Jay Raghu's Musings - The aromatic coffee Store....

The aromatic coffee store....

As you turned to your right into the main road from the deserted Kasturbha nagar II Cross road, you would come face to face with a long thatched roof structure, about 25-odd feet long and perhaps 8 feet wide right on the platform that separated the main road from the I st Main road of Gandhi Nagar. This structure housed a long row of bamboo plates and containers that used to brim with green vegetables and green leaves of the daily palate. Hand-written on a black board in tamil would be "Nyaaya vilaikkadai" or the Fair price shop!

The place would be filled with activity in the mornings and evenings - house wives with children trudging along, the tufted uncles and moustached gentlemen of the 1960s Adyar. The affable Nadar manager would be all smiles at the customer and a high-decibel terror for those employees in the shop. Any child who walks up to him along with its parent for billing, would always end up with a tomato or a small banana, with his best compliments, of course!

A native format of the much-acclaimed but failed concept of Uzavar Sandhai, this fair price shop was a grand success as I recall from my memory.

If you walk, quite happily and carelessly on the same platform further East towards the Padmanabha swamy Temple- you can walk nonchalantly in the 60s for the main road used to get a bus or a car crossing only once in 15 minutes or so - you will hit upon a small booth that used to distribute milk in bottles. The earlier avatar of Avin! I recall those fatty-looking half a liter bottles with an aluminium foiled paper cap - in blue and red stripes - one for buffalo milk and the other, cow's milk!

You can easily cross the road as , I said earlier, there was hardly any traffic and you would come face to face with Besant Hotel in the now landmark multi-cuisine restaurant Coronet! The whiff of idly waves would permeate the air and the lip smacking sambhar would be no less inferior! Thanks to the poor eating-out habit of the vegetarian adyarites in the 60s that this Besant hotel gave way to Coronet Hotel which is flourishing till date.

As you walk back westwards, on this side of the Fair price shop, is a row of shops in low roof structure. They housed in the East to West order - Hongkong Tailors, Gentlemen laundry, Adyar bakery and Amrutha Coffee works.

You will always face the owner of Hongkong tailors in the evenings as he stands before the shop smiling at you. Adyar Bakery, a small shop then, used to sell out-of-the world cakes and bun butter jam! Coca cola in 100 ml bottles costing 25 paise used to be the incentive for me to walk back home instead of a cycle rickshaw ride - a clear half a kilometer distance to my house from the main road!

It is the owner of Amrutha Coffee Works that I was always afraid of. A short, dapper, dark man in white shirt and half white dhoti and a bulging pocket brimming with his leather purse and soiled notes I have never seen him smile. The store is a coffee seed roasting and grinding place and hence would be making excruciating noise all the time as the two machines  - one roasting and one grinding - keep pounding the customers' delivered coffee seeds. The owner with his deft hands would scoop the powder from the machine's tray, tug them into a butter paper cover, staple it and hand over - no smile even if the customer is a young boy like me! I always wait for my mother to empty the coffee powder into a tin and grab the butter paper cover. If you blow air into the cover, closing its mouth and when you smash the bulged cover, the noise as it tears would be that of a Lakshmi Vedi!

I have seen his son studying one class above me in the same school. He was a playful prank laughing away to glory all the time, a shrewd kabadi player and often could be seen standing outside the class room, a punishment meted out by teachers of those days.

I could never understand the complexities of life as this boy committed suicide for some unknown reason. 

in less than a year, Amrutha Coffee Works vanished and Adyar Bakery consumed its space for ever, till now!