Vintage Beverages

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Like in Wheat & Rice:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2011/10/wheat-rice.html

post-Independence India of the 1950s can be divided into two irreconcilable cultures: Coffee & Tea.

RKN has written extensively on the Coffee Culture of his South India. But not about Tea in the deep South, because it was just not there.

My Father's household (about 10 strong) was finding it tough to serve Coffee to visitors and maid servants (both partly welcome). Because Coffee was becoming too expensive and laborious...one has to buy a Filter Pot which was made of two vertical compartments like the heinous Kipp's Apparatus in the Chemistry Lab, separated by a metallic grid like the Control Grid of the Vacuum Triode, dump some coffee powder and pour boiling water and close the lid and wait for 12 hours for the decoction to seep down...Instant Coffee was unknown.

So there appeared in the Nellore Market two grades of Brooke Bond Tea Packets, one red and the other green. The cheapest is for the maids and was called Dust Tea. And for visitors a slightly costlier called Semi-Leaf. Full-Leaf was unknown and when I asked my Father, if such a thing exists, he kept quiet like a good teacher, unlike me.

Buying a packet of Tea is kid's play; even I could do it. But what to do after buying it was left to mothers who never believed in asking others for instructions. So, my mother used to take a big enough vessel and pour as much water in it as is required and add a little milk and add a pinch of sugar (if the visitor is welcome) or gud (molasses) and boil it on the chulha till the concoction threatens to overflow and bring down the vessel and take a piece of old cotton sari and pour the brew down the membrane and squeeze the sari piece with all her might till the yield stops and keep the sari piece aside and fill up a tumbler and pass it on. And when the maid comes, repeat the process...only this time no fresh tea dust is used...the soakings of the earlier sari piece are recycled, again and again...

To this day...

If it is summer, I was asked to go down to the Bus Stand and fetch a couple of soda water bottles, with the opener, leaving the change as imprest with the shopkeeper.

I used to enjoy this exercise. The soda chap had a machine with a handle that can be cranked. He would take half a dozen specialized blue glass bottles of thickest gauge each with a weird kink in its neck that holds a huge glass marble that can't sink below its throat but can dance and go up to the mouth of the bottle where it acts as a stopper. These bottles would normally be filled with plain water. And kept in their grooves in the machine. And connect the inlet pipe to a long metal cylinder which I came to know had compressed Carbon Dioxide (?) in it. And he opens the throttle and cranks the machine 21 times if you don't count and 22 times if you insist that he not cheat. And open the machine and take out the bottles filled with Carbonic Acid and pass them on at twenty bottles for a Rupee.

I used to bring the bottles home and hand the opener to my Father. He would hold a bottle against his ribs and push the opener with all his might. The glass marble would give and sink down to the bottle's throat with as mighty a sound as the greatest sneeze ever. The bottle would be passed on to the guest and he would quickly hold it to his mouth and attempt to drink it before the 'gas' leaks out. And would have tears in his eyes.

If the Visitor is a VIP (like the District Collector to the High School), the HM's Peon with his khakhi uniform and a dawal would be sent to the soda shop. This proud dawal is a thick khakhi belt worn across the shoulder and its buckle holds a brass showpiece with the ornamental lettering: Government of India.

And in half an hour the Peon would arrive with a crate of soda water bottles. The first one would be served to the Collector; and the soda water in his bottle would look RED. And the HM would say: "Please have COLOR!" And the rest of mankind would be given the regulation colorless bottles. The COLOR is just like the janata model except that a little of ESSENCE would be added to it...it would smell oranges and taste sweet.

GRR, my eldest B-i-L told me that when he was in his High School as a student, their District Collector arrived one day and he was served COLOR in public...the urchin GRR decided then and there that he would one day become Collector...

He was like Arjun...single-mindedly he achieved his ambition and he became Collector of Dharmapuri. And he asked me to visit him and I did quickly because by his time there was such a huge demand to become Collector from his junior IAS folks that he was brought back to the Secretariat at Madras within 10 months.

There was this bright batchmate of mine at AU, Waltair who was very smart and loved to mix with Physics folks. But he chose to do his MA in Economics...just to become IAS Collector. And he did.

There was a time at IIT KGP before the Dawn of IT Revolution when every other topper in Physics wanted to become IAS Collectors, and many did. I recall one youngster, Umakanta Chowdhury, who was in EE and in my Optics Class. He was sitting in the front row and taking down every word I said; and at the end of the Semester, I stole his Class Notes and got it bound and used it subsequently. It became the breadboard for the Lecture Notes I published with RSS a decade and half later.

Umakanta came down to my Room when he was in his Final Year and asked me if he could borrow his Class Notes for a couple of months. I asked him what for. And he said he is preparing for IAS and he chose Physics as a Special Paper. You may hear of him one day like our Subba Rao and Dharam Vir.

Maybe he too wanted to have a COLOR soda in his heart of hearts...



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