by Namitha Varma
She was making coffee, as usual. He could never understand her obsession with coffee. He could not understand why the coffee had to be just so hot, why she needed it black, why even an extra pinch of sugar was unsavoury. He secretly thought she was mad – no, not mad about coffee, but mad to be so obsessed with something so silly as coffee.
He watched as she rattled the kettle, shuffled the cups and poured herself the coffee. Her full hips swayed as she moved about and her hands quivered as if in anxiety that the coffee won’t taste just right. As if she was trying to please someone by drinking a fussily-made coffee. It was just maddening. He went back to his reading – she could afford to worry about coffees because she had a job; he was yet to pass his post-graduate exams.
***
She slurped on her coffee from her favourite mug. He had gifted her the mug last Valentine’s. It had a cute picture of them embossed on it. They were holding hands over a restaurant table that had a couple of cocktails and a plate of chicken wings on it. Her friend had clicked the picture last December when they had taken her to an expensive all-American joint. She knew that a lot of her friends hung out with her because she could afford to take them to fancy places in Mumbai. While her friends toiled in showrooms and BPOs and insurance agencies, she took home a fat salary after staring at Excel sheets all day in a sanitised air-conditioned cabin. Even her boyfriend, she knew, tolerated her quirks because she never asked him to share the rent or pay for dinners, and she always got him extravagant gifts.
She turned and watched him study. She wished she could go back to academics, go back six years and change a few things, go back to the days when coffee was just a drink, not a ritual that had to be followed to the dot….
***
It was in August six years ago that her parents last came to stay with her. She hadn’t been home in two years at the time, busy studying for her Master’s in Business Administration, so the family time was welcome. Moreover, it was rare that her parents came to stay with her – they preferred their farmhouse in Ooty, cozy and self-sufficient, to the hubbub of Mumbai. She’d left Ooty when she was just 18 to do her college in the metro. Her father could afford it, and her mother, though protective, wanted her to “find herself”. And find herself she did. She was so lost in self-discovery – learning that she preferred friends from humble backgrounds, real people, to the richer, fashion-toting belles, knowing the limits of her tolerance, having sex and knowing what part of it she liked the best, experimenting with alcohol – so much of herself there was to discover, that her family and their lives faded out of her consciousness. Each year she went back it took enormous amounts of tolerance and curiosity to like her mother’s food, her father’s non-stop chatter, the interfering questions of her relatives.
So when her parents came to stay that August, it was like beginning afresh. She forebore, with a little impatience, her mother’s attempts to cleanse her wardrobe, her father’s advice on maintaining the house, her mother’s rearrangement of the kitchen… and she felt proud and mature that she did not snap at them. But it also felt factitious – it felt quite like the new in-laws were visiting her – she did not know how grown-up children should behave with their parents, she hardly remembered their ways, she had to adjust to them all over again.
The only thing she could not tolerate during that visit was the number of black coffees made throughout the day. Why did the two of them fuss so much over this caffeine drink? Her mother insisted that a glassful of water had to be boiled with a teaspoonful each of sugar and coffee-powder – a little less or more and the coffee would have to be re-made. Her father always wanted the coffee at the perfect drinkable temperature – he couldn’t tolerate if it was so hot it would scald his tongue, nor if it was too cold to swallow in a mouthful.
One evening she’d finished work early and come home to the horrid smell of coffee (not again, she’d murmured), the family sat around the table while her mother laid a plate of vadas and three steaming cups of coffee. She slurped on the revolting liquid and finished it in a couple of minutes, while her father watched the wisps escaping the cup till he thought the liquid was ready for consumption. She felt annoyed. Her mother was busy chewing on the vadas – no one said a thing.
“Mama, why do you make the coffee so strong? I like it sweeter,” she said impatiently.
Her parents stared at her with hazy eyes – for a moment it felt surreal, as if they weren’t there with her at all, as if they and she were on different planes of existence. They exchanged glances, and she knew there was something they wanted to tell her. She hated people glancing at each other meaningfully; she felt frightened of the language of the eyes. There would be something unexpected – had they found a man for her to marry?
“Paru, we have something to tell you,” her mother finally said.
“Your mother and I have decided to separate.” Her father did not meet her eye, but continued to sip on his coffee.
She stared at them blankly. Separate? Divorce? Why? How? How many years had they been married? 29? Why now? What was wrong?
“But we’ll make sure that the separation does not affect you in any way. I’m going away for a few months – to your chitti’s place – and your father will remain in Ooty. I’m going to be in Chennai after that. Half of your father’s property is going to be bequeathed to me, and I’m going to sell it – rather, your father’s going to pay me the cash equivalent…” her mother was babbling on. ‘Your father’, coming from her mother, had always sounded possessive, inclusive. But now, it sounded foreign. As if she was washing her hands off the possession. “…and the rest of his property will be yours. And of course, whatever I own after this will be yours too. You won’t be affected by this separation. You won’t lose anything.”
How easy it was – weigh everything in terms of money and hand it over to the parties concerned. How clinical, how impersonal. They would not have to count the memories that could yet have formed for her, of a family. But then again, she had left them years ago to discover herself. What right did she have to demand any kind thought from them?
She gave up her vacant stare, nodded to the expectant eyes of her parents – what did they expect? acceptance? support? anger? denial? – and walked to the stove. She poured a glassful of water into the kettle and added a teaspoon each of sugar and coffee-powder to it. She boiled the coffee and poured it out into a cup, and waited for it to cool down enough to avoid scalding her tongue. She looked back at the table – empty cups and crumbs on the plate felt like a symbol of a new life.
