May, 2018. One afternoon, stroller bag in tow, I entered the perennially air-conditioned confines of Mumbai International Airport, relieved to get away from the oppressive heat. Though I'd travelled rather extensively for the average Indian, butterflies flitted and floated around in my tummy because my next destination was both exotic and unusual. Yangon, Myanmar by way of Bangkok, Thailand.
Some places have such a mystical quality. They do to me, in any case. This sense of fascination was what led me to Cambodia. 10 years later, it was conspiring to take me to India's forbidden neighbour. Plagued by authoritarian rule, oppression and bloodshed for decades, I'd first heard of the country from my grandmother when I was barely 5 years old. This was back when our Mumbai building hadn't been redeveloped and was a 2-storey rabbit's warren of 15 homes. Pati was talking about the histories of our neighbours and had reached the very last one - Flat No. 15.
Mrs. A, the elderly Tamil owner (most people in the building were Tamil then, and to a kid at least, elderly) of the house was a tiny bird-like woman and her complexion resembled a weather beaten betel nut. Back ramrod straight, she would always walk with small, firm, quick steps. The most distinguishing features were her ears; she wore large 7-diamond-clustered gold earrings whose considerable weight had dragged her earlobes downwards over the years.
It's weird how, even 35 years later, some splinters of memory fail to lose their edge. Not only do I remember that time and those people quite vividly, I will also probably never forget this next bit. Pati revealed to me that during WW2, Mrs. A had risked life and limb, walking through tropical jungles, all the way from Burma into India, escaping the invading Japanese forces. I tried to plot the distance on a map, but gave up because Google doesn't show you straight line distances. Besides, does it matter? You don't hear stories like that anymore, much less meet people who experienced any of that hell-scape. To me, the most remarkable thing about that lady was how normal and ordinary she seemed all those years later, in a quiet, late 80s suburb of Mumbai.
And so, there I was, about to fly into a country that hadn't encouraged visitors in ages, to film a soap commercial. Talk about paradigm shifts. By 2018, things had calmed down enough that visas were easy to get and flying in was no trouble.
We reached Yangon early in the morning and went straight to the Production House (PH) office to meet the film team. What a motley assortment of people we were - 3 Indians, the Burmese owner of the PH, her French husband, the (such a cliche) haughty, middle-aged British director forever haunting South East Asia, and the rest of the staff, also Burmese. I was jet-lagged enough to barely care what was being discussed and only perked up when the French guy kindly brought me some black coffee in an elegant espresso mug. It was love at first sip. He said it was a local brand so, the day before we left, I picked up, to my eternal regret, only 4 packs of that wonderful coffee. To be fair, I thought I'd be back in 2019. But, it wasn't to be. The monsoons were heavy the following year and the client baulked at the cost of covering the shoot, cancelling the project at the last minute. I left the agency soon after. Today, Myanmar seems closed to the world again.
Now, I know the literature on coffee freshness so please save it. There's a streak of irrational nostalgia in me that will never be cured so I have held on to two of those packets for dear life, keeping them frozen all this time. But now, I'm down with COVID and isolating at home. I ran out of coffee powder and the only option was to finally give in and open one pack, two days ago. First thing in the morning, I made a cuppa, looking forward to savouring what was left of the flavour of that lovely Burmese coffee, imagining that it would take me back to another time and place, when things were more normal, more serene.
Only to discover that I've lost my senses of smell and taste.
Song for the moment: Black Coffee - Peggy Lee
P.S: I've tried to source this coffee online but they don't seem to ship to India.
Comments