Now I find myself longing for a certain kind of scarcity, of rarity, of the effort required in missing something, and then getting it

It’s funny how the grass is often greener on the other side of time. What set me thinking about this was a recent off-hand remark by a friend. Sitting in a garden in London, enjoying the summer weather, we began to discuss the relatively new fad of cold-brew coffee and how it was taking over the trendy cafes in the city. “London, what London?” growled my pal from Bombay, “You also get this cold-brew nonsense in Bandra now.” I raised an eyebrow but only slightly. “Bandra? Really?” My friend grinned. “Aisa duniya mein kuch nahi hai, rey, jo Bandra mein nahi milta! (There is nothing in the world, rey, that you don’t get in Bandra.)”

This reminded me that my own introduction to proper coffee took place in Sion, not too far from Bandra.

Growing up in a Gujarati household in 1960s Calcutta, one’s nose was caught in an olfactory parentheses between two kinds of tea, the thick, sweet, masala-powered Gujju chaah and the more watery, far less sweet Bengali chaa of the tea-shops. Coffee meant instant powder, either from a Nescafe tin or a brand called Polson’s, followed in the late 60s by the entry of Bru which came additionally powered by something called ‘chicory’.

Visiting Bombay with my parents, staying with their friends D-Mashi and P-Mama, I caught a whiff of something strange that P-Mama was drinking with his morning cigarette. I asked what it was and they half-filled a small steel tumbler and handed it to me for a taste. It was my first encounter with South Indian filter kaapi and I loved it.

You could get Madrasi coffee in Cal, of course, but somehow that didn’t happen very often and my first long engagement with non-instant coffee was when I went to college in America. After two years of canteen-drip, and the bubbling of those odd, rickety, glass-topped aluminium pots that older, rural Americans love, I moved to New York and was introduced to the love of my life when a Puerto Rican student neighbour in my Lower East Side tenement made me a cup of espresso on a stove-top mocha device.

Outside on the streets you got three variations of this strong, dark brew. The Italian places served espresso of Italian blends, the Latino cafes served the Puerto Rican blends and the Cuban joints did the version closest to Gujju tea, a milky yet strong cup called café con leche (coffee with milk). After a year and a half in the Big Grapple, I was weaned off almost all other kinds of coffee forever. Only under desperation or duress would I now drink instant, drip, French press or American bubble-boil, though Madrasi filter-coffee retained its happy hold, it’s chicory-chain, on my palate.

Intimately exotic

I finished my American sojourn and took a plane back to India in mid-1982, stopping in London for a few days to hang out with a close desi friend. Everything in summertime London was great, different, exotic, quaint, stylish and intimate compared to the New York I’d become used to. You could smoke on the underground, you could drink openly on the street without needing to hide your alcohol in a brown bag, the white natives were far more racist (and, unlike in NYC, they knew you were a sub-continental and yes, it was specifically you they hated) but they also called you ‘mate’ or ‘love’ while serving you. The bitters and ales were far superior to the industrial incontinence that passed for beer in America (this was well before the micro-brewery revolution took over Yankland), and the pubs were lovely, with their oddly shaped glasses and mugs.

The only problem was, food-wise, London seemed like a hick town—there seemed to be no decent Italian, Mexican or Japanese places, and worst of all, no proper coffee, forget espresso, no non-instant coffee at all. I was carrying my mocha machine and a tin of Italian espresso but that had to be saved for home, for Calcutta, when I would begin to deeply miss New York.

And so, British tea (rather than bad instant coffee) it was for the 10 days I stayed in provincial London. Nearly 40 years can change a lot of things. If, as the cliché went, in the early 80s, Bombay was the Indian equivalent of New York to Calcutta’s London, that comparison now seems absurd. London has become one of the great food cities in human history, at least equal to New York in cosmopolitan variety and quality, if not better. Bombay now deserves its very own denomination; despite the desperate attempts by Shiv Sena and the Hindutvaliban to turn it into a provincial backwater, Aamchi Bombay retains its cosmopolitan energy and originality, not to mention the fact that you can now get everything in Bandra.

Oddly, but yes

Calcutta hasn’t progressed much, but even there you no longer need to be desperate for a decent pizza or a cup of espresso. In fact, between Spencer’s supermarket and its overpriced extra virgin olive oil, sashimi, Danish feta, and Indian-made bocconcini balls, and the still extant pice-hotels, with their typical, cheap but tasty Bangla food, you can say the city has its own range of food, an odd range but a range.

The thing is, this hyper-ubiquitous availability of everything everywhere can become a bit tiresome. The old joke may still be true of Paris (“Where is the best Indian restaurant in Paris?” “Oh, go to Gare du Nord, take the Eurostar to London King’s Cross and the desi restaurant strip on Drummond Street is right there!”) but in London one can, without any effort, locate Polish, Somali or Brazilian grocery stores, not to mention the many aircraft-hangar-sized stores that sell every kind of Indian produce from chow-chow to chana jor garam. You may struggle to find good South Indian food in Rome or Berlin but it won’t be long before frozen Ilish maachh (Padma, not Ganga) and pui shaak become visible in local Bangladeshi grocery stores. The ultimate nightmare, of course, is that a day will come when there will be no Hapus to be had in India outside maybe the Maharashtra-Goa region but no shortage of it in London, New York or San Francisco.

Putting aside the tectonic bowel-movements of international markets for a moment, something in a person of my age finds itself longing for a certain kind of scarcity, of rarity, of the effort required in missing something, of waiting for it and then getting it, but in small precious quantities that force you to savour it with attention. When I actually faced these scarcities, I used to hate them; from this side of the decades, I’ve begun to appreciate them. And, as for the coffee, I used to calculate how much I needed to take back to Calcutta from America or the U.K., but last year, I actually considered taking a few packets of my preferred blend from India when I left to go abroad.

And, as a further indication of how much things can come around over time, there is the recipe on a fancy American food website to help this latest fad of making cold-brew coffee. The ratio of beans to water should be high; grind the beans extremely coarsely and pour over the water; steep the beans for about 12 hours; strain the coffee liquor and refrigerate it; take out and add milk and/ or sugar when you want to drink it. Reading this, I realise this is pretty close to the instant cold coffee we used to make—pour hot water over the powder, put in fridge or, with South Indian filter, steep the coffee overnight, refrigerate, and then follow normal procedure. I may not remember the taste of the latter two with pleasure but sometimes I do miss the the times when we didn’t know better.

The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary. He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta.