The word coffee, borrowed from the Arabic word qahwa, is said to mean wine. Perhaps the word comes from Ethiopia’s Kaffa region, the home of the plant. Coffee, containing caffeine, may be the most popular drug in the world. After love, of course.

October 5. The day we met for the first time at a café-bookstore in Delhi. His three-day beard and scruffy hair is a striking contrast to his formal suit and tie. Maybe he likes being a contradiction. Maybe he was going to an interview.

“What are you buying?” he asked.

I showed him the book in my hand. The Art and Craft of Coffee. He offered to sign it for me. I thought he was being funny until I realized that he had written the book.

Serge Gainsbourg sang in the background as birds flitted across the sky, retreating to their nests.

L’amour sans philosopher
C’est comme le café
Tres vite passe
Mais que veux-tu que j’y fasse

We order three espresso shots each.

Love without philosophy,
It is like coffee.
Drank too fast.
What do you want me to do about it?


May 10. We both do not understand what romantic love means or how it translates into action. Is it a scream into the void? A promise of eternal friendship or a web of deception? Is it that feeling you get when you have been patiently waiting your turn in a queue and an idiot jumps the line?

Is it the brightness of fireflies or spiders on caffeine?

I learn that his parents have been happily married for thirty-five years. My mother left my father when I was two.

We are sitting in the reading room of a museum. I love you in this moment, he says, like a sneeze that he did not see coming. He smiles at me. I guess I am supposed to feel flattered. I feel like Raja Ravi Verma’s girl on canvas, holding a hukka and a broom, gazing into space and thinking what the hell.

October 5. Many years later.

I have always wondered why people put milk and sugar in their coffee. Isn’t that a milkshake? The sweet world is my bitter workplace. Elevate me, destroy me, or remain apathetic. I will make sense of it all and turn it into words. That is the fun thing about being a writer.

I am at Antisocial at 11 pm, intoxicated and happy. I am sitting at the bar, minding my own business, buying my own drinks. A girl comes up to me, starts a conversation on, I do not know, electronic music or something. One thing leads to another. She tells me about her city. I generalize about life. She asks me about my ethnicity. I talk to her about her loneliness.

She asks me to come back to her house. I say, okay. Twenty years down the line, she will find herself in my short stories. The perfume on her body, her black lace underwear, the color of her nail paint, the shape of her feet, the universe in her eyes. It will be there in the words I write.

I will not know it while writing it down. She may not recognize it while reading it. However, it is all going to be there, somewhere.

I love you in this moment, I say to her, as we lie together in bed.
She laughs.
She knows exactly what I mean.

The next morning, the smell of coffee beans floods the bedroom. I wake up, check the time on my phone and rush to the bathroom to wash my face. The cold water against my skin lightens my mood. I take some dark chocolate out of my handbag and put it in my mouth. It is time to light a cigarette. She is sitting on the couch, reading the newspaper headline. CIA’s torture regime leaves a legacy of troubled minds. I cannot tell whether the color of her eyes is a greyish green or a greenish grey.

“A shot of espresso?” she asks the moment she senses that I want to leave.

• Megha Arora