The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : The last cup has been drunk

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Monday, Apr 06, 2009
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

The last cup has been drunk

Deepika Arwind

One of the city’s best-known watering holes, Indian Coffee House, moves out of M.G. Road

— Photo: K. Murali Kumar

MOVING ON: Sunday marked the last day of Indian Coffee House on Mahatma Gandhi Road in Bangalore.

BANGALORE: That the “Save Indian Coffee House” Facebook group has 568 young members is a matter of interest. Mostly comprising those who saw Coffee House somewhere in its mid-life crisis, the group probably indicates Indian Coffee House is a symbol of collective history — if you did not have a stake in its history, someone you know did.

There was no last-day gloom about Indian Coffee House. Even as people trickled in to have their last ritual cuppa or the sublime scrambled eggs on toast or the mild masala dosa, this symbol of Old Bangalore had the same ease about it. The waiters walked about taking orders with their usual pace and economy of conversation.

The cashier, though, allowed himself a slight look of melancholy as he punched the bill into his clattering machine. And then he continued to chat and glance at the fancy 40-inch plasma television on the wall, one of Indian Coffee House’s more recent acquisitions, which regulars agree did not gel well with its unpretentious interiors.

Nostalgic trips

“People have known that we were going to shut down for nearly three months now,” said the cashier. “So, there aren’t that many making there last trip here,” he said, and rightly so. The regulars have stayed regulars, and they have been making nostalgic trips through the three months.

A young journalist, who calls Indian Coffee House an “acquired legacy”, said he went there as many times as possible in these last weeks.

And while many sentimental customers seemed to have kept away from its final chapter, there were those who stood along its stairs and the open space on the first floor sketching each other, hoping to salvage whatever memory of it they could.

But what was most interesting about Indian Coffee House’s last day was the fact that it was still representative of what it had been all these years. It may have been started by the Coffee Board under the British.

But it eventually turned into a watering hole for just about anybody: the writer, the journalists, the artist, the average office-goer, the broke college student, the foreign traveller, the family stepping out for coffee and, yes, the occasional oddball muttering to himself. Everybody was served with the same equanimity by the red-turbaned waiters whose white uniforms had turned increasingly greasy as the week rolled by.

And Sunday, April 5, 2009, was no different. The last day was just another day.

Even now, the 42-strong staff here is not sure when exactly the shift to the Avenue Road branch will take place.

“It all depends,” said one of them laconically.

For those who felt perfectly at home here, its moving will leave a hole in their hearts. Just as the tourist guidebooks will have to delete the entry from their new editions.

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