I moaned out loud. It seemed our “business” was still operative. Unless I pretended the letter had never arrived; probably the wisest thing to do. Yangi, Yangi, Yangi, I thought, tossing out the postcard. Damn him! Despite all the bullshit, despite all the trouble he had caused me, I still had a soft spot for the bastard.
Monkey Droppings
One need only compare the violent coffee-drinking societies of the West to the peace-loving tea drinker of the Orient to realize the pernicious and malignant effect that bitter brew has upon the human soul.
Hindi dietary tract, anonymous
I’D FIRST MET YANGI FOUR months earlier in a cavernous old coffeehouse in Calcutta. I remember it all quite clearly; the waiters in their white turbans, the socialist posters, the sea of slowly spinning fans heavy with clumped filth. On one wall hung an oil portrait of the poet R. Tagore. He’d been a regular customer when he won his Nobel fifty years ago and seemed still to provide a role model for the students who packed the place—fat, whiskery fellows munching samosas and slurping chai, girls with blue jeans under their saris. Calcutta’s progressive wing. The day I met Yangi even the balcony tables were full, and the crowd’s roar was so loud that people leaning over the railing to shriek out their order were inaudible; only the writhing of their lips could be seen, and their faces, distorted by the intervening sea of whirling ceiling fans, looked like shimmering gargoyles.
Yangi was sitting alone at a corner table. Beautiful man—luminous, almond-shaped eyes, dreamy lips, flawless caramel skin, long jet-black hair. He rolled a cigarette. He sighed. When I later found out what a bhang (hash) fiend he was, his behavior made perfect sense. At the time I was puzzled how anybody could find staring at an unlit cigarette for forty-five minutes so amusing. No one tried to sit at his table, or speak to him. As I left, he looked up and gave me a sleepy smile. He was cross-eyed.
I was working for Mother Teresa at the time, handfeeding emaciated men one day, carrying out their corpses the next, and this café was my favorite hangout. Most people do not understand why I love Calcutta. Think of it as Paris circa 1930—cheap, dirty, and full of poorly washed people sitting about babbling nonsense. Like Paris in its heyday, Calcutta is its nation’s intellectual capital, and this particular café is probably the heart of it all. Two of India’s three Nobel Prize winners frequented the joint, and even its name, the Indian Coffeeworkers Union Syndicate, is quintessential Calcutta; the owner had become so involved in the political ramifications of a café that he’d neglected to indicate that coffee was served on the premises. Nevertheless, the place is perpetually packed, and when next I visited, it was once again full. Likewise, Yangi was sitting alone. He waved me over.
“Sit,” he said. “All the tables are taken.”
He asked me what I thought of Calcutta. I said it was dirty but interesting.
“So dirty!” he agreed. “And the Bengalese—they talk so much! Talk, talk, talk, talk!”
He spoke with a languid drawl. His eyes seemed permanently half-closed.
“You are not Bengali?” I asked.
“No. Me? Himal Pradesh.”
“Strange. You look like you are Bengali.”
“Yes,” he drawled, giving me a dopey look. “I look like Bengal.” There was a pause while I tried to figure that one out. He pointed to a painting on a nearby wall. “You know this man?”
It was the portrait of Tagore. Yes, I said, I knew him. I told Yangi that the café had also been the headquarters for the Calcutta clique of the revolt against the British, a pro-violence wing whose leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, eventually allied himself with the Nazis. I mentioned how the café’s manager had refused to talk about this bit of history without a contribution for the “charity fund,” then denied it had ever happened. “No politics in the coffeehouse,” he’d said. “Only artists.”
“Charity fund—ha!” sneered Yangi when I told him. “Managers are all liars. The Bengal only do politics. Everything is political. Politics! Politics! Politics! Talk! Talk! Talk!”
“You don’t like Bengalis?”
“Oh no. They are fine.” He fell back in his chair, apparently exhausted by his little outburst. “Only I don’t care about politics, Stewart. Bullshit. I like money.”
“Useful stuff.”
