According to WebMD (which, as we all know, is the last word on all things medical), substance dependence manifests in the following ways:
You spend a lot of your time thinking about the substance and how good you’ll feel when you take it.
You look in other people’s cabinets for substances you can consume.
You feel strange when the effect of the substance wears off.
You have a hard time setting limits regarding your consumption of the substance.
You have a new set of friends with whom you go to different places to consume the substance.
WebMD may not know it, but it has succinctly described my relationship with coffee.
I grew up in a family of tea-drinkers but never had any affinity for that particular beverage1. It was coffee that held an allure for me. Decades before Dalgona Coffee became a lockdown-fuelled-internet sensation, it was the only way we knew to make coffee at home. Instant coffee powder, milk, water, and sugar, would be vigorously churned in a small bowl with a metal spoon until it attained the colour and consistency of sludge; sludge that had the rich, deep aroma of heaven itself. Then, hot water and milk would be added and a cup of frothy coffee would be served with a sprinkling of coffee/cocoa powder.
Undertaking this elaborate ritual as a thing of daily habit would have eroded its magic and charm. To make the remarkable, routine, is to render it mundane. And so, coffee - unlike tea - never became a staple, regular drink in our household. There was a sense of occasion, of performance, associated with it - and though we made it more often as I grew older, it remained firmly perched (in my mind, at least) on its pedestal above the humble tea. It felt indulgent. Something that could be savoured from time to time but never co-opted into quotidian life, let alone become a dependency.
Little did I know getting married would set me on the path to its addiction.
For any relationship to be successful, the parties involved need to find a healthy balance between pursuing their independent interests and spending time with each other on joint activities. In case of the latter especially, it is imperative that both parties perform their role with commitment and conviction. If either party starts slacking and does not participate with as much vigour as the other, things can go south pretty quickly.
Let me illustrate. My wife is an inveterate tea drinker. The preparation and consumption of tea - particularly in the morning - is for her a hallowed practice, a sacred observance. In the early days of our marriage, it was the time we shared with each other before heading off to work. Only I had no beverage affiliations so I could not, in good conscience, be an equal partner in this activity. I mean, you cannot very well have one person purring and sighing with every slurp of their tea while the other person demurely takes small sips of water. The enterprise was destined for disaster. If this joint routine - and thereby, our marriage - was to be rescued, I had to find something I could drink with as much passion and enthusiasm as my wife gulped her tea.
And that is how I began drinking cold coffee.
It started innocuously enough, with a single mug in the mornings. One mug soon became two, and once two became four (when I took to evening drinking) things began to get out of hand. On weekends, I would rarely be seen without a mug in my hand and a foam moustache adorning my upper lip. Before long, I was drinking my body weight in cold coffee every day.
Given the amount of sugar I was ingesting, my heart had likely packed its bags and started bidding farewell to its friends, but fate had other plans. Just when a cardiac incident seemed imminent, my affair with cold coffee was brought to a shuddering halt by the most shameful of first-world problems that could befall a person. I developed lactose intolerance.
For years, I’d thought of lactose intolerance as a whimsical complaint endemic to the West; an affliction that could only assail the soft-bellied populace of the developed world. What did we seasoned partakers of street food laced with dust and grime, have to fear from this fanciful malady? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Reports suggest close to 60% of Indians are lactose intolerant and I appeared to have joined their ranks.
With cold coffee no longer viable, I had to find an alternative that would let me continue the morning beverage routine I shared with my wife and slake my caffeine dependency. The obvious choice was black coffee - Nescafé coffee powder dissolved in hot water - so I took to drinking that unholy concoction. In retrospect, I don’t know how I did it. I have nothing against Nescafé - it was synonymous with coffee, for me, for over three decades - but it was never meant to be consumed in its barest form. Milk and sugar don’t improve Nescafé, they rescue it. There should be some sort of law prohibiting its consumption without their tempering influence. That I continued drinking this runny-tar-masquerading-as-coffee for many months, should tell you all you need to know about my growing caffeine addiction. And I suppose I would still be drinking it if I hadn’t discovered ‘speciality coffee’.
Now, I get my coffee from one of the many artisanal roasters that have emerged in the past decade. I use an Aeropress - a device whose existence I was unaware of eighteen months ago - to brew my coffee. When I go to a cafe, I order a Pour Over (and secretly Google what ‘Chemex’ means). I wax eloquent about how the ‘acidity’ and ‘body’ of an Americano differs from coffee brewed in a French Press (though I can barely discern any difference). I tell people, with an air of smugness, that I am considering purchasing a Moka Pot and they tell me about the multi-thousand-rupee coffee machine they have at home, at which point I mumble an excuse about needing to monitor the temperature of the hot water I will be adding to my coffee and leave the conversation2. I spend hours sipping coffee in a determined - but doomed - attempt at detecting the advertised notes of orange, butterscotch, cotton candy, tandoori chicken and so on. And lest we forget, I now spend four times as much on coffee as I did during my Nescafé days.
Perhaps I was right, after all.
Perhaps lactose intolerance does manifest in people who attract first-world problems.
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I was, however, partial to iced tea. In my twenties, I consumed copious amounts of iced tea but my advancing years brought this habit to an end.
Adding boiling water to ground coffee is a rookie mistake. You have to let the water cool a bit to avoid scalding the coffee.
You say your relationship with daily coffee began as a bonding ritual with your wife. Yet, by the end of the piece, coffee has become an end in itself and wife is nowhere to be found. YAHIN TOH MAAR KHA GAYA INDIA 😂😂😂
Not at all a coffee addict but I cannot live without the only cup of coffee that I have in the morning. Daily. Hot.
I am from a family where ‘utho chai pi lo fir so jaana’ is a completely normal thing to say to kids who are asleep. Even I don’t know how and when I got addicted to my cuppa. I think it was about 8 years ago. In my late 80s, you could say.
I have no idea about the intricacies of coffee like you do and I have ‘chain’ coffee mostly. All I want is milk but no sugar. Also, i was using sugar till 2022. Milk is going down consistently . All I ask is that coffee be strong. This post was read while drinking a ‘strong’ starbucks latte. Please don’t block me.