Coffee Faux Pas

I go by the comments on my past blogs to write on the future ones. A friend of mine told that my blogs were a bit too long, so this is going to be a short one :).

Well this blog pertains to an incident which happened when I was at Karthik‘s place one evening. Some guests came over to visit them. So his mom asked me to prepare coffee for them. As I went to make coffee into the kitchen, Karthik came to help me. I was instructed not to add the sugar into the milk but add it later. And the coffee decoction was already prepared. So I religiously boiled the milk. Then I put the sugar into the glasses in which the coffee was to be served. Then I added adequate amounts of decoction and milk into the glasses. I was about to mix the sugar in the glasses that Mr. Know All Karthik stepped in and said, “No, No we don’t mix the sugar in the coffee. Its Tamil style, you are not supposed to mix it. You put a small container under the glass and they will mix it themselves by pouring the coffee back and forth from the glass into the container.” I felt ok it was his home turf after all. So I put the glasses in a tray and went ahead to serve the same.

The guests were all pretty pleased with my sweet “homely” girl role playing. I served coffee to all of them. And waited for them to mix the coffee and savour it. But to my utter horror they started sipping the coffee straight from the glasses. It must have tasted awful as I could clearly read from their faces :(. I could not stand onlooker to the scene, and I said,”Uncle, Aunty, I have not mixed the sugar. So could you please mix it?”

At that point Karthik’s mother and the guests burst out laughing. Then I told that Karthik had told me to uphold Tamil tradition and not mix the sugar in the coffee. Then they mixed the sugar and had it, and I think perfunctorily said that the coffee was good :(.

But I was not able to recover from the public disgrace for a long time.

I don’t know whether the ruffian Karthik did this on purpose or it was unintentional (as he claims it to be). But I hope he gets his just deserts some day when he pays a visit to Orissa.