Ode to missed opportunity or why it could-not-have-been (after all)

I have a fascination for good coffee

But I try not to make it too often

With coffee I associate conversation

And your company

(tea does not have to suffer such associations)

Sometimes when the coffee is particularly good

I dreamily remember what could-have-been

Times that could-have-been spent together,

Conversations that could-have-been had

(It never happened though,

we were never good friends.

But I could never forget

that which could-have-been)

We could-have-had long conversations

over restless starry nights

We could-have-had long make out sessions

over quiet lazy afternoons

(We would most certainly have led a most decadent life.)

As I sip my lonely coffee

This dim October afternoon

And the building opposite reflects tobacco light

Into my room

You return to your house,

resounding with the laughter of children

and without a doubt I know why…

(apologies for bad poetry :D)

Of eavesdropping on conversations in cabs...

So I overheard this rather interesting conversation today.

It so happened that I landed up in a cab with a stranger in the front  passenger seat. Cabs were hard to come by today, and we were both headed in the same direction- the cab guy was gracious enough to suggest that I hop on as well, (for he had taken on the other guy first,) and the dark, lanky passenger nodded his agreement.

As soon as the cab started the lanky boy in the front seat started fiddling with the newspaper on the dashboard.

Ye aaj ka hai?

Nahin, kal ka. Aaj ka nahin hai mere paas.

Arre, aaj ka paper dekhne ka hai.

Kyun, kya hua.

Burma mein logon ko kaat rele hain.

(Incredulous) Acchha?

Haan, bahut logon ko. Bacchon ko bhi nahin chhod rahe. Ek mahine ke bacche ka sar kaat dala. Usi ke liye log jama hai Azad Maidan pe.

Acchha? Kyun maar rahen hain.

Kya maloom, bahut kuchh to gadbad kiya rahega.

Ye Burma kidhar hai?

Nepal ke baju mein.

Acchha. matlab India mein hai?

Nahin. India mein nahin hai. India mein Assam mein maar rele hain. Kaat ke phhenk rele hai.

Acchha? TV pe dikha rahen hain ye sab.

Nahin, TV pe kahan. Sab daba dete hain aisi khabar ko. Kahin nahin milegi, na TV pe, na paper mein.

Cabdriver gets a phone call- his mom has called to apprise him of the trouble at Azad Maidan, and to ask him not to go there. He speaks to her, hangs up and relates the news to us.

At this point, my destination is near. Much as I would have liked to hear more of this conversation between the very interesting passenger and the simple, rather ignorant and easily believing cab driver, I had to ask the cab to slow down. The lanky guy shuffled around as I paid up, he got out of the cab and left without offering to share the fare.  As I entered the building, I realized he was there in the foyer, not ignoring me but not acknowledging either. We entered the lift together, and got off at the 10^th floor. On the way I stole a couple of glances at him- there is something oddly familiar about him. He waits for me to get out first. Chivalry, I thought, or has he just decided to let me lead the way since I obviously know where I’m headed.

I was late, and even though I was curious to at least ask his name, or check if he has come for the screening, (in which case I would have asked him to come with me,) I just rush through to the theatre. A minute after I find myself a seat, I see him walk past and sit a few rows ahead. The first film has ended and the second one begins.

And there he is, on the screen. Videokaaran.

Bhutan Diary 6: Coffee and conversation in Bhutan

Back to Norzin Lam, which was feeling more and more like home ground, and we decided to try Khamsa again. We were freezing, and that seemed like a good reason to have a cup of coffee, while enjoying the ‘views over the surrounding mountains’. We reached Khamsa at six, and found two girls there, getting ready to close shop. At six? Unbelievable. It didn’t take much pleading though to convince the giggly girls to serve us coffee.



The book I am bent over is the coffee scrapbook at Khamsa. Its an indoor cafe, but it does have a wonderful view

Check out the kiras that the two are wearing. That coupled with the jacket on top is the most common dress for the women. Stripes and checks are very popular for the kiras, while the jacket is typically of a single colour

