Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG Feb 2020 : Cafe Terrace

It's time for the inaugural post for the year at WEP, but it's not any old year. WEP hits a major milestone in 2020, the tenth anniversary, wow! We've come a long way together, WEP and M-i-V. I can't believe it still, the way time flies. Thank you, Denise and WEP, for the badge and the fun and the learning.

I've been a bit ambitious with this prompt and spectacularly failed to trim my post to the required wordcount, so it's broken into two parts. The first appears for this challenge, the concluding part will go live on Sunday. 

A Short History of Café. Terrace. Alfresco. Street Lighting. Pigments. And Nocturnes. (Part I)

So I could have told you how I went to MoMA without checking, unpardonable! - and found it closed for renovations. No shufti at a famous Night, no nibbles at Terrace 5. But I won’t. Let’s begin at a different point, away from the nights, away from shuftis, and most of all, away from me. Bored with staring at millions of my own reflections in the sheesh mahals of my mind.  Let’s start with…this mug beside me. With café. Which is the French word for coffee  - absorbed into other languages to sometimes mean the beverage and/or the place where it is drunk.

To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and drink one's coffee in peace.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Coffee. It’s another religion started and propagated by Arabs which took on a life of its own, left them behind and happily traversed right round the world. Just like the other one did. Every single country in the world consumes coffee, I kid you not. And clearly coffee has done relatively better for itself than the other faith propagated by Arabs,  it’s bagged more converts and has less phobia and misconceptions attached. But it wasn’t always so. Coffee’s got enough bad press in the past, down to 17^th century ladies in London protesting it was an anti-Viagra kind of stuff, if you know what I mean. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Things kick off around 850 CE in Ethiopia. Because you know, all the good stories start in Africa. A goatherd – yes, all good stories will also have an animal flock tucked in somewhere – well, a herder called Kaldi notices his flock ‘dancing’ after they’ve munched on some berries. He takes the berries to a monk, who disapproving, throws them into the fire, whereupon issues the most delicious aroma. Other monks come to investigate, retrieve the roasted beans, grind them up and brew the first mug of coffee. This is the first reference, in a book written by a Lebanese professor of languages in Rome in 1671, of the origins of coffee. And since it is almost nine centuries that Kaldi and party have proceeded to the great café in the heavens, this is taken to be apocryphal, a legend. Except in Ethiopia, where it’s treated with due seriousness as history and where both Kaldi and The Dancing Goat are two popular names for cafés, with or without terraces.

***

Talking about terraces, I could have told you too, about their role in my childhood. The first hailstorm I watched happened on one, a small internal terrace filling up with hailstones one winter in front of my five year old, delighted-astonished eyes. About sleeping on them on summer nights on charpoys - all of Delhi did that in the 70s and 80s, don’t know if air pollution, crime and sophisticated, modern lifestyles allow that anymore?

Terraces go back much further than cafés. In architecture, they happened with the building of the first shelters. There’s archaeological evidence from ancient settlements dotted around the Levant, the oldest one dated to Palaeolithic times. Somewhere south of Haifa in Israel is a village consisting of a cluster of 12/13  subcircular houses set on artificial terraces, constructed around 10,000 BCE. Clearly, humans have always enjoyed sitting around outdoors and sipping whatever beverages were in vogue, from the earliest hours of civilisation. And alfresco dining is thought to have originated with a quick filler of baked pastries and meats before people set off on hunts in medieval times. Which then developed into more elaborate picnics by the 18^th century, as pleasure gardens, public parks and outdoor spaces were developed. But eating outdoors for pleasure or as a leisure activity was restricted strictly to the upper, more affluent classes. The peasant farmer, the fisherman, the shepherd would naturally eat their slice of pie out in the open, but that came with the job. In the early 20^th century, the automobile sparked off a sea change in lifestyles as more and more people could travel further afield. Day trips became part of the repertoire of family activities and work groups, picnicking boomed. The accessories available also became more elaborate and so the hasty baked pre-hunt snack of medieval times became a full-fledged formal meal taken outdoors. Okay, now back to coffee.

From Ethiopia Arab traders brought it to Yemen, where it caught on with the Sufi monks – they drank it to stay awake through the nights. The Arabs called it qahwah – that which prevents sleep. Qahwah became popular with ordinary folks too, especially during the month of Ramadan, when people stayed up deep into the nights for prayer and entertainment. Mocha, an important trading port in Yemen, became a focal point in the coffee route. By 1450-ish, the Ottoman Turks had  taken coffee to Istanbul  where the first cafés, called qahwah-khane, opened. From there it was a small step to Cairo and to Mecca. The qahwah-khanes became a focal point where people gathered not just to drink coffee, but also to discuss, debate, write about the hot button topics of the day. They became so popular that the Governor of Mecca abolished them fearing the vigorous discussions and dissent would disrupt his rule. Unrest broke out far and wide,  the Sultan was finally forced to intervene. He restored coffee to the public and order in the empire. Coffee was thus established in the Muslim world. Up to late 16^th century cultivation was kept a closely guarded secret. Exports of fertile beans were prohibited.

However, a subcontinental chap smuggled back some beans after a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1600. Coffee cultivation  thus started in India. And in Europe, coffee made its way through trade first to Venice. Later the Pope took a sip and became a fan.  The first settlers took coffee to Americas in the early 17^th century, and by mid-17^th  a coffee club was set up in Oxford in England  – the first members included luminaries like Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton. This matured into the leading scientific think tank of Britain – the Royal Society...

WC - 991
FCA

It often seems to me that the night is even more richly coloured than the day, coloured in the most intense violets, blues and greens. If you look carefully you’ll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow. And without labouring the point, it’s clear that to paint a starry sky it’s not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black.

Letter  to Willemien Van Gogh, dated 8^th-14^th Sept, 1888, Arles.

Credit. In some kind of a cosmic coincidence, Kirk Douglas passed away earlier this month and so prodded me into watching the Van Gogh film, Lust for Life. My interest in Van Gogh started with the  original title, the book by Irving Stone (1934), which got made into the film (1956). Kirk Douglas is uncannily similar to the maestro though the film differs a bit from the actual life events of the artist.  Also itching to watch the more recent film - Loving Vincent, when I can access it finally.

Read the other entries below - 

Four quarters of the day

The newspaper collector comes around with his harsh call

shattering the humid Sunday morning beyond my wall
a couple of rickshaws lazily twirl their conjoint wheels
and a sudden squeeze on their lo-tech honker feels
like the televisual scream of dying birds that tumble and fall
plummeting from the sky in a strident cosmic drawl.

The noon comes veiled, in the guise of some evening

when the light turns murky well before it’s time to bring
each hour of the day together in neat pleats and tuck
them into the waistband of the sun, and to chuck
this neutral light over her left shoulder, splitting
the day from dark and the twilight’s final fling.

The traffic peaks by habit at the appointed hours

even during holidays, the hollow concrete towers
disgorge their inmates for the mandatory merry
making, a bigwig’s white car cruises, her red cherry
sits flush on her roof, the inmate sits flushed in flowers
torn and strewn around her even as her public sours.

The night is poor in stars and silence, to sleep and fade

is surely wasteful, when there is so much to be made?
A prescribed life must stay wide awake and urbanity
equals unblinking sodium eyes of a frantic sleepless city
and I too, urbane insomniac, lazily parade
my goblet held high on my terrace and arcade.