Coffee of the Gods

1

Sour Plum Hill was a small village, and as the name implied, overgrown with sour plums. A little over four miles away, the nearest village, Kyaungzu, was larger, hot and dry, covered in dust—distant, poor, with only a few houses: nothing special. When people wanted something like a special snack to tide them over when keeping the precepts on a holy day, or some other kind of ready-to-eat food, it was Kyaungzu they went to. Sour Plum had only a market. Still, it was a proper village, with a bicycle repair and barber's chair. Some villagers grew sugarcane, so there was a small cane-juice stall. You could get a cup of brick-red syrupy tea, strong and sweet, at the small teashop. Over to the west, a little stall sold vegetable fritters, and another toddy wine. That was pretty much it. Visitors could get a haircut, have their bicycles repaired, and for two kyats, have as much cane juice as they wanted. They could go to Ko Loun's shack in the palm grove for toddy wine, and to I Kun's teashop for tea.

What I want to tell you about now is I Kun's teashop. More precisely, the small packets of coffee powder sitting on the upper left-hand corner of the table where he mixed up the tea.

2

I Kun had bought those powdered coffee packets a good while ago; he couldn't remember exactly when. So long ago that, would you believe, there'd been only one customer for coffee in Sour Plum Hill. That was Chan Htun Aung: tall yet stooped, flat-lipped, with an unkempt beard and stubborn demeanor. He'd go to I Kun's every morning for a cup. If anyone loved his coffee, it was him. He'd swallow it down in one long gulp and then puff on a Two Elephants cheroot before pouring a little green tea into the blackish dregs at the bottom of the cup and drink that. Then, he'd puff away on his cheroot, have two cups of green tea, let out a resounding belch, get up, and be off. In the evenings, the teashop closed up early, so before going home, he'd return to get another cup of coffee and let it sit. Just before bed, he'd drink it, weak and cold. He could go to bed only after having had a taste of coffee.

The problem was that I Kun's shop was no grand establishment. Keep in mind that it was the kind of place that, to make a sign for it, he had just dipped his finger into enamel paint and written the name out on a sheet of zinc. Nor were the villagers the kind of people to sit in teashops as was done in the towns. A cup of tea cost nothing, but no one settled down for any length of time. The question then was, just whom did I Kun sell to? The horse-cart drivers crossing back and forth while the market was open would stop and have tea. Workers from the irrigation canal would too. Sometimes when villagers had a little extra money, they'd have a cup, or when they had guests, they might come get some. That was all who came. It was the kind of teashop that sold less than thirty cups a day. That wasn't all he sold, however—he also had dusty bottles of soda water, ginger beer, and Wincarnis for sale. That's how he made his living, selling odds and ends. Like I said, it was thirty cups of tea a day, but only one cup of coffee, which was for Chan Htun Aung. The packets of coffee powder I Kun got whenever he went to Kyaungzu to buy stock for his store in bulk were only for him.

Sometimes the packets went moldy and even the flavor would go, making it hard to still call the contents "powdered coffee," except for the memory of what they had once been. But...