Khamsa is located on the top floor of a building called Cham Lam Plaza, and it does indeed have a wonderful view of the surrounding mountains, which at that hour were pitch dark, and dotted with lights. It was a nice enough view at night, and must be prettier by day. The coffee was good too, though I preferred Art Café’s fresh ground. Khamsa had a scrapbook full of coffee trivia, articles on coffee, its history, popularity, types etc and a whole series of cartoon strips. Interesting!
On the ground floor of the same building, we found a shop selling North Face jackets. We walked in to enquire. We were expecting to go to Bumthang and had to pick up warm clothes for the trip. The lady at the counter was most friendly and helpful. She showed us North Face jackets, told us what kind we should pick up for the cold we were likely to encounter and then talked us right out of buying anything… she and Ramya were united in their opinion that we should pick up local stuff from Bumthang. Well, I was all for local wear, so I was delighted by the idea. At this point, I should probably mention my consistent but as yet failed attempts at picking up a half kira for myself. I wanted to get something that was traditional, without burning a hole in my pocket, but it seemed just too much to ask. I hadn’t walked past a shopping street without checking out all the kiras on display, and had stepped in to a few shops, only to be disappointed by either the choice, or the price. We still came away with dirt cheap woolen socks, ‘imported from Bangladesh’. Most things in the shops in Bhutan were imported either from Bangladesh or Thailand, and priced accordingly. I had for instance bought a muffler earlier in the day, which had cost me twice of what four pairs of socks together did. I was also forced by Ramya to buy a hat! It was a very daft thing to do, but then I have to admit it did look sweet, with a bow at the back and what not. I cursed Ramya then and threatened to make him carry it, but I bought it anyway. The helpful lady gave us a discount and a travel magazine, for some articles that she thought we might want to read.
Our next stop was this awesome handicrafts shop that we had passed along the way. We walked in to just look around, and ended up spending a good hour browsing through the things on display, and finding out about the significance of anything that caught our fancy. The shop was playing beautiful music, sung by Ani Choying Dolma. The shop had several cds of her music, and the lady there was nice enough to play several tracks for us. The music was simple, with few instruments as accompaniment, but haunting. It was also perhaps one of the most calming pieces of music I have ever heard. We fell in love with it immediately. But uncertain as we were of our plans, not to mention our finances to carry them through, we didn’t pick up any. That is something I regret to this day. We thought we would at the end of the trip if we had any money left, but as it turned out, when it was time to leave, we didn’t find the opportunity.
On the other hand, we did pick up other stuff. There were these wall pieces, faces of the Buddha and princess Tara, that I just could not tear myself away from. I kept going back to the same ones; it was as if they were telling me, with their calm faces and closed eyes, that they belonged elsewhere. So we left the shop considerably poorer, but very pleased with ourselves.
We decided to eat at Comifers that night, which wasn’t easy to find. We were aided as usual by friendly locals who walked us all the way up to the restaurant, even though it was a very cold evening, and they must have been in a hurry to get someplace warm.
Comifers turned out to be a big, cheerful restaurant. It was made merrier still by a whole bunch of youngsters, almost 30-40 of them, who seemed to be having a party. They had taken up most of the tables at the place, and there were few other customers. But we found a lovely place to sit anyway, a comfortable sofa next to the bar, which we plonked ourselves on. The man behind the counter was friendly and talkative. He had been to India on several occasions and studied in Bangalore, so he seemed to connect with us easily. While chatting with him about our travel plans we realized that traveling by public transport may not be easy, for its not very frequent. Buses to Bumthang for instance run only once a week.
In reply to our enquiries about local liquor, he recommended the Bhutanese sake, and dissuaded us from trying the ‘sonfy’, which he said was the poor man’s alcohol and most unavoidable. They didn’t serve either at Comifers, but he arranged a bottle of sake for us anyway. Sake is rice beer, and best had fresh. The sake that we had that evening was a little too bitter for my taste.

Eating at Comifers. The pictures on the wall are of the King and his son, both very handsome men. The Bhutanese seem to love their king. You will find their pictures everywhere, in shops, restaurants and hotels



The food on the other hand was excellent. He helped us with the order, so I’m not quite sure what we had. I believe it was thukpa and a tofu preparation with vegetables and rice. We were so supremely happy by the end of the meal, we just had to round it off with a coffee, which sadly was Nescafe.

Bhutan Diary 4: Coffee and conversation in Thimphu

On the way back we decided to drop in to the Art Café, another recommendation from the printout. This is tucked away in a corner, next to the Swiss Bakery, and even though we were in the right place, it still took us a little while to find it. But was it worth it! It’s a cosy little coffee shop, with a coal heater and great filter coffee. Needless to say we fell in love with it immediately. Sadly it stays open only till 7pm. Obviously the coffee shop culture has not arrived in Thimphu yet. But I did find it strange that a coffee shop should stay open only in the business hours of 9am to 7pm. How do they ever manage to do any business?


A little while later, this guy who I had spotted at several places, starting with the Siliguri bus station, and later Phuntsholing, walked in with his camera bag. I decided it was time to say hello. He was Darshan, an architect from Ahmedabad. He was accompanied by a couple of pretty Bhutanese girls, both of them called Sonam. Both Sonams were very friendly and talkative. We spent some time chatting over coffee. The Art Café was their local hangout, and apparently it serves some great soups and sandwiches. We weren’t hungry, so didn’t try any.

