My first memory of Indian Coffee House, ICH to anyone in Bhilai, is from 1990 or 1991, when I was four or five. My grandmother used to go to Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital in Sector 9 every month for her diabetes check-up, which in those days meant going to the hospital to have your blood sugar tested, and I’d tag along. The test had to be done on an empty stomach, so once it was over she needed her medicines and breakfast, and we would have that breakfast at the ICH inside the hospital. It wasn’t in great shape. The stairs up to the first floor were broken and dusty, but once you opened the door everything inside was clean and tidy and in its place, and there was always a table free. That’s still true of every ICH I’ve been to.
She used to have a sada dosa, and I would have a masala dosa and sometimes a mutton cutlet. That was our routine every month for years, until the day a bone from the cutlet got stuck in my throat. My father found out that evening, and that was the end of my ICH extravaganza. From then on I was allowed dosa and idli vada and nothing else. That ICH isn’t inside the hospital any more. It moved out to the corner at the end of Central Avenue, and from the outside it looks smaller than the old one. I haven’t been in since it moved.
After those years it dropped off my radar for a decade or so. Through school and college it wasn’t a cool place to hang out, and I had other places to be. Then in 2012 I moved back to Bhilai from Jamshedpur for a project at the Bhilai Steel Plant, and ICH became a big part of my routine. The work involved visiting suppliers and vendors in the industrial area, and most days I had to take inspectors from MECON with me. Like most government agencies, they were never on time, and I spent a lot of mornings waiting for them to come down. Luckily for me, their office was right above an ICH, just outside the BSP main gate, so that’s where I waited. I had more breakfasts and lunches there than I can count, and an endless number of coffees.
Through most of the 2010s we had a lot of booze parties in Bhilai, and the morning after, an ICH was where I went to nurse the hangover, with a big omelette and a couple of black coffees. On Sundays I’d go for breakfast at the Sector 10 ICH with a friend, which usually meant idli sambar, then a dosa, and a Nescafé to finish.
Walking into one still feels like walking into another decade. The waiters wear the same distinctive uniforms, the white tables are set out at equal distances from each other, the coffee comes in small cups and saucers, and the South Indian food tastes the same every time. None of the fusion and reinvention and upgrading that’s trending everywhere else has reached it. It’s like plain vanilla ice cream, not exotic, but essential. The food is good, the prices are fair, the service is quick, and above all nobody disturbs you. You can sit, read, eat or do whatever you like for as long as you like. There’s no Indian Coffee House in Pune, where I live now, and I miss it often, so whenever I’m in Bhilai I go, the way I did this morning.
I had a meeting from seven to half past eight and came out of it drained. It had rained earlier and it was still cool outside. My calendar was empty for the next couple of hours, so I logged off, picked up the car keys and asked my father, who was reading the newspaper on the porch, whether he wanted anything from ICH. He didn’t. Ten minutes later I was parking outside the Sector 10 branch. It was empty inside. The cashier was tallying his books at one of the tables and a server was waiting for someone to walk in. I sat down, he put a glass of water in front of me and asked what I’d have, and I’d already decided: a veg cutlet, a French toast and a black coffee, with the coffee first. I needed something bitter in me before anything else.
The coffee arrived within five minutes, and by the time I’d finished it the cutlet was on the table. The ICH cutlet, in Bhilai at least, is its own thing. It’s a beetroot and potato patty shaped like a diamond, or a rhombus if you want to be exact about it, crisp on the outside and soft and mushy inside, and I have it with a little ketchup.
Then the French toast, which is where my love affair with French toast started. Years ago I came to this same Sector 10 ICH with a friend who ordered one, and I liked it immediately: plain bread with butter inside and honey poured over the top. I’ve eaten a lot of French toast since, far better ones included, enough that I once thought about writing up the ten best in Pune. The ICH version comes out a burnt, charcoal brown with sugar syrup or honey on top, and yes, it’s slightly crunchy. I’ve never had one like it anywhere else.
I finished it with a second black coffee and asked for the bill. It came to ₹350. In most cafés in Pune, the French toast alone would cost twice that.
Wherever it is, Indian Coffee House has a long history with its city, whether that’s Delhi, Kolkata, Jabalpur, Shimla or Bhilai. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg had a name for places like it. Home is the first place, work is the second, and the third place is wherever you go to be around other people: a pub, a club, a café. In a country without much of a pub culture, Indian Coffee House was that third place for a lot of people, and there are fewer and fewer places like it now, which I think is part of why people are less social than they used to be.
My father has stories about ICH from his college days, which tells you how long it’s been around. When he was working, he used to have coffee with his friends at the Indian Coffee House in Supela every evening. He doesn’t have many of those friends left, mostly because of age, and he only goes now and then, with my brother, when he’s in the mood. He said no this morning when I asked if he wanted anything from ICH, but I’m fairly sure he misses those evenings.
I think that’s a big part of what draws people to ICH. A lot of us come to it with a connection that someone older had with it first, a father or a mother or a grandparent, and in my case both my father and my grandmother. Mumbai and Pune are full of old places like that. In Bhilai they’re few and far between, but they’re there.
For me ICH is a rock of Gibraltar, a small piece of Bhilai that has stayed still while everything around it changed and keeps changing. Going to one gives me a kind of calm, and I think that’s what I went looking for this morning when I came out of that meeting and picked up the car keys.
