We had barely exited the Sunil's wax museum at a Mall in Lonavala when Mrs Katyal spotted a stall with this huge espresso machine placed right in the front. Just the sight of the machine and its whoosh made both of us want a cup of coffee. And it wasn't much later that an order was placed for two cups of Shadi wali coffee!
In Hindustani, Shadi stands for a wedding and Shadi wali coffee translates to Coffee served at weddings. Coffee at most North Indian homes wasn't a daily affair, well, at least not in the 90s, when I was growing up in Lucknow. Most people we knew were tea consumers. Consumers may be an understatement, more like tea guzzlers! And like tea, coffee too was prepared over a gas stove, with lots of milk and copious amounts of sugar. Sometimes we would pester our parents to treat us with some 'Machine wali coffee' when it wasn't the weddings' season.
Another reason we stuck to nomenclatures such as shadi wali coffee or machine wali coffee was that in the 90s, terms like Espresso, Café Latte, Cappuccino, amongst others, were still unheard of in small towns like Lucknow. The only coffee place that we knew was the quintessential Indian Coffee House at the upmarket Hazratganj. And if I recollect correctly, they too stuck to Hot Coffee, Special Hot Coffee and similar other options on their menu.
At home, tea or coffee was never encouraged in children, so weddings were the only occasions when we were allowed to have coffee. As the guy would finish steaming the milk and coffee mix in the steel jugs, we would eagerly wait for him to pour it into the disorderly laid cups, sometimes of ceramic, but mostly of polystyrene. But just coffee whooshed under the machine and then poured out steaming hot wasn't the end of the story. The sprinkle of fine chocolate powder (almost, always Cadbury's) over each cup was the cherry on the cake. As kids, we all secretly wished for it to be sprinkled more generously.
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| Voilà, the coffee is served! |
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