Next on our agenda was a visit to the National Stupa. Our printouts informed us that we if we visited it in the evening, we would come across Bhutanese doing their evening prayers. We asked the two Sonams at Art Café about it, but they seemed unimpressed. To them it was just a stupa, which people visited, mostly old people, and they had not heard of any evening prayers. We decided to go anyway, much to the amusement of the two Sonams. They thought we were the religious variety. Nothing could be further from the truth. But we certainly were interested in observing if not actively exploring, the local culture. The Sonams were so familiar in a way. They were just like the millions of young Indians, dismissive of their indigenous culture, and proud of their English speaking capabilities. This atleast was my first impression, and I do hope I was wrong.
We walked to the National Stupa, and I must admit, I can understand their lack of enthusiasm. The Stupa is well, a stupa. Not much more to write about it. It seemed to have a temple, but the doors were closed, so we couldn’t actually see it. There were a lot of people around, and most of them were hurriedly making rounds of the Stupa, while chanting under their breaths. And admittedly, a lot of them were old. In fact, I got the feeling that a lot of them were on their way back home from work, and were dropping into the Stupa for a quick prayer. Part of the charm of the place is lost because of the construction going on around it. So there was a lot of scaffolding and other construction material lying around. Anyway, we played copycat and made a round of the Stupa, though with our leisurely pace, we couldn’t be more unlike the Bhutanese.
On the way back, we lost our way, and it turned out to be a longer walk than we had intended. It was getting colder and I was thankful for my monkey cap. We dropped in at Khamsa Coffee at the Cham Lam Plaza, another recommendation from the printouts, hoping for a hot cuppa while enjoying ‘the view over the surrounding mountains’, but this was not to be. It was closed, what is it with these coffee shops in Thimphu?
Back to the room in Centre Lodge, and a hot suja later, we were ready for dinner. We went across to Hotel Tandin, another recommendation from the printouts, and had a ‘wine cooler’ while we mulled over what to eat. The ‘wine cooler’ is an artificially flavoured drink that has absolutely no connection with the beverage it borrows its name from. It comes in a variety of flavours and colours. I don’t recall which one we tried, but I have a feeling they will all be equally bad. Tandin seemed to us a place for Indian food. The menu was primarily Indian, and that’s what everyone seemed to be having. So we decided to try MK instead, which claimed to serve Japanese food.




Mk is a more modest place (apologies for no pictures) on the first floor in a building just behind the cinema hall. The menu is displayed on a blackboard, in Japanese. Some had an accompanying explanation in English, but most dishes were written in Japanese. Hell, I really regret not having taken pictures! Anyway, the friendly lady who came to take the order recommended to us a soup, a dish of fried tofu with vegetables and cheese momos. Of course all these had Japanese names, and I could kick myself for not having written them down. The food was interesting, as always. My pick would be the dumplings which had a filling of cheese and some green leaf, possibly spinach.
That was our first day in Thimphu.

Of coffees and conversations past midnight...

There is this phenomenon in Bombay that I haven’t found anywhere else, and that I love… the coffee and cigarette wallahs on cycles that you find standing at roadsides all over the city, late into the night and till the wee hours of the morning. It reminds me of an occasion not so long ago, when I was at a friend’s place in Delhi, meeting up with people I hadn’t seen for many years. The conversation was still going strong, and it was 1am already. I was dying for a cup of coffee but my friend wouldn’t let me make it. He said the sounds from the kitchen would wake up his mother, and then she would insist on making coffee for us, which of course was out of the question since she had been working all day already. The occasion you see was Id, and we had gone across for the feast that has been customary on the occasion at Amin’s place for years now.

But then I was meeting Amin and Punit after many years, and Punit’s wife Kriti, for the first time. And adorable as those two seniors of mine are, they decided that coffee I shall have, come what may. So off we went at that unearthly hour, to look for a measly little cup of coffee. To Noida at first, to two hotels that they thought would have 24 hour coffee shops. One was closed for renovation and the other was just closing, they couldn’t serve us, sorry. And then to Connaught Place, where in only our third attempt (thankfully), we found a coffee shop that was open, and served some utterly disgraceful coffee.
So we paid five star rates for four cups of teas and coffees of varying degrees of respectability, but mostly I guess for the experience of it, the driving around the city and the adventure that was finding those elusive cups!
Contrast this with another occasion, also not so long ago, only this time the setting is Yari road, Andheri. Another set of seniors, this time from FTII and another long night of gupshup. And then the customary running out of cigarettes. So the last few of us still standing step out in the cold, fresh night air of 4am. And go across to the friendly neighbourhood cyclewallah. The smokers, Nilanjan and Kutty get their cigarettes and all three of us enjoy cups of lovely strong coffee. Ok, it may not be the best coffee in the world, and I do admit I’m no authority on the matter. But then again, try having that cup, at 4 am, sitting on the footpath with friends, and discussing films and friends and life and the future. It’s the experience of it… And the beauty of this already priceless experience? It’s cheap!