion of the filter and gently pressed down. The lower portion of the filter was fixed below and boiling hot water was poured little by little on to the coffee powder. The divine decoction would percolate through the layers of the powder and the whole kitchen would be filled with the heavenly aroma of fresh coffee!
One can take this to a philosophical level where the two parts of the filter are as inseparable as the Jiva and the Atma, the Yin and the Yang and while each complements the other and remains incomplete independently, the essence of life is found at the end! A lesson in Advaita!
Whether it was Bababudan who brought those seven magical beans to Chikkamagaluru in the 16th century is still open for debate. But what is unquestionable is the popularity of filter coffee in South India..
With or without chicory added for consistency, whether it is Robusta over Arabica, whether it tastes better with cow’s milk or with buffalo’s milk are favourite topics for discussion among coffee connoisseurs. Kumbakonam degree kaapi and Coorg coffee are the Gucci and the Armani of the coffee world! And have you heard of the ‘one mile coffee’ sold in the streets of Chennai? Apparently, it is not the brand, but the gravity-defying style in which the beverage is served, where the coffee is poured on to the davara from the tumbler, not by stretching the hands vertically, but horizontally, without spilling any of the frothy liquid!
While the filter coffee ritual is slowly becoming decadent in many households, with the instant coffee varieties being less time consuming, the coffee roaster and grinder have become antiques to be locked up!
But, even after staying away from the South for decades, our family has not given up on filter coffee yet! And so, my friends too taste it when they visit my house. They liked the strong drink! Of course, they wouldn’t know if Peaberry and Robusta were coffee beans or contemporary dance forms! Surely they wouldn’t know the perfect ratio of coffee and chicory powder. But that shouldn’t deny them the pleasure of relishing strong filter coffee in the traditional davara and tumbler... No bone china cup and saucer, please!
So, I visited a steel utensils shop in Bengaluru to buy the davara-tumbler pairs. The amicable shopkeeper was eager to sell his wares. He mentioned that nowadays, sadly this traditional utensil was being replaced by ceramic ones. Once I had selected four identical steel pairs and had paid him a little extra to carefully pack them for my return journey, I asked him where he hailed from. His answer stumped me. He was from Abu Road in Rajasthan!
It felt so surreal that I was buying coffee davara-tumbler steel sets from a shop in Bengaluru run by a Rajasthani shopkeeper for my Gujarati friends back in Ahmedabad! Talk about unity in diversity!
Was this the Karmic cycle of kaapi?
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