“Ha-ha! Stuff!” He gave the table a languid smack. “I like you. You are a funny man.” He leaned toward me conspiratorially. His breath was spicy and sweet. “Maybe you like we get rich together. Hmm?”
THE CAFÉ-AS-A-PLACE-OF-CONSPIRACY WAS THE INSTITUTION’S first incarnation as it evolved away from its religious roots. The vast majority of the conspiracies were political. But the type of financial conspiracy that Yangi was about to propose also has a long history, with a particularly rich chapter belonging to the seventeenth-century English coffeehouse.
Once upon a time many years ago, while most of continental Europe still believed coffee dried up one’s brain cells, London was the café capital of the world. This was about 1680. There was one particular establishment, Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, where sea captains and merchants met to hear the latest shipping news. Boats went down on a regular basis back then, and when they did, their owners were out of luck. One day some of Lloyd’s regulars started offering odds on which ships would make it to port. If an owner’s ship stayed afloat, he lost the bet and Lloyd’s kept his money; if it went down, the boys at Lloyd’s had to pay for the loss. According to insurance historian F. H. Haines, “Coffeehouses like Lloyd’s provided a place where ideas were developed as they would never have been in the private guildhalls and brain muddled tap rooms.”
Lloyd’s was not the first instance of insurance, but it was the first modern manifestation. With the risk removed, shipping took off, and Britain soon had the world’s largest merchant marine. The fellows who hung out at the Jerusalem Café also did quite well, and their company, the East India Company, was soon the largest shipping conglomerate in the world.
Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, however, did not prosper. With all the comings and goings, and merchants making their stalls into little offices, the café had to give up serving coffee altogether and settle for being the world’s largest insurance firm, Lloyd’s of London, Ltd.
Yangi’s “business” scheme, which unfolded over several weeks, was a tad more modest. He had an artist friend in the northwest province of Rajasthan who was painting a group of fake antique Mogol paintings for a show in Paris. The problem was that for the paintings to be sold as antiques, they needed official papers, which meant a huge export tax. Foreigners, however, could take antiques out of the country at a much lower tax rate if they were purchased as presents. If I were willing to take some of his friend’s forged antique paintings to Paris “as presents,” and then hand them over in time for the upcoming show, they would pay me three thousand dollars.
I loved the concept of art smuggling and forgery, so pretty and tricky. I also quite liked the Rajasthani school of miniatures: jewel-like paintings incorporating gold leaf and fantastical animals. The catch was, I didn’t believe a word Yangi said.
“When do you think you get to Paris?” he asked, after outlining the scheme.
“Maybe February.”
He slammed his hand on the table. “Perfect!”
What a surprise, I thought. It’s all falling into place.
“So would you want to do this?” he asked. “It would be such a favor to my friend…”
“Hmm…It is illegal.”
“Yes but no. You will be selling the paintings. They are yours to sell, yes?”
“But that implies that I bought them. This means I have to give you money.”
Yangi waved the possibility away. “No, no. I don’t know. They may want you to pay for the insurance. That is only reasonable. You will have all the paintings.” He gave me a blissful smile. “So beautiful. Little jewels. When do you arrive to Rajasthan?”
“Around November.”
He wrote down directions to a café in the so-called Pink City of Jaipur
. “Ask for me here. Then you will decide.”
I hadn’t been planning to visit Jaipur. But I didn’t want to kill the whole scheme. The idea of being an international art smuggler was terrifically romantic. And three thousand dollars would be useful.
“I don’t know…”
“No problem!” he drawled, pushing the directions into my hands. “As you like. If you are in Jaipur, come. You will like Jaipur,” he whispered. “The Pink City!
MOST PEOPLE DO NOT ASSOCIATE INDIA WITH COFFEE. DISORGANIZED, dirty, undereducated, lazy, muddled, poor, and run-down—not to mention superstitious—it is clearly a nation of tea drinkers. But, in fact, India was the first non-Muslim nation to have our beloved plant take root in its soil. This was thanks to an Indian Sufi named Baba Budan. Baba means papa, but his real name was Hazrat Shah Jamer Allah Mazarabi. Some time ago, nobody knows when, Baba made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where he met Sufis using coffee in their rituals. Baba naturally decided he should bring this wonderful substance back to his home in south-central India to share with his Sufi brothers. Taking live coffee beans out of Mecca, however, was punishable by beheading. So first Mr. B. did the Mecca thing. He revolved around the Holy Kaaba seven times. He kissed the Black Stone. He drank from the holy Zam-Zam. Then he taped seven green coffee beans to his belly and smuggled them back to India to plant high in the mountains near Mysore. These seeds gave birth to today’s two-hundred-thousand-ton a year industry, as well as providing the seedling that the Dutchman Captain Adrian Van Ommeren used to found Indonesia’s great coffee plantations in 1696.1
Since I knew so little about Baba, I headed south from Calcutta toward his home in the mountains near Mysore. It’s a thousand-mile journey, five days by train, and as I meandered down the rails, it was interesting to note the differences between the coffee-loving south and the tea-drinking north. Northern train stations were filthy, filled with homeless families and reeking of urine. An endless parade of beggars cruised the aisles. As we reached the southern states, the beggars became rarer, stations were cleaner, and schedules were sometimes adhered to. People looked healthier, as well they might, since coffee consumption, literacy, and income levels were about twice as high as in the north.
The method of service on the trains also offered an interesting peek at what’s to come as the world’s second largest nation modernizes. Tea and coffee vendors have traditionally served their brews in rough clay pots, which you smash underfoot when done. Good fun, hygienic, and completely biodegradable. With the entry of entities like Nescafé, these traditional vessels are gradually being replaced by shot-size plastic cups. I asked one vendor what he thought would happen when India Rail’s three billion annual customers had all switched to plastic. Did he think there might be a little littering problem?
“Problem? No problem!” He pointed to a beggar collecting discarded plastic cups and placing them in a filthy bag. I looked at the cup in my hand. So much for the illusion of hygiene, I thought. “You see,” he continued proudly, “Indians are very good at recycling.”
MYSORE PROVED TO BE A PLEASANTLY COOL CITY WITH WIDE, shady streets and not too much traffic. We loved it. (I say “we” because I was traveling with my lover, Nina, who is too modest to appear in these pages.) I’d soon heard the usual range of misingormation. Baba, I was told, was a Muslim saint. No, he was a Hindu deity. He was renowned for his generosity. He trained his pet tigers to milk cows. He had a troop of wild monkeys that picked his coffee beans. There was a university named after him.
“University? Tigers? This is nonsense,” said Mr. Chaterjee. “There is only the temple in Chickmagalur, and to tell you truthfully, it is a disgrace. Best not to go.”
Mr. Chaterjee, whom I met at a Mysore café, looked a bit like an educated parrot. But he seemed to know what was what. According to him, there was an active shrine to Baba Budan about two hundred miles away. As this was India, it was of course more complicated, for although there was a Baba shrine where Muslims prayed, the same spot, a cave, was also a shrine to a Hindu deity called Dattatreya, who had at some point entered the cave and was expected to come back out at the beginning of the new millennium.
“But I tell you, it is a disgrace to the Indian people,” warned Chaterjee. “I beg of you not to go.”
The problem lay in Baba’s habit of giving his clothes to beggars, a tradition his followers continued by first bathing in a holy waterfall and then leaving their clothes hanging on tree branches for the destitute. Unfortunately, devotees performed the ceremony in such tattered rags that even the poorest of the poor wouldn’t touch them, and the forest around the shrine was now festooned with an ocean of rotten, fly-infested clothing, according to Chaterjee.
“I even have a letter that I took from the Deccan Herald on the subject.” Chaterjee pulled a clipping out of his oversized briefcase. “Look—my friend has written demanding rectification. But there is no satisfaction.”
His newspaper clipping demanded that “authorities clean up this holy place” and make it into an official site.
“So this is an issue here?” I asked.
“Not for everyone, perhaps. But Baba was a great holy man.”
Chaterjee told me that he had once been in the coffee business down by a place called Shrevenoot.
“Excellent coffee. You know of course that Karnataka grows the best coffee beans in the world?”
“I’d heard,” I replied politely. “I must say, though, I find the coffee here a little milky.”
“Well, milk is another matter entirely.”
I let it pass and asked instead about some of the stories I’d heard.
“Do you know anything about how Baba trained his tigers to milk cows?”
“That is just mythology.”
“Like the monkeys, I suppose.”
“I know no monkeys.”
“You haven’t heard how he trained his monkeys to pick the beans for him?”
“More nonsense.” He took a sip of his tea. “There are, of course, the coffee-picking monkeys of Shrevenoot.”
I laughed. “Wait—so there are actually monkeys trained to pick coffee beans?”
“Of course not. They are not trained. It is a natural phenomenon. They pick the fruit off the tree and eat. That is how you get Monkey Coffee. Surely you have heard?”
Actually, I had read about this stuff. Monkey Coffee was something that had existed in the nineteenth century, supposedly the best brew in the world.
“So there really is such a thing?” I asked.
“It is a well-known fact. I have read it is a delicacy in some countries.”
“Yes, yes. I’ve read that too. They say it is because the monkeys will pick only the best, the ripest berries, right?”
“So some say. Others claim it is the chemical reaction within the bowels.”
“Bowels?”
“Yes. The monkeys eat the beans and then pass them through their digestive system. That is the monkey coffee.”
“You mean it’s monkey, uh, feces?”
“As I have said, nobody drinks it here. They are unclean animals.” He wrinkled his nose. “But it was a terrible problem in Shrevenoot. The monkeys ate all the best beans.”
I was never quite sure whether to believe all this until much later, back in the States, when I discovered that Monkey Coffee had recently become part of the gourmet coffee roster. It does not, however come out of either a monkey or India, but a small Indonesian creature called the palm toddy cat,2 a nocturnal tree lover that lives on the naturally alcoholic tree sap used to make palm toddy (wine), and fresh coffee berries. Whether it’s because the animal’s intestinal juices impart some special flavor (perhaps because of its alcoholic diet) or merely because it eats only perfectly ripe berries, the toddy cat’s droppings, cleaned, produce what many say is the world’s finest coffee. Japan buys most of the stuff nowadays, but the U.S. firm of M.P. Mountanos (800-229-1611) sells it under the name Kopi Luwak at about three hundred dollars a pound, making it the world’s most ex
pensive cup of joe. Another firm, called Raven’s Brew Coffee ([email protected] or 800-91-RAVEN), sells it by the quarter pound for seventy-five dollars and, in that grand American tradition, throws in a free T-shirt showing the beast hard at work with a cup under its ass and the caption “Good to the Last Dropping.”
THE DUBIOUS PLEASURES OF MONKEY COFFEE ASIDE, INDIA produces the world’s most consistently vile cup of joe. It is never fresh-brewed but made with instant “flakes,” which are boiled with milk, sugar, and nutmeg. The resulting stew is best described as a sickeningly sweet, piping-hot milkshake, the memory of which is a dark blot upon my soul. The whole thing is not only vile, it’s illogical. Tropical cuisines worldwide avoid dairy products like the plague. Here they were worshiped. How could a culture with such fine cuisine be content with such a perversion? I just couldn’t understand.
One day, as I walked down a lonely desert road near the city of Jodhpur, I was given my answer.
“COME, FRIEND,” SAID A VOICE, “COME DRINK WITH ME.”
I hadn’t noticed the little house by the side of the highway
“Come!” There was a man sitting on the porch, gesturing I should sit beside him. “Tea!”
“What is the price?” I asked.
“Oh, there is no price here. Free! Come, come sit.” He pointed to a stool at his feet. “This has been saved for you.”
He was a fat man with a happy face. Wisps of beard trickled down his shirt front. I sat.
He told me that his house contained eighty-three steel jugs filled with water.
“The metal,” he said, “keeps the liquid cool in even the fiercest heat, the better to quench the thirst of strangers such as yourself.”
This, he said, was his geas, his duty, as it had been his father’s before him, to ease the thirst of any stranger who might pass, at no cost